How to use the online alarm clock
Midnight is where one date stops being true and the next one starts, and in Britain a surprising amount of official life is pinned to exactly that instant. The self assessment tax return is due by midnight on 31 January, and every year a few hundred thousand people file in the last hour before it. Online applications, competition entries and ticket ballots close the same way, on the stroke rather than at the end of a working day.
It is also the hour the whole country listens to at least once a year, when the bell of the Great Clock at Westminster is broadcast to mark the new year. For the rest of the year midnight belongs to people who are working through it: hospital night staff, hauliers on the motorway network, warehouse pickers on a shift that began before the pubs shut.
One point of genuine confusion is worth clearing up here, because it causes missed deadlines. Twelve o'clock at night is written 12:00 am, and it belongs to the day that is beginning, not the one that is ending. Every minute page in this hour, from 12:00 am to 12:59 am, is labelled on that basis.
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