So, it’s tonight that the clocks go forward, not last Saturday as I’d assumed last week. Even if I had changed my clocks last week, well, I wouldn’t have, because they all change themselves these days. Gone is the time when you had to run around on those Sunday mornings in October and March and move the hands or digits of your time pieces manually; everything does itself.

This country has no traditions left.

I recall once a couple of years ago when I was on holiday. It was the last night of our holiday in France, the clocks were going forward, we had to set the alarm to be picked up by the airport transfer people at 7am… and we were in France. If you set the alarm on your phone before the clocks changed, would it wake you at the right time? If it woke you at the wrong time, would it be too early or too late? And would the time on your phone change automatically if you weren’t on your home network?

I have never been so confused in all my life.

Actually, that’s no entirely correct. There was a time in Rome when me and my sister visited a restaurant with this splendid buffet and we couldn’t grasp whether we could just pay for a buffet dinner, and if so, whether we were allowed to go back to keep filling our plates. In the end, I made her keep watch to warn me of angry waiting staff while I went back for seconds. The artichokes were just too good not to go back for more.

But apart from if you actually have to get up to be somewhere, the change to BST or back to GMT shouldn’t really have much of an impact. I wake when the little dog’s bladder tells me it’s time to.

It’s Easter Day tomorrow. Big deal. I have always hated Easter, it was always so solemn when I was growing up. “So we’re celebrating somebody getting hideously murdered? What’s so great about that?”

“But he rose from the dead two days later!”

“What? Are you out of your minds?”

The run up at school was OK; we did the making Easter chicks out of pom poms with pipe cleaner legs, oh, and paper daffodils out of toilet roll tubes. Then they let us off school and the telly was full of really morbid shit and church stuff. There weren’t Easter egg hunts in those days, we just stayed off school for a fortnight being bored. Because that’s what kids did back then in school holidays, they were allowed to get bored.

After my auntie died when I was twelve, Easter had an added dimension of misery as we were taken to the crematorium where we had to stand and look at half-dead rose bushes in the garden of remembrance. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my auntie so much and losing her caused an awful lot of pain, but she wasn’t there in that rose garden – even I knew that. People who are gone are gone, why not just cherish their memory? Because bloody Easter tells us that people who are gone aren’t gone. Why? Why can’t people just be allowed to not exist in any form other than the sweetest of memories? Why do people hold on to this bizarre notion that they have to live on in an afterlife… for all eternity, which is for as long as is imaginable, only multiplied by infinity… time that you have to share with all the tosspots and wankers who’ve ever walked the earth, yet have been “saved”. Why would anybody want that? It’s just fucking ridiculous.

Anyway, then we’d come back from the misery of the crematorium and be made to watch Jesus of Nazareth – again, and The Greatest Story Ever Told – again, and a Bond film.

So as a child, Easter = misery & boredom. Then as I grew older, it meant misery, boredom and stress of exam revision. Now it means a couple of days off work and hot cross buns, so I’m finally enjoying it, all these years on.

Some might say that the original Pagan festival is more appropriate to celebrate: rebirth, spring, fertility, whatever. Why not celebrate and enjoy the world as it comes to life after the cold of winter? Because it’s still fucking winter, that’s why.

I shall celebrate my time off work with my family, the little dog, crap telly and a bit of booze.

Now, what time is it? It’s 11.52am, but this time tomorrow, it’ll be 12.52am. Oh good grief.

I can’t get my head round it, but flux capacitors at the ready, we’re heading off in time.