A BLINDING SHAFT of light where there had been only darkness 24 hours before - or was it 23 hours, or maybe 25? - and a dawn chorus of famished felines jolted me from a pleasant dream about voodoo and landlords. It took me a few fuzzy seconds to figure out that the Robin Hoods of time had struck again.

I stumbled blearily from my bed and made a pathetic dash-cum-stumble toward the kitchen and cat food before Currant Bun, Teddy Bear and Ali Magraw had a few more seconds to consider how my toes bore a striking resemblance to mouth-watering prawns at this hour of the day.

As I stirred out the glop (why does cat food always look like something that's fit for not overly particular vultures?), I muttered under my wheezes, "Spring forward, fall back. . .spring forward, fall back. . ." My sanity clearly was off somewhere holidaying on the French Riviera.

Then I remembered. The night just gone by was the Changing of the Clocks, that twice-yearly occasion when the law of the land dictates that we must roll all timepieces back or forward an hour because, as best I can gather, some Scottish chicken farmer's birds might otherwise oversleep up there in the remote Grampian highlands.

It's a Robin Hood sort of thing done with clocks - taking an hour here, giving it back there. The trick is getting it the right way round. Otherwise, you're apt to show up at the pub two hours early, banging on the door like some demented alky, or two hours late for your wedding to find your bride is long gone with the best man.

That's where "spring forward, fall back" comes in. It's a mnemonic, to remind you that in the spring, your clock springs forward an hour (so 6 a.m. becomes 7 a.m. with immediate effect), and in the fall it falls back an hour (6 a.m. is 5 a.m.).

. . . Or is it "spring back, fall forward"? In which case, you would gain an hour in the spring and lose it in the fall, or maybe it's vice versa. These are, indeed, the times that try men's souls.

It's the British equivalent of switching from standard to daylight savings time and back. The whole deal is done at 2 in the morning, a time normally the preserve of insomniacs, refrigerator-raiding dieters and werewolves who haven't ripped out a juicy throat since the last full moon.

And that's a major part of the problem - who aside from the aforementioned is up at that hour to retune the clocks? So you either do the deed the previous evening, in which case everyone in the family spends the remaining hours before bed in a state of temporal dislocation, or you do it the following morning sometime during the two hours between 6 and 10.

Now I'll concede that, as a threat to life as we know it, this doesn't exactly rival mass famine or genocide or the Yankees winning the World Series. But in the Webb household it is a calamity because whatever the powers-that-be decree, for the cats 6:15 is breakfast time every day of the year.

Telling an insistent cat to look at his or her watch that has been newly set to British Standard Time from BST (British Summer Time - our daylight time) accomplishes about what King Canute managed when he went down to the seashore and regally ordered the tides to cease.

Between sunlight bedazzling me like a particularly nasty laser beam (I loathe sunshine before toast), Currant Bun drooling in my left ear, Ali sticking her quite ample and quite hairy derriere in my face and Teddy warbling like Tina Turner on speed, this first morning of BST (2000-2001) was marginally less joyful than nude bungie-jumping.

Besides which, I cannot figure the purpose of this daylight-savings nonsense. Why not, Canute-like, simply tell the earth to slow down or speed up its rotation? - you'll get just as far. The fact remains, the amount of daylight available on any given day remains immutable, regardless of what time we say it begins or ends.

I'm told that, as far as Britain is concerned, the time changes are at the request of Scottish farmers whose poultry and cattle get upset when dawn comes too soon or too late for their liking. In fact, if the Scots had their way, the clocks would go forward and back two hours at a time, rather than the single one at present.

The solution is, of course, blindingly obvious - pension off all Scots farmers, turn their chickens into fried drumsticks and their four-leggeds into steaks, lamb chops and cat food, and buy eggs and milk and butter and the rest from America or Australia or New Zealand.

Just leave the clocks alone and let me get some sleep.

The British are forever dickering with the natural order of things. During World War I, a prime minister of the time became frantic when he thought munitions workers were spending too much time boozing and not enough hours beating plowshares into swords and decreed that all pubs would close henceforth for most of the afternoon.

It took nearly eight decades of derision from the civilized world, including pockets of it in Britain itself, to get those Draconian anti-drinking laws abolished.

You can buy Playboy magazine on Sunday in Britain, but not the Bible. You cannot buy fish and chips (fried fish with French fries - a sort of national dish) from a fish and chips shop on Sunday, but you can buy fish and chips from the pub.

With that sort of mentality, messing around with the clocks was a logical follow-on. The fact that chickens and cows and pigs and sheep had successfully coped for hundreds of thousands of years with longer daylight hours in summer and shorter ones in winter was hardly a deterrent for determined, time-meddling do-gooders.

Besides which, this morning my watch - the one I've used for years to reset the carriage clock, two TV sets, two VCRs and their handsets, the bedside clock-radio, the timer on the stove, another one on the microwave, the clock that runs backwards over the cupboard door - fell apart.

Now I've no hands on my time.

Thought for the Week: Today is the tomorrow I was so worried about yesterday.

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