REMINDER: Time turns back 1 hour at 1:00 a.m.

Merton's peaceful precincts are disturbed once a year by the (in)famous Time Ceremony, when students, dressed in formal sub-fusc, walk backwards around Fellows' Quad drinking port. Traditionally participants also hold candles but in recent years this practice has been dropped, and many students have now adopted the habit of linking arms and twirling around at each corner of the quad. The purpose is ostensibly to maintain the integrity of the space-time continuum during the transition from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time which occurs in the early hours of the last Sunday in October. There are two toasts associated with the ceremony, the first is "to a good old time" whilst the second is "long live the counter revolution!". The ceremony was invented by two undergraduates in 1971, partly as a spoof on other Oxford ceremonies, and partly to celebrate the end of the experimental period of British Standard Time from 1968 to 1971 when the UK stayed one hour ahead of GMT all year round. It is also seen by many as a protest against the abandonment of sub fusc in recent years.