MY mother had an expression: “That clock goes on teacakes.” She meant that a particular clock couldn’t be trusted to tell you the right time. Where the teacakes came in, I’d no idea but there was no mistaking the meaning of what she said.

It seems to me that all our clocks have been on teacakes for decades. I enjoyed my extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning when we put the clocks back, but the whole process harbours a destructive folly which makes all our lives more inconvenient and unpleasant than necessary.

This is what putting clocks back every year at the end of October produces. We lose an extra hour’s light in the evenings so that from the first week in December until the first week in January it’s dark at four o’clock.

I live in Harrow, north London, but my friends in Durham and Yorkshire have to put up with an even earlier sunset. It would be far better to stay on summer time all year round.

Then we would have the evening light until five o’clock even in midwinter. Of course we would have to pay for this extra hour’s light in the evenings by enduring an extra hour’s darkness in the mornings.

But from all the people I’ve talked to, I hear loud and clear that they’d prefer the lighter evenings.

At this point in the discussion, someone always says that darker mornings – sunrise at 9am rather than at apm – would result in more road accidents, especially involving children on their way to school. This would indeed be a strong reason for leaving things as they are – if it were based on sound facts.

But it isn’t. It’s a red herring. For we have had experience, four decades ago when we stayed on summer time all year round and discovered that the total number of road accidents had reduced. Recent research bears this out.

The consequences are not confined to the depths of winter. We put the clocks back at the end of October: that is approximately seven weeks before the shortest day. But we don’t put them forward again (and so gain more evening light) until a full three months later, the very end of March. So it’s dark just after 6pm in the springtime. I noticed this particularly a few years ago when Easter happened to be very early. It was dark when I went across to church for Evensong at 6.30pm. Profoundly depressing. Here’s a compromise with those who like to tinker with the clocks: let us at least put the clocks forward again not three months after December 21 – the shortest day – but seven weeks after it.

That would harmonise with what we do in the autumn. And it would carry the bonus of lighter evenings in sullen February when we can all do with a bit of cheering up.

I propose that we put the clocks on not one hour but two first week next February and leave them like that permanently. This would mean lighter nights in the summer – light until 11.30pm – when the light is more useful for making the most of the warm weather, holidays and tourism etc. And it would be dark in the mornings until 4.30am instead of, as it is now, 3.30am.

An hour’s extra light in the summer evenings is an excellent trade-off for an hour’s darkness in the very early mornings – when most of us are still asleep anyway. This seems to me to make splendid sense – and that, of course, is why it never gets done.

Anyone for teacakes?