Sunrise and Sunset

The life I lived on the coast of East Africa when I was young seemed very simple. The sun rose over the sea each morning at six and....

....set over the vast continent behind us each evening at six. Since we were very nearly on the equator the times of sunrise and sunset didn't vary by more than a few minutes through the year, and nobody did anything silly like requiring us to move our clocks forwards and backwards by an hour for reasons that no-one really understood.

The regularity of sunrise and sunset means that the local Swahili do the sensible thing of telling the time by these two 'fixed' and easily visible events. So saa moja asubuhi - saa is time, moja is one, and asubuhi is morning - means one hour after sunrise, our seven o'clock in the morning, and similarly saa nne usiku - nne means four - is ten at night, four hours after sunset.

When I arrived home from school in England at the beginning of my precious annual eight-week African holiday, one of the first things I did was to take off my Ingersoll wrist watch and leave it on the dresser - and then watched for it to stop. I didn't need it then for eight weeks as I could tell the time from the sun. It wasn't wound up again until the day I had to set off back to England.

Of course, even as a very small boy I understood that such a beautifully simple system couldn't possibly work in England as it was so often cloudy.