“So, you’re calling from the future? Wow,” said my son excitedly as we shared a late-night phone call. In Kuwait, it was already Wednesday. Back in Britain, it was still Tuesday. I was indeed ‘in the future’. Will we ever quite get used to the idea of different time zones? My trip to the Middle East had begun with unexpected bout of jetlag: a short, sharp overnight flight from London left me dazed and dazzled in the bright morning sunshine of Kuwait City.
It was 6am in Kuwait, but it really did feel like 4am in the morning to me. (Or maybe even 3am, the fateful hour when F Scott Fitzgerald noted that things always seem at their worst). The more I told myself that I laugh in the face of jetlag, the more my head drooped and my eyes grew dim. My workaholic plans for a full day at the laptop had given way to a simple desire to get my head down on a soft pillow.
What a wuss. What a lightweight. What a victim to the mighty and mysterious power of world time. When I awoke in my hotel room, with that soft loamy evening light bathing Kuwait’s Liberation Tower, I began a hazy routine which might be familiar to some travellers. The hotel room clock said 6.10. But could it be trusted? Hotel clocks leave the factory with a default setting to display the wrong time. They are made to be inaccurate, to lull the unwary visitor into rushed breakfasts and missed appointments.
My watch read 18.05. But had I remembered to reset it on that bumpy flight east – Or was I still on London time? My Blackberry read 18.06. But these devices can automatically reset themselves, and so can laptops. The machines know what time it is, even when we don’t.
Turning on the TV, it was still hard to fathom the time. Trouble and trivia (the mainstays of global news channels) were happening all over the world – in darkness and in light.
Whatever the time zone, the 24-hour channels are always at the same pitch. They are always brashly In The Now, even when they are not In The Know. Finally, one of the better business news networks displayed a reliable time below the ticker streams on the bottom of the screen. 17.10 CET. Ten past five in the afternoon in Central Europe. Ten past six in Kuwait. Hallelujah at last.
Of course, things were simpler when each little city-state or island around the world had their own time. For centuries, people worked out the time from the rising and setting of the sun exactly where they were. If the town fifty miles away had a different time, it didn’t really matter.
If you were wealthy, you could check your sundial, to make sure you were early for your meeting with the local squire. Blackberries were something you picked and ate, not something you checked ten times a day.
Then came the railroads. In 1847, the first time zone was established, in order to keep the trains running on time. Most British rail passengers will tell you that 164 years later, the rail companies are still trying to be punctual, but not always succeeding.
The ancient connection with solar time – the exact local time, as seen on your sundial – was lost forever. The sun, whether beating down on Kuwait or a sleepy English suburb, was no longer our reference point. To make the world run on time, we had to swap the celestial for something more mundane, the aptly-named mean time.
From now on, mean time would dictate when we got up, went to school or work, worshipped, partied or slept.
Within a generation, hourly time zones had sliced their way longitudinally across the planet. Nepal was the last to fall into line with a standard time zone, offset from the Greenwich meridian, in 1986.
With an idiosyncratic and rugged sense of independence typical of its people, Nepal went for five hours and forty-five minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Time that, as they might have said in Nepalese.
And so, the whole world entered the era of the time zone. Travellers everywhere could glance at their watch, do the mental math and work out what time it was at home, while feeling oddly tired. But then, as you know, I don’t believe in jetlag and would never admit to suffering from it.
Hywel Jones is a television producer who has travelled the world with the BBC and ITV. He now runs the international broadcast and TV production company hi.tv
