THE MERTON TIME CEREMONY has no spiritual or recreational element like other Oxford ceremonies; nor is it an artificial ceremony conferring a status on those who participate. It is a purely temporal and practical ceremony developed earlier this century, but of a date of origin which is already uncertain, and designed to remedy the ill effects of modern man's abrupt interference with the diurnal cycle.
It is performed during the hour each autumn in which the clocks in the United Kingdom return to Greenwich Mean Time. Although this is normally referred to as the hour in which the clocks are "put back" (for the obvious reason that that is, in practice, the most convenient way to alter the clocks), those who perform the ceremony prefer to refer to the hour as that in which the clocks "stand still". For, although it is difficult to accept that time can go backwards, and even more difficult to accept that it can suddenly jump backwards, it is easy to visualise time being slowed down, even to zero.
During that hour, the participants walk anticlockwise, in relays, around some reasonably large horizontal area (this has, in fact, always been the Fellows' Quadrangle at Merton). The purpose and effect of this is by resonance to create a localised area in which natural time stands still for an hour, in the hope that into this well of depressed natural time so created will flow sufficient natural time from surrounding areas to nearly equalise natural and civil time throughout the country within about 24 hours, thus shortening by many days the time which it would otherwise take nature (including mankind) to re-adapt its diurnal cycle after an abrupt "stationary jet-lag".
The ceremony is traditionally heralded by the Keeper of the Watch sending out invitations for the following Sunday "to take port around the sundial in Fellows' Garden at 1.30 a.m. for 2.00 a.m. passim."
Accordingly, at about 1.30 on the Sunday morning, the participants congregate around the sundial, port is poured out, and introductions are made. There are traditionally two toasts, at about 1.50 and 1.55: the first is "To Good Old Times", or "To a Good Old Time": the second is "Long Live the Counter-revolution!"
Despite the wording of the invitations, there is no circumperambulation in the Fellows' Garden. At about 1.55, the participants leave the sundial and walk about 50 yards to the Tower of the Four Orders at the middle of the south side of Fellows' Quadrangle. The port is placed on the bottom ledge of the Tower.
At 2.00 precisely (as measured by a watch checked earlier that day), the assembly walks backwards and anticlockwise around the quadrangle. Initially, everyone does so, each person completing at least two circuits, and the senior participants three or four, before stopping. Throughout the hour, participants make further circuits as and when they like, but ensuring that there are always at least two people maintaining the counter-revolution. Immediately before the end of the hour, those not already walking make a final circuit so as to be walking when the hour is up.

It is not in principle essential to walk backwards. This is done partly to increase the solemnity of the occasion, partly because when one walks in a circle one sees where one is going sooner if one walks backwards, but chiefly because it has always seemed the obvious and appropriate thing to do.

Dress for the ceremony is full academic dress: for men, that is dark suit, white shirt, white bow-tie, black shoes, gown, and square ("mortar-board"). Graduates wear their hoods: this is indeed one of the only four occasions in the University calendar on which hoods are worn.

A few tips for freshmen:

(a) Walk backwards naturally, as you do when hailing an approaching bus when you are still some way in front of the bus stop: use a flexible action, bending the knee slightly, putting the toes down, and then the heel.

(c) Do not carry full glasses of port while walking. Port will spill onto your hand, and evaporate, making your already cold hand even colder. When you need a refill, stop at the Tower, or as you approach the Tower hand your glass to an onlooker who will walk, faster than you, to the other side of the Tower and will there fill your glass and hand it back to you as you pass (walking to and fro by the Tower will not disturb the temporal effect, as it does not alter the "winding-number").

(d) If you must carry candles (a practice which real old-timers disapprove of, since they used to try to make the quadrangle as dark as possible), do not let the wax drip onto the ground unless you intend to clear it up afterwards.

(e) Do not walk on the grass.

(f) Keep well into the right as you pass Front Quad, so as not to walk into the bushes.

(g) "Twirling" at the corners has recently become fashionable, but it is unseemly and should be discouraged. Remember that you are at a walk, not a dance.

Attempts to produce a rigorous theoretical explanation of the effects of physical rotation on natural time have so far been unsuccessful.

Current research favours the idea that, just as matter is composed of elementary objects called particles, so time is composed of elementary objects called chronicles. Two chronicles are proposed: they have provisionally been named the quick and the quock.

Particles can either be virtual or exist. Chronicles can either be free or be bound to particles. A particle can exist only if bound to a chronicle.

A free chronicle can be thought of as an event waiting for somewhere to happen.

Chronicles have spin. They have two spin-states, clockwise and anticlockwise. These states behave identically except in a gravitational field. In our part of the universe, all chronicles have clockwise spin.

Chronicles are affected by gravity, but particles are not. Therefore, free chronicles will fall, but virtual particles will float.

A sufficiently strong current of angular momentum anticlockwise relative to gravitational field lines reduces the effective binding energy of chronicles, freeing some chronicles completely. The freed chronicles migrate down the gravitational field-lines (where they are either trapped by virtual particles below the angular momentum current, or collect in a cloud supported by degenerate chronicle pressure), but the virtual particles float, and capture chronicles from adjacent existing particles, thus producing a chronicle-deficit shock-wave which radiates horizontally from the source of angular momentum.

If the current is turned on suddenly, maintained steadily, and turned off suddenly, the shock-wave will be square. If it is maintained for long enough, statistical fluctuations will even out, and every particle will cease to exist for the same length of time. Natural time will thus have been delayed.

(The words in italics above were in the original typed draft, but were accidentally left out of the second draft, from which the original printed version was made in October 1987. Barry Press.)