It might be a sign of advancing age or retreating patience, but I’ve reached the point where my deepest held convictions have sunk without trace.

Once I was such a woolly liberal you could have knitted me into a cardi. I had as many Make Love, Not War badges as the next girl, and practised what I preached.

At parties, if not in public, I argued vociferously for proportional representation, and I had a direct debit to Oxfam and the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust.

But gradually my concerns have turned elsewhere.

It may be that global conflicts have simply become too tricky for anyone without a PhD in The Branding, Marketing and Sale of Armaments to follow.

It may be that the more we learn about the many PR options, the more I realise that it would take anyone at least three glasses of sauvignon blanc to think they fully understand it, let alone that they can argue on its behalf to a group of strangers.

No, these things just don’t grab me by the throat like they used to.

Let the next generation of Young Turks, who are as yet untouched by the tedium and nagging ache of hitting their heads against brick walls, spend their days pressing for the things that have eluded their forbears for century after century. Let them take up cudgels, whatever those may be, to turn this world into a place fit for heroes and great crested newts.

I have had my fill. And so now I’ve turned my attention to an issue much closer to home. The sore that never completely heals, but that now and then weeps.

The phenomenon that strikes at the heart of our household with the reliability of clockwork. Because it is clockwork.

For a couple of days, twice a year, life is thrown into utter confusion when the clocks go back or forward, and we enter or leave the state of chaos that is British Summer Time.

Last Sunday was no different.

The official keeper of time in our house had made a sort of half-hearted attempt the night before to alter the radio alarm and his own watch, and I’d put my mobile on an hour to join its European counterparts. But the day was a disaster.

My mobile is so self-sufficient that it also pushed itself on an hour, so that by lunchtime on Sunday I would have to have been on the Continent to have been in possession of an accurate timepiece, and that’s a weak excuse for a city break abroad, even for me.

The cooker, whose inner workings we have come to fear and respect, still announces that it’s 11am at midday, simply because to fiddle with its knobs is to take your ability to cook food, if not your life, in your hands.

Many a time we’ve tried to bring it in line and time with the rest of the country, and have quaked as the oven switched itself on and off spontaneously, and then rang its own alarm bell in the middle of University Challenge. As if it could answer a starter question on thermodynamics.

Even the car colludes in this treachery. We’ve been residing in British Summer Time for four days now, and I still can’t cast my mind back to October well enough to remember how to make the requisite change on the dashboard. So I’ve been very early and spectacularly late for several appointments, and still feel rubbish every morning.

Stop all the clocks! At least, stop messing about with them.

I don’t care if we’re BST or GMT or whatever, as long as we make a decision and then stick with it.

Morning is morning and dark is dark, and if you need to start your sheepshearing or crofting or whatever else it is that you need daylight for, just start it later.

Please. I beg you.

Don’t make me lose another hour’s sleep over it.