Substack diary no.153: Thursday, 14th. May 2026

I find myself confused by something very simple, or rather, that I thought should be very simple. Meet you at noon. Today, noon at my location is at ten past one. However, it seems that a great many people think of ‘noon’ as simply 12 o’clock. So why give it a name and call it ‘noon’?

In general, a time is just a time – 08:30 or 15:40. We do not attach names to them. I have always considered ‘noon’ to be the name given to that time at which the sun is at its highest in the sky, hence noon today is about 13:10. There is an artificial ‘human’ factor at work here: we are on British Summer Time! So, whereas noon (solar noon?) would be at 12:10, our insistence on fiddling with things for no good reason means noon appears to be an hour later than it is.

So, since most people apply a name to the daylight time of 12 o’clock – ‘noon’ – I shall also call it noon. I do not want to be an hour late for my engagement. Just as well we didn’t agree to meet at ‘sunset’ – another name for a time that shifts daily – imagine the mayhem that could have caused! However, I am left with a problem: being an old romantic I rather like the idea of a name for a time – tea-time, twilight, lunch-time. These are pleasantly vague and laugh in the face of the time notation we have invented.

Of course, there are times when we need to refer to conventional time. When is the next train to London? Tea-time. That wouldn’t do would it!