The last collection from a post box is stamped on the front of it, and missing it by a minute costs a day. If 1:42 pm is that cut-off, the countdown here tells you plainly whether the walk is still worth making, tracking hours, minutes and seconds rather than rounding to something vaguer.
Rather than rounding to the nearest minute, the count tracks hours, minutes and seconds the whole way down, in one line. That precision matters most in the last stretch, when the minutes turn into single figures and the difference between leaving now and leaving shortly stops being academic and starts costing you the train.
Between the last Sunday in March and the last Sunday in October the country runs on BST rather than GMT, which is why timetables and confirmations sometimes carry the label as well as the number. This page counts down to 1:42 pm using whatever your device is currently set to, so the switch is handled for you.
Common questions
Will this alert me when the time arrives?
No. It is a live number rather than an alarm — nothing rings, buzzes or notifies you at zero. If you need to be interrupted at 1:42 pm, set an alarm as well and treat this page as the running total.
Is it affected by the clocks changing?
Only in the sense that your device is. When the change between GMT and BST happens at the end of March and October, the device adjusts and the countdown follows it without anything to do here.
What is 13:42 in the 12-hour clock?
That is 1:42 pm, or eighteen minutes to two in the afternoon if you are saying it aloud. From 13:00 onwards, subtracting twelve gives the pm figure — the same moment written three different ways.
Does the number update by itself?
Yes. It recalculates every second from your device's clock, so there is nothing to refresh or restart. Whatever is on screen is the current gap to the target time, not a figure worked out when the page first loaded.
Cookie policy