Peter

I'm generally in favour of keeping sunrise within reasonable limits at the expense of sunset fluctuating somewhat, so BST/GMT is fairly close to how I'd like it.

I have in the past suggested, in a ha-ha-only-serious sort of way, that if you're going to decouple the civil consensus time-of-day from the rigid clock used for actually needing to know exact durations, then I'd almost prefer to do it by gradual continuous variation throughout the whole year in place of two big bangs, but I recognise that unless every clock in the country were replaced by something extremely high-tech it would be utterly infeasible.

Mostly what I like about the October clock change is that I don't get dazzled on the way home from work any more. The single most inconvenient time to have sunset is the time that puts the sun at eye level during the going-home period of the day; I don't mind whether the sun sets before or after then, as long as it doesn't do it during. It tends to be "during" for most of late October, until the clocks change at which point it jumps to the much preferable "before".

In winter I think it makes sense to try to put the restricted amount of daylight that is available at the most convenient part of people's work-day for as many people as possible. If I were EPDFL I'd do this by saying that the clocks should be set to the actual time-zone (that is, GMT) and mandating that things that take place at state-determined fixed times (eg schools) happen at useful hours for daylight. This is pretty much the situation at the moment I think.

I've never been convinced of the arguments for BST. After all, having optimised for the daylight availability in winter we get *more* daylight in summer! So all the parts of the day that had daylight in winter still have daylight, and bonus extra daylight exists at both ends of the day.