Sunday 30 October 2011

Cheese Biscuit Time


In case you hadn't noticed, the clocks have just gone back to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), so if you haven't changed your watch yet, you need to now.

This will make life slightly easier at the station where informally we tend to work in local time (GMT in winter, BST in summer) whilst the Operations Centre at Portland tend to talk in terms of UTC, or 'Co-ordinated Universal Time' all year round.

To all intents and purposes, UTC and GMT are interchangeable terms although whereas UTC is recognised all over the world and is always an official time, GMT is only an official time in the UK during the winter months.

Incidentally, when Co-ordintated Universal Time was born, us Brits wanted to abbreviate it to CUT. However, Johnny Foreigner wanted to call it TUC (temps universel coordonné), but we already had a TUC (well, two if you include the cheese biscuits) so the compromise was reached.



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