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Daylight Saving Time, or British Summer Time - wherever you are and whatever you call it, what is the point? Surely its benefit, whatever it was, has long been lost.

I have enjoyed reading other articles on this side of the debate. They have all confirmed my feeling that changing clocks twice a year is an exercise in futility, largely as no-one is clear what it is we are supposed to be achieving by it.

History has it that during a war there is a benefit from having longer summer evenings. For a start that relates to an outdated concept of war. Missiles can be launched day or night, and modern armed forces are equipped with night vision. So where is the benefit nowadays?

Some sources refer back to the need for more time to farm the land during WW1. But the whole concept of gaining more time is a fallacy.

Time, as we know it, is a man-made linear concept based on a unit called an hour, calculated from the time it takes for one rotation of the earth. Dividing the earth longitudinally and measuring in degrees, based I assume on Euclidian geometry, we get 360 for a complete revolution taking roughly 24 hours, and therefore time zones approximately 15 degrees wide for each hour.

That is fine so far as it goes, except that the world's time zones do not fit into exact longitudinal 15 degree wide strips. For example we live in SW France, in a zone which is set one hour ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. Yet our village is due south of Greenwich, so our time is always skewed by one hour, and the sun is at its southernmost not at 12 midday, but 1pm. Confusing, isn't it?

It's even more confusing during the period of summer time, when clocks have been adjusted one hour forward and our midday is at 2pm because we are then two hours ahead of the sun.

When the UK and mainland Europe changed their clocks on different dates, the confusion was immense, with periods when they were two hours apart, and others when their times were the same. At least that has now been standardised. But the date for the change is different in the USA, and as another article has informed us, one state in the union does not use Daylight Saving Time at all. Good for them.

At a time when international trade is so rapid, with computers making transactions possible in seconds, to have a situation twice in every year, in which we are not quite sure what the time difference is between two countries or two cities, is patently absurd.

I do find it remarkable though, that my computer always knows when the hour change takes

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