Greenwich Mean Time "Actually Mean" Says Local Man
Eaton Socon resident Felix Dakaat this week revealed that, according to his studies, Greenwich Mean Time is indeed “quite mean”.
“I’ve been wondering about this for a couple of years,” said Dakaat, 43, of Shakespeare Road. “I have analysed the weather patterns over the course of the last five years and it seems that all the worst weather happens while we are running to GMT time, instead of BST.”
Using a “rather complex Excel spreadsheet involving macros and v-lookups and stuff”, Dakaat was able to determine that the worst weather – wind, rain, snow, sleet and the suchlike – occurred between the last weekend of October, and the changeable date in Spring when the clocks go forward. “Just look at this week,” said the accountant. “The clocks went back on Sunday morning and since then it’s been freezing. It proves my point.”
Greenwich Mean Time is now largely a notional time measurement as official timekeeping is done using UTC. The Citizen pointed out to Dakaat that maybe his cause and effect was a little faulty, and that the “mean” in Greenwich Mean Time was to account for the differences caused by the Earth’s elliptical rotation around the sun – the same difference which means we gain a leap-day every fourth February. Dakaat responded that “Obviously the Citizen reporters have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean, in Paris they refer to Western European time as PMT, and they are certainly moody and hormonal all the fucking time.”
Cllr Derek Miles commented that, “St Neots Market Square Mean Time is about four minutes ahead of GMT anyway, so this is all by the by.” We contacted Expert Scientists on the matter but “they” refused to comment, and just mumbled something about Swatch Internet Time.
