A national emergency... time for Willie and the Website

IT’S the near future. There has been a nuclear emergency and Defence Minister Willie O’Dea has urgently switched the nation over to “Zulu Time” — but don’t panic — you have your lavishly produced €2m booklet by your side telling you to, er, stay indoors and listen to the radio.

“Zulu Time” is the sexy new name for Greenwich Mean Time, but we are not allowed to call it GMT, and has officially been renamed UTC (Universal Time Concept). The national emergency co-ordination centre (NECC) shows it is ready to deal with anything by moving two of its clocks forward one hour to match up with GMT, sorry UTC, or “Zulu Time” as the army prefer to call it.

The world’s 24 time zones are all assigned alpha-bravo-style alphabetical prefixes, so there were only two letters left for the military to name UTC with, and presumably, “Yankee Time” would have offended even more people than the UK connection.