The extra hour

On Sunday, in the small hours, they took an hour out of the night and gave it back in the morning, which is the only time of year anyone hands me time without my asking. I woke at ten past seven thinking it was ten past eight, and lay in bed doing sums like an accountant: if it's already ten past eight but it's really ten past seven, then I have an hour to spare. An hour of what?

I never know what to do with it. March is simple, that's theft and that's that. But in October the hour turns up unannounced, like a banknote forgotten in a coat pocket, and I stand there looking at it, not daring to spend it.

The oven lies

First I went to the kitchen to put the coffee on. The oven clock said quarter past eight. It's the only clock in the flat neither of us knows how to change: it has three buttons and a manual Marta threw out two years ago in a big tidy-up. So in spring, when it falls an hour behind, we leave it and subtract in our heads for six months. This morning, for the first time since March, the oven was telling the truth. It was right. It had reached the present out of sheer patience, without anyone touching it.

I took it as a sign of something, though I don't know what. Marta came out of her room in her pyjamas, puffy-eyed, looked at the oven and said: "Weird, it's not lying today." And went back to bed.

Sixty minutes on the balcony

So I kept my hour. No lessons, no rehearsal, the quartet is resting until somebody hires us again. I dragged a chair onto the balcony with my coffee and the sofa blanket and sat watching the street at eight on a Sunday morning that, for the rest of the neighbourhood, was still seven.

The street was half switched off. A man was walking an old dog that stopped at every third lamppost. The bakery on the corner had just lifted its shutter and the smell of hot bread reached the third floor. A girl cycled past with her lights on because the day hadn't finished starting, and I thought about my new brake, which makes everything better, and about the old cable still in my violin case.

I didn't play. On any other Sunday that's what I'd have done, an hour of the partita's harmonics before the neighbours complained. But it struck me that a gifted hour shouldn't be spent working, so the violin stayed in its case, leaning against the wall, looking at me with some offence.

What I did do was count rooftops. From my chair you can see fourteen, and on one of them, the low house opposite, there's an orange tree in an enormous pot that I'd never noticed, because in summer the leaves blend in with everything else. Now, with the low light, it had little dots of colour. I thought of Marta's aunt's oranges, and how in a couple of weeks that tree's would be ripe too, and nobody would pick them.

The evening, at six

What nobody mentions about the change is what happens at the end of the day. Yesterday at six in the evening it was already night. I went out for bread and the streetlights were on, and the market square had that look of a day that left earlier than it should have, with all of us pretending nothing's wrong. I bought a loaf and a single orange, and the fruit seller told me everything gets shorter and longer at the same time.

Tonight I came back from teaching at half past seven feeling as if I were coming home at dawn. Nil, my seven-year-old student, asked me why it was so dark outside if it wasn't late. I told him the clocks had changed. He asked where the hour they took from us in spring had gone. "Nowhere," I said. "We've given it back." He frowned. "Well, I didn't notice we were giving it back."

Neither did I, Nil. But yesterday morning on the balcony, with the coffee gone lukewarm, I realised I'd eaten the whole hour doing nothing, and for once I hadn't felt guilty. The oven showed the right time. Down in the street, the old dog was finally reaching the fourth lamppost.