Letter: In Brief

Sir: Your most punctual of readers will know that Greenwich, specifically Greenwich Mean Time, has not been the reference for time for several decades (letter, 20 January). Civil time in most countries is now based on UTC (Co-ordinated Universal Time) maintained by atomic clocks world-wide which are accurate to better than one second in 1000,000 years. GMT can deviate from UTC by several tenths of a second. It is the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington which maintains UTC in the UK. Perhaps we should mark the start of the millennium at Teddington.

STUART POLLITT

London TW11