Summer Time begins tonight and I am deprived of an hour of sleep. I will feel the effects of this Monday morning and have already warned my collegues of the impending grumpiness and snarls.
But are there any poems on the general topic to cheer me up?

A fetishist living in ca
Eighteen hundred in Mecca would wa
Few weeks at his store,
Then visit a whore
To ja hot load on her ba.

Now it's official again, you could go around crooning that George Gershwin song:

Summertime
(Heyward do Bose)

Summertime when the livin' is easy
Fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high
Yo' daddy is rich an' yo' mummy is good lookin'
So hush, little baby, don't you cry

One of these mornins I'm gonna rise up singin'
I'm gonna spread my wings an' I'll take to the sky
But till that mornin' there is nothin' can harm you
Cause daddy an' mummy standin' by

Not that there's much cotton growing in your part of England, and perhaps the locals take pride in the livin' being tough rather than easy!

Well I prefer the livin' easy. But I'm also tone deaf, so if I ever woke up singin' the rest of the family would probably throw things at me.

(And don't say there's no such thing as tone deaf, I need a difference of two tones to distinguish pitch on the same instrument, but can regard my children's plastic and wooden recorders as different even when playing the same note because the overtones differ.)

Linda,

If you meant this as an APRIL FOOLS you should have waited until March 31st.

(We actually have to "spring forward" this coming SUNDAY morning.)

It's a week earlier for the rightpondians.

Oh dear!

I'm so sorry!

(For my posting, AND for the rightpondians.)

Linda, here's a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar on the subject:

CHANGING TIME

THE cloud looked in at the window,
And said to the day, "Be dark!"
And the roguish rain tapped
hard on the pane,
To stifle the song of the lark.


The wind sprang up in the tree tops
And shrieked with a voice of death,
But the rough-voiced breeze,
that shook the trees,
Was touched with a violet's breath.


Les

We had to 'fall back' here last weekend.
I'm already missing those long hot summer days and nights.



April

The darling of Australia's Autumn -- now
Down dewy dells the strong, swift torrents flow!
This is the month of singing waters -- here
A tender radiance fills the Southern year;
No bitter winter sets on herb and root,
Within these gracious glades, a frosty foot;
The spears of sleet, the arrows of the hail,
Are here unknown. But down the dark green dale
Of moss and myrtle, and the herby streams,
This April wanders in a home of dreams;
Her flower-soft name makes language falter. All
Her paths are soft and cool, and runnels fall
In music round her; and the woodlands sing
For evermore, with voice of wind and wing,
Because this is the month of beauty -- this
The crowning grace of all the grace that is.

Henry Kendall

That's OK, I'm feeling human again. I like the idea of being a rightpondian, like being on the leftbank.

Sounds like folks Lemuel Gulliver might have visited, along with Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, Laputans, Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. I wonder what attributes he would give them.

A people given to grumbling without action to correct the problem. And weather that never goes to extreems, so they come never feel happy about it. Never crisp cold and sun on snow, but damp and slush. Never a glorious hot sunny day, but sunny spells and the threat of rain.

'A people given to grumbling without action to correct the problem' - and here we are trying to increase global warming by burning fossil fuels to run cars and heat houses etc, so we can get lovely consistent hot summers. We never get credit when we do try!

Les, I love that Dunbar!

I'm going to include that in an email reminding my sister to set her clock forward.

Thank you!

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.- Dave Barry

pam

They don't change the clocks to summertime in Queensland. The rumour in the southern Australian states (which do) is that that's because the housewives in 'Bananaland' fear it would fade the curtains.

Ian, it's true!
I visited some friends way out west of Brisbane a couple of months ago and the temperature hit 55' (centigrade) several days in a row - i thought i'd melt. One of the locals actually commented that it was lucky they didn't have daylight saving, as it would have been even hotter!

Can that be right? 131 deg. F.? 32+(55*9/5) Now that is HOT!

Yep, it was HOTTER than hot. Great to get back to a nice temperate Sydney climate!

IanB - over the weekend I suddenly "twigged" your joke about Bananaland housewives. Here we would call that "a blonde joke."