At 2am, the students and fellows of Merton College, Oxford will meet in the fellows Quad and with a glass of port in hand, they will walk backwards for one hour. When they finish, it will still be 2am and time would have stood still for an hour! ……… At the (in)famous Time Ceremony students dressed in formal academic dress walk backwards around the Fellows Quad drinking port. Traditionally participants also held candles, but this practice has been abandoned in recent years. Many students have now adopted the habit of linking arms and twirling around at each corner of the quad. The alleged purpose of this tradition is to maintain the integrity of the space-time continuum during the transition from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time, which occurs in the early hours of the last Sunday in October. However, the ceremony (invented by two undergraduates in 1971) mostly serves as a spoof of other Oxford ceremonies, and (historically) as a celebration of the end of the experimental period of British Standard Time from 1968 to 1971 when the UK stayed one hour ahead of GMT all year round. There are two toasts associated with the ceremony, the first is to good old times!, or to a good old time!, whilst the second is long live the counter-revolution!.
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 21:11:11 +0000
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