You went to bed on Saturday feeling slightly smug about it.
An extra hour. A whole free hour, handed over by the government, to be spent lying down. You told somebody about it in the kitchen. You may even have stayed up later than usual on the strength of it, which rather defeats the point, but you did it anyway, because an hour in hand feels like money in a coat pocket.
And then at six o'clock, which is now five o'clock, there is a nose on the edge of the mattress.
He has not been told
Nobody told him. There was no announcement. The phone updated itself in the night with the quiet efficiency of a thing that does not need to sleep, the oven did not, and the dog, who runs on light and on seventeen hundred consecutive mornings of evidence, has concluded that it is time.
He does not bark. He is far too good at this for barking. He sits by the bed and breathes, with the specific audible patience of an animal who knows that eventually you will crack, and that the ceiling cannot hold your attention forever.
You say the word no into a pillow. It has never once worked and he has never once been discouraged by it.
The negotiation
What follows is a sequence you know by heart.
First the sitting. Then, after a decent interval, the small shift of weight that puts one paw on the duvet, deniably, as though it got there on its own. Then the sigh, which is not a sigh of resignation but a sigh with a question mark on the end of it.
Then the tail, which starts going before you have moved anything at all, because he has read something in the quality of your silence that you were not aware of broadcasting.
And then you are up. Of course you are up. You were always going to be up. The hour was never yours.
Outside, at a quarter past five
Here is the thing nobody mentions about the extra hour.
It is light.
For the first time in about a month, you are standing in the garden in the morning and it is properly light, in that thin, washed, apologetic way that late October manages, with everything slightly wet and the sky the colour of the inside of a shell. The street is silent. A single blackbird is going at it somewhere behind the fence. There is nobody on the road.
He walks out onto the grass and stops, the way he always does, to read whatever has happened overnight. Then he stretches, front end down, back end up, for far longer than seems necessary, and shakes himself out from the nose backwards.
And you stand there in a coat over whatever you slept in, holding a mug you do not remember filling, in a morning you would not otherwise have seen.
What he has actually done
You wanted the hour in bed. You would have taken it, and you would have enjoyed it, and by Tuesday you would not have been able to tell anybody what you did with it.
Instead he has spent it for you, outside, in the first decent light of the day, at the only time of year when getting up early and getting up in daylight are briefly the same thing. It will not last. By the end of November the mornings go dark again and both walks are in the black and the whole arrangement stops being charming.
But today he was right, and he did not even know he was arguing a case. He simply turned up at the time he always turns up, because the day starts when the day starts, and a dog has never once been persuaded that an hour is a thing a person can invent.
Half past five
Back inside. The heating has not come on yet because the heating believes the clocks.
He eats, early, with the air of a dog who has corrected an administrative error. Then he goes back to the sofa and is asleep within ninety seconds, having got exactly what he wanted and lost interest in it immediately.
You, on the other hand, are awake now. Properly awake, at twenty to six on a Sunday, with the whole day in front of you and nothing yet demanded of it.
Which is, if you think about it, the extra hour. He just insisted on taking it at the front end, where it is worth something, rather than at the back where you would have slept through it.
He will be an hour early for everything until about Thursday. It is a small price.
If your own dog has already filed his objection to the new timetable, our guide to the clocks going back has the practical version, and a long chew covers the dark hour at the other end of the day. Free UK delivery on orders over £30.
More of the same season: the lamp goes on at four, and the spare ten minutes.