As well as the wind and rain, this weekend,we have an added delight this weekend: the clocks go back early tomorrow morning.

While that will grant an extra glorioushour under the covers on Sunday,morning, the evenings will suddenly be much darker and trigger an upsurge in traffic accidents, disturbed sleep patterns, seasonal affective disorder and other miseries.

There is nothing we can do about the shortening hours of daylight, but we could scrap the end of summer time and leave the afternoons and evenings lighter and then, next spring, add another hour for the summer, what is known as Double British Summer Time.

This was tried out from 1968 to 1971, but it left the mornings darker and met with protests from the early risers — farmers, builders and postmen. The switch was felt most keenly in Scotland, where sunrise in the far North was around 10am in midwinter. But if the Scottish Parliament were given the power to legislate on its own time zone, it could carry oncurrent system while the rest of the UK went an hour ahead. This is not as crazy as it might sound - until recently [2006], the state of Indiana allowed its local counties to set their own time zones.

By sticking to summer time we might save ourselves a wave of depression, as well as synchronising Britain with most of Europe.

And it would also save energy by burning less fuel in the lighter afternoons and evenings, and so cut 170,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, according to University of Cambridge scientists.

The whole idea of changing the clocks was thought up by Benjamin Franklin in 1784 to save energy. At that time he was American ambassador in Paris.He calculated that changing the clocks with the sun through the year would save Parisians £100 million of candles, in today’s prices.

But it was Germany that drove the time change in Britain. In 1916, during the First World War, Germany went on to Double Summer Time to save coal by using less heat and light in the winter afternoons and evenings. Not wanting to miss out on this golden opportunity, Britain followed almost immediately. And the same system worked so well it was used again in the Second World War.

Energy consumption these days has changed considerably, but saving energy has become just as important. In 2007 the US extended their summer time by four weeks to save energy, which was estimated to have saved about 0.5 per cent of the nation’s electricity per day, enough to power 100,000 households for a year.

And a study by scientists at Cambridge University estimated that if Britain went on to European time all year round, it could save the country 170,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions — literally at the stroke of the clock.

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