With the clocks going back it is officially the end of
British Summer Time, ha. Blink and you’d miss it. I totally get why we do the
daylight saving thing. It makes so much more sense to have longer summer
evenings. In theory. But in practise what is the point? It's not like we even
get a summer anymore. Not like the summers I remember as a child which seemed
to last for ages and you could actually wear a summer dress and not need to
have a coat and gloves with you at all times. Why don't we just accept that it's winter all
year round and be done with it? Spring is really just an afterthought of winter
after all, tacked on to the last two weeks, the only difference being the trees
are starting to grow their leaves back and we occasionally see the sun for five
minutes before it pisses down again (or sometimes even snows, remember when it
snowed in March a few years ago? See? It is still winter in March). And autumn,
well it's just winter but people are still trying to prove a point by sloshing
around blue lipped in wet flip flops and dripping maxi dresses. Even summer is
never really Summer, all of us shivering in the garden, showing maximum goose
pimpled flesh, determinedly drinking Pinot Grigio and eating burnt barbeque
sausages in Baltic conditions, trying to pretend we have some semblance of
Summer like southern Europe. But it's all just a fallacy, winter lasts all year
long, deal with it.
Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea of daylight saving
in order to switch an extra light hour from the morning, which we all miss
because we are sleeping (unless you have children who decide it’s morning at
around 3am), to the evening, so we would save electricity as well as have more
light hours to do fun things (presumably in his day he was thinking of society
balls and mixers, he clearly had never visited my town where the only choice of
evening entertainment is a criminally expensive cinema, great if you want to
spend two weeks wages on a single night out, and twenty five Chinese
restaurants, each offering amazing deals on all you can eat buffets but charge a small fortune for drinks). So if I had more to do in the evenings maybe
having that extra hour would be worth the havoc it plays with my body clock
each time it changes.
Gaining an extra hour this weekend was wonderful, or it
should have been, as I laid in until 8am, great normally but technically it was
still only 7am. Last week waking up at 7am meant that it was pitch dark and
reminded me of those times as a child when we used to get woken up at 3am
because we were going on holiday. I quite liked it really, it felt very
exciting, and you get to enjoy the sunrise which is one of the best times of
day. This morning I woke up and jumped out of bed so fast I banged my knee on
the wall because I was convinced I had overslept. Then I go and confuse my body
even more by eating random things at different times of day (not Daylight Savings
fault admittedly but the confusion my body feels at having toast and marmalade
for dinner is certainly exacerbated by the fact that one day it's dark at six
and the next it's dark at five). It feels like everything is mixed up.
Even Son Two, who is three years old and at that age where
he kind of accepts everything with a shrug, is confused. Last week he was waking up every day in the dark, finding me in the shower at seven fifteen and saying "mummy is
it bedtime?" "No mate, it's morning, see you're still in your
pyjamas" "Ok" and he'd toddle off to play with his Lego (a
pastime that cares not what time of day it is, is there anything more ear
ripping than being woken up at 3am by a child sorting through Lego?).
I just think that life is complicated enough and the
daylight saving just adds to the confusion. Is there anyone actually organised
enough to go round every clock in their house and change them all at exactly
the right time? Maybe I'm the only one that spreads the changeover over a
period of weeks, constantly having to remind myself that the kitchen clock is
now on new time but my car clock still thinks it's last week so I need to be at
work at 1045am instead of 945am, unless I am going by my bedroom clock which I
did put back to remind myself that I could get up an hour later (didn’t help me
this morning).
No, I think we should just simplify. Have one season a year
(winter) and keep the clocks the same all year round. It's certainly not worth
all this hassle. I am perfectly happy with it getting dark early, it means I
can get the kids to bed earlier so I am well prepared for middle of the night
Lego missions and I wouldn’t constantly be wandering around mumbling to myself Rainman style "kitchen clock is an hour forward, car clock is an hour backward, kitchen clock is right, car wrong". Or is it the other way
around? See? Confusion. I vote for my time simplification programme.
