Our fear of the dark is built in – but we need it

It always comes as a surprise somehow: sunlight filtering through curtains when the alarm goes off, the kitchen bright and a blue tit dangling from the bird feeder. The clocks have gone back.

- Jean Sprackland

As a child, I had the idea that "daylight saving" was the action of a kindly being whose principal concern was that we shouldn’t have to walk to school in the dark. In fact it was Mr Willett, a businessman from Petts Wood, who brought this about. Out riding his horse in the early hours one summer morning in 1907, he noticed the curtains still drawn at the windows he passed. An industrious man, he thought it scandalous that perfectly good hours of daylight were being squandered on sleep. He began to campaign for time to be flexed with the seasons so the working day could be optimised according to the rising and setting of the sun.

"He tried to bring more sunshine into the lives of the masses," wrote a journalist after William Willett's death. But he also brought us the November evenings, when autumn lurches decisively towards winter.