SO, winter is drawing in again. Despite the appeals to our Continental inclinations, 15 October 2008 won’t, after all, go down as heralding a new era of balmy late evenings on summer terraces awaiting the twilight.

Leaving aside the nationalistic overtones, what is it that gets us so exercised about time – and indeed weather? Maybe it’s because the more we consider ourselves masters of the universe – give or take a financial system or two – the natural elements remain totally beyond our control?

Every country has to adapt to the sun rising in the morning and sinking in the evening – even though it all gets a bit academic the closer you get to the poles. Countries united in politics are divided by time. North America is sliced by seven time zones if you include the Maritimes.

Juno, the state capital of Alaska – remember this if you’re a Trivial Pursuit fan – is an hour ahead of its principal city, Anchorage. Closer to home, on my latest visit to our closest European neighbour, I was faced with changing up an hour on arrival on French soil, back one at local winter clock change, then back another on return to Jersey.

During the late 60s an experiment to introduce ‘double summer time’ in the UK was met with howls of protest from Scottish farmers condemned to early-morning milking before even the birds had stirred from their nests, and postmen felled by unseen hazards across a pitch-black obstacle course. It didn’t catch on then, and though arguments similar to those raised here have re-emerged, it’s not high on the agenda now.

Control of time means control of activity. In Stalin’s Russia attempts were made to standardise the nation’s time on clocks in Moscow – so you could be 3,000 miles away in Vladivostok enjoying a post-lunch nap while Muscovites were climbing out of bed, ostensibly at the same time, into early-morning drudgery.

The Canutes of Berlin had the same idea when they imposed CET on the Channel Islands during the Occupation, inflicting local inconvenience in the name of imperial standardisation. In theory, there’s a perverse logic for the UK, Ireland and all we offshore western European outposts to cluster under the umbrella of Central European Time, since we form the Continental territorial boundary.

Given that to the west lies an ocean divide, it makes little difference whether America is five, six or seven hours different. You can’t help feel that there is more than a touch of Dunkirk withdrawal-ism about the UK view – something about being ‘dragged into Europe’ – the same sort of thing that makes us cling to the pound sterling however it fares against the euro.

As we become more of a 24/7 society, the concept of a distinction between time for work, time for play and time for sleep ebbs away. All-night TV, all-hour casinos mean that it’s no longer bakers, factory-workers, broadcasters and emergency service workers who are condemned to sleep disruption. And while we’re still able to indulge in international air travel, the curse of jet-lag will continue to upset our biological systems.

Cheating comes at a price. Too many journeys on the ‘red-eye’ can have long-term physical effects – I mean the ‘real’ transatlantic one – not the ridiculous attribution to the early-morning Jersey-to-London flight, which actually takes off after many London office workers are already at their desks. But it goes further than that.

We’ve grown to expect strawberries at Christmas, daffodils in the autumn, grapes in March – all the result of forgetting that there is a natural cycle to time and the seasons. It’s nice to be able to jet away to Oz for the bizarre spectacle of Santa Claus and his bikini-clad elves sizzling round a ‘barbie’ on Bondi Beach. But, like freighting those winter strawberries from South Africa, it squirts an overdose of carbon into the stratosphere.

I’m certainly not advocating that we all revert to living in huts and hunting with the seasons. We couldn’t do it, anyway – we’ve already destroyed the habitats and customs of our natural prey, and much of the fauna that would sustain them. But we are beginning to have to face up to the fact that we are living in changed times.

Indeed, the eco-warriors would have us respect our limitations to a greater degree than most of us would feel comfortable. The consequences for world trade would be dire – just as it plunged into global financial uncertainty. But in the overall scheme of things, we’ve not actually been taking all this time and hemisphere-dodging for granted for all that long. Remember how difficult it was, 25 years ago, getting to grips with the fact that the British Task Force was struggling though mountainous seas and slogging it out through the Falklands winter, while we looked on from a pre-election UK summer.

Now, you’ll find absolute time and ‘elastic’ time. In the first category: the Greenwich ‘pips’ and your hourly BBC News – you wouldn’t want them to turn up ten minutes late, would you? While the elastic variety covers most aspects of ordering material, punctuality of tradesmen and payment of debt; interestingly, most airlines flying from London to Jersey will quote a one-hour flight. So, when you touch down well in advance, there’s a smile on your face – until, of course, you have to wait for your luggage.

Dr Who and the Time Lords may be able to travel in whatever time direction they wish. Novelists – particularly science fiction writers – can place the action of their plots in whatever period their imagination can conjure. But, for the rest of us, real time waits for neither man nor referendum.