i did the usual fall back thing this morning and went out with my watch wrong, and got myself confused because the place i went opened at nine and my watch said nine. Though of course here in the real world it was only 8.

It’s only an hour, yet a disagreement between internal and external clock somehow tilts the axis of the universe just slightly, so that everything looks the same but feels in a fundamental way wrong. Like everything in your house – walls, floors, roof, and everything your house contains – has just been moved an inch to the left. It all looks exactly the same; yet in some fundamental sub-sensory way, we feel it to be wrong.

It isn’t, though, the satisfying temporal displacement of travel and jet lag. Because that means we’re somewhere, somewhen, and have a reason to be out of sync with the air around us. We have the thrill of difference, and a different sun rising and setting at a different time, the fatigue of travel, soon solves the problem for us, for good or ill.

Here, home, we’re simply knocked out of balance, like a tire hitting a pot-hole. We spin a bit off-center for a time until we again find equilibrium.

But you know, at least now the clock in my Jeep – a clock that requires some elaborate vulcan-neck-pinch of buttons to set, and for which I last saw the manual around the turn of the century – is once again correct as it is half the year. So that’s something.