Whensday: Greenwich Mean Time

The BBC has a very recognizable way to announce the hour on the hour. The pip-pip-pip signaling the hour on the radio is known around the world. Anyone who has listened to BBC recognizes the sound. I first lived in the Netherlands in 1982 when I came to Haarlem to work as a missions apprentice under Jim Krumrei. At that time, learning Dutch, living on my own, far from family and in a new country and culture, it was nice to have something a little bit familiar. That was the BBC. 

In my apartment in the attic of the church building in Haarlem I had an old radio. It was amazing. These days everything can be found on the internet, but then it was great to have a radio that received long wave. This is not FM or MW (middle wave), but LW (long wave). It wasn’t easy to tune in. A lot of screechy, scratchy sounds until you passed by a clearer voice and stopped to see if you could recognize the language. You could hear radio stations from all over the world. My favorite, of course, was the BBC World Service. I could listen to radio plays and news in English. 

And Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the time to which every other time is pegged. That was how I knew that to talk to Shirley (we were dating at the time) I had to figure 7 hours backwards. If it was 10am for me, it was only 3am for her. We still pay attention to the time difference, of course. We are set up pretty well with our sons since they are 6 hours behind. Our dinner is their lunch. We can eat together during our video chat. 

In 1924 that the BBC started using the pips to mark the hour om radio. BBC World Service still marks every hour with the 6 pips. In the Netherlands, the national radio service used 3 pips before the hour. I still use the pips to readjust the clock in my car which for some reason is not radio-controlled and runs fast. These days everything is digital, but my car its still analog and the BBC still sounds the pips. Those pips still give a feeling of ‘home’ and security when I hear them, bringing back memories of listening to the radio and thinking of people far away.