Adjusting to a new time zone

Flying in to Heathrow from the East, I failed to appreciate that I was going to gain time. This was something that I was not yet understanding even though I had been told about it many times.

I think it became light over Austria and of course having hardly left time zone GMT +3, my body clock was not used to time zone changes. So when the sun came up and we were given our breakfast, I started thinking that as we flew and got nearer to Heathrow, so did the time move on. Well, of course the clock does not click as fast as it should if one is flying east to west.

When we landed at Heathrow, I thought that it was sometime in the afternoon. Of course it was not. It was still in the morning and I think I should have taken that on board.

But with the problems that I encountered with immigration I took my eye off the clock. The excitement being let through and seeing the UK for the first time, I completely lost track of time.

Later on in the day the fatigue and the new phenomenon of jet lag were to take hold in a rather interesting way. Quite dramatic!

We had a light lunch, my first meal in the UK which was vegetarian. I found this one a new one on me. In Uganda at the time vegetarian meals were not that much of a favourite.

In fact for one to have a purely vegetarian meal meant that one did not have enough money to supplement their meals with meat or chicken. When the lettuce was served, I thought the family I was visiting despite having a nice house did not have enough money to buy food! Besides, they were not cooked! We in Uganda, fry a lot of our food.

Once one of my friends from the UK joked that we are about to fry water. That was a difficult meal. Thankfully Jackie whose parents I was with at the moment had written an A4 sized letter to her parents as a sort of "operation manual". So we were later on to eat quite a lot of chicken to my delight.

Later on, Harold decided to take me and my sister to have a quick look around the immediate area. We walked down Park road, across the Worthy Road and into Russell Road the aim being to get to the fields beyond and enjoy some bit of countryside within a city. Well, that was the plan until he got a brain wave! "A change of plan!" as he so triumphantly announced. He knew of some nice tidy pub nearby called the Hyde Tavern on Hyde street.

The Hyde Tavern introduced to me the traditional English pub. Slightly stuffy with a lot of "organised" clutter yet very intimate. It was one of those places that one never heard loud music. Just quiet enough for a contemplative pint. Harold asked us what we wanted to drink. With the excitement of finnaly tasting English beer I could hardly contain my self. However, I could hardly recognise a single one so he ordered for me a half pint of Wadworth 6X. My first taste of proper English beer. 6X! For a while that is all that I ordered anywhere we went.

On the walk back home, that is when the jet lag and the fatigue finally took hold. It was like a tiredness that I had never experienced before. I felt like throwing up (no it was not the beer), I lost my sense of distance.

Everything seemed really far. My legs felt like they were encased in cement and I started speaking nonsense. Thankfully my sister was still with us and she quickly took control of the situation. As soon as we got back home, I was sent to bed for a quick nap. I was to awake a few hours later, thinking that it was a different day because it was still light.

Anyone who has not travelled far beyond the tropics of cancer and Capricorn, the length of day remains pretty much the same all year round. In Uganda, the fact that the country is astride the equator means that day and night are equal. Its twelve hours each. This has affected even the way time is told. When I woke up later in the day, my cheap digital watch was reading something like 0813PM. But I failed to internalise the PM bit. I thought that it was 0813 in the morning because I had never seen it light that late in the day.

The sun along the equator rushes up the sky in the morning then crawls across it through the day roasting the ground and the people. As soon as it gets about 1730, the sun literally drops out of the sky! As a young boy, I watched the sunset many times with my father and it always excited me seeing the huge red sun drop behind the hills on the horizon.

Within minutes, the stars would be out. That evening, my first evening in the UK, the sun seemed to refuse to go away! I could not believe it seeing day light until way past 2100 hours!