Now is the winter....

This blog has been going long enough now to have some annual traditions. Today, it's time for the yearly rant about what a stupid idea it is to put the clocks back.

I know I have banged on about this again and again and again but I still find it incredible that we go through this pointless ritual every year. Twelve noon might have been the middle of the day for our agrarian ancestors but for many of us now, it is not even the middle of our working day. For most of us, the middle of our waking hours is probably somewhere around 2pm. Why, then, do we insist on moving the middle of our daylight hours to twelve o'clock?

As a Cambridge University report showed last year, putting the clocks back means that more of our daily activity is spent in darkness. We now have daylight while many of us are still inside getting ready for work and darkness when we are travelling home. More people are out and about in the late afternoon. It makes sense to have the daylight at that time, rather than in the morning when there are fewer people about. The graphs from the report reproduced in this post illustrate the point well.

Earlier this month, the people of Jersey voted in a referendum on whether they wanted to move from GMT to Central European Time. The proposal was defeated but the main reason for this seems to be that people were worried about the impact on business if the island was on a different time zone from the UK and the other Channel Islands.

I'm not so bothered about whether or not we move to CET. Being two hours ahead of the sun in summer would give us nice long evenings but June sunsets at 10.30 in London and 11.30 in Inverness might make getting to sleep a bit difficult.

No, I would be happy if we simply stuck with British Summer Time all year round. Let's set our clocks an hour ahead of the sun and leave them there.

I doubt whether our government would do something as enlightened as allowing us to vote on this in a referendum. All attempts to stop this annual act of masochism have failed, despite the overwhelming logic behind them.

But each year, more and more people are questioning why we do it. Even some Northerners and Scottish people,  who have traditionally been more opposed to any change, think that putting the clocks back is unnecessary.

For now, though, we are stuck with it. More people will die, more people will get depressed and most of us will curse the dark evenings.

Oh well, maybe next year.....

Comments

[Rastaman]

No one likes Daylight Savings Time. I don't like it and I've never met anyone who does. All I've ever read in regard to it has been negative.

This is why we have it.

It's like diamonds and agates. Diamonds are ugly and common, agates are beautiful and scarce, therefor we covet diamonds far more than we do agates.

If Daylight Savings Time actually served a useful purpose we would have gotten rid of it long ago.

[G. Tingey]

We put up with it, because, I'm sorry to say, you are wrong.

The day simply isn't long enough, even in London at midwinter, never mind further North.

Please drop this one - you are beginning to sound like the dreadful Christopher Booker on Global Warming .....

[Steve]

C'mon! I've been called all sorts of dreadful things in these comments boxes but being compared to Christoper Booker is just about beyond the pale!

[Jez]

I seem to remember that G. Tingey had a simlar whinge when you wrote about this last year (he was talking bollocks on the subject of road casualties and DST). I responded to him then (with facts) and here we are again. No, Steve, you are aboslutely right. Don't drop it, the evidence is overwhelming.

[Esmerelda]

I am old enough to remember the misery of the experiment of the winters 1969/70/71 (or it may have been 68/69/70) when the clocks didn't go back.
It didn't produce happy sporting activities into the early evening. It produced more accidents during the dark mornings where dawn arrived once we were seated in our classrooms. I was 15/16/17 so old enough to a) remember accurately
b) travel about unaccompanied and safely
c) assess the arguments
It was miserable, miserable, miserable.
Experiment tried.
Experiment failed.
Why repeat experiment?