Time ...

On a balloon day a while ago I mused on the arbitrariness of counting systems and our giving multiples of ten importance only because we count in tens.

I feel much the same about the way we measure time and I find it very hard to get excited about last night's 12 boings of Big Ben. It is arbitrary that we have decided that December has 31 days not 30 and it is arbitrary that the year begins in January. Although the Roman calendar started in January, from the 12th century the beginning of the English legal year was Lady Day (25 March, still marked in the UK by the beginning of the tax year on 6 April - the 11 days' difference resulting from the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar).

Catholic Europe switched to the Gregorian calendar, with its January new year, around 1582 and Scotland in 1600, after which festivities in England also started to shift to January even though England didn't adopt this calendar until 1752. The different times for the calendar change mean that although we record both Shakespeare's and Cervantes's deaths on 23 April 1616 they actually died 10 days apart; Russia didn't change until 1918 so the October revolution started, by everyone else's calendars, in November.

So much for the arbitrariness of years and months. How about days?

The point at which we measure 'midnight' is is not arbitrary but it is imprecise. In theory, noon GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) at, say, Greenwich, is the exact moment when the sun is highest above Greenwich. But the earth's uneven speed means that in practice the highest point can be up to 16 minutes away from noon GMT. Hence Greenwich time being mean - we use the average.

Because solar noon (therefore midnight) are at different times in different places I was able to console the person struggling to pour celebratory wine into enough glasses before midnight last night that he had plenty of time - midnight in Oxford is actually 5 minutes later than midnight in Greenwich. Oxford adopted London time only in November 1840 when the Great Western Railway established 'railway time' because train timetables were getting so confusing.

So, happy as I am to celebrate a new year, and wish everyone happiness and peace, I don't really mind at all when I do it. I might do it again for the Chinese new year on 10 February. Or for the Afghan and Iranian new year on 31 March. Or the Burmese/Myanmar new year on 13 April (though, for the first time, Burma/Myanmar held a public new year celebration last night - an interesting change).

This clock is on Tom Tower at Christ Church in Oxford, and also messes with time. At 9.05pm every night (i.e. 9pm Oxford time) it starts to ring 101 times, for the original 101 students who had to get back inside (from the nearest pubs, obviously) before the last chime.

Appropriately, since I had already decided what I wanted to blip today, my satisfyingly 'accurate' Swiss railway watch stopped at 9:11:43 this morning. I shall have to find a new battery for it or I might be late for new year 2014.

Happy times, all!