What a brilliant idea. The best part is that if you are on your own, you can use your birthday for both components, and make out with yourself. Anyway, to the Googlemobile! We haven’t a moment to lose!

Geographic coordinates have X and Y components. Gay couples must choose who gets the X, but for obvious genetic reasons, everyone else should assign X to the female half (except polyamorous triads, who’ll need a Z coordinate and either a helicopter, or a spade).

I initially mapped birth dates to coordinates in British DDMMYY format, but this ended up miles out to sea. I should have remembered that YYMMDD is the universally correct format - not only does it preserve chronological order in lexicographic orderings, it gave me a point on land. Win-win.

It just so happened that the Birthday Point was 10 miles away near a road I’ve driven down about 200 times in the last 15 years - a route from which I’ve never deviated. What a recipe for a familiar adventure!

Here’s what Google Maps had to say about it all:

The green marker is the closest parking spot we could find to the foot bridge (the A31 is a busy dual carriageway), the red marker is the exact location we were aiming for, and the blue marker is where we actually ended up.

I always knew our destination would be on private property. In my mind it would only just be on private property, perhaps at the far bottom of an abandoned rural house’s garden, a mere hoppable fence away. In reality, it was some way ahead of us through a dense, pitch black forest. Since we had conveniently forgotten to bring a torch, the light of my phone’s GPS screen was all we had to guide us. Rather than scramble through trees and possibly barbed wire in the dark, we found it more pleasant to just climb a small mound and stay there for a bit.

All things considered, we couldn’t have asked for more convenient birthdays. An easy drive and a short walk on the heath. I expect a more perilous adventure when we try it again in Bristol.

Daylight Saving Time has been in the news this week with claims that fiddling with the clocks could reduce CO₂ emissions, just as wartime politicians discovered that fiddling with the clocks could reduce energy consumption. Laudable goals, but I fear the practice of turning the clocks forward in spring, then back in the winter, has been so ingrained into all of us for the last 90-odd years that we’ve lost sight of what an utterly insane idea it is in the first place:

Q: How can we reduce our energy bills?

A: By meddling with time itself! Mwahahahaaa!

Lunacy. Sure, it’s a solution, but it’s such a monumental, disruptive hack that it boggles the mind, if the mind is willing to be boggled by such things. How did it become acceptable to solve social and economic problems by messing with such a fundamental part of our shared society? It’s like abolishing every third Monday to reduce Monday blues - by skipping straight to Tuesday. It’s like switching the national language to French during the summer, to attract continental tourists, and then switching back for Christmas.

If mangling the country’s timestamps is acceptable, I have a further suggestion: since the City of London is arguably the most important part of the British economy, optimise its timezone for maximal productivity: at 5pm, put the clocks 4 hours back to EST to take in the afternoon trading in New York, then at New York 5pm, switch forward 13 hours to Japan Standard Time for a couple of hours sleep before the start of Tokyo trading. At Tokyo 5pm, switch back to GMT to begin the next day’s work in London.

I call it Daylight Trading Time: elevating insanity to brilliance.