Daylight Saving Blues

My husband hates daylight saving and whinges about it all summer. My patience has run out and I can’t take it anymore this year. Could you shed some light to help him? Mrs. S. Day, Gulmarrad

Magenta says

I love daylight saving and as soon as it starts, or ends I wake up well prepared because I have already changed the clocks the night before. I know it takes a while for our circadian rhythms to adjust. Going to bed half an hour later and gradually adjusting to your normal bedtime helps get in the groove. 

Like your husband, Norm also hates it. He never changes the clock in his car (maybe he doesn’t know how?) Personally I find it confusing to have two different time references but he finds it comforting that, at least in his car, some things stay the same. Especially something as important as the concept of time. He is someone who thinks time is fixed and regular as, well, clockwork.

The issue here really points to the bigger picture of how we experience the world. Some people are good at adapting and moving forwards. They, typically, are the survivors. Others, (we won’t mention names), are so fixed that they do everything they can to resist the only thing that we can truly depend on - change. Therefore it stands to reason that practicing flexibility and adaptation is a good thing. So bring on daylight savings!

It seems that in your relationship for things to stay as they are, things will have to change. You could help your husband adapt better by shifting the furniture around when he’s out. Change bedrooms, get a new pet. Hell, why not get in his car and change his bloody clock. That’ll throw him!

‘I don’t mind going back to daylight savings time. With inflation, the hour will be the only thing I’ve saved all year.’ Victor Borge

Norm says

Dear Mrs Day, daylight saving goes back a long way. Benjamin Franklin, who coined the saying ‘early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise’ was the American envoy to France. In 1784 he published a letter suggesting that Parisians should be awakened every morning at sunrise by church bells ringing and cannons firing.

However, the real schlub we have to thank is a Kiwi named George Hudson, who came up with the idea for modern daylight saving in 1895. And the arguments have been raging ever since.

Like everything foisted on us by governments and people with too much time to think, daylight savings works for some and not for others. Personally, I think it’s bollocks. Each year my body clock takes longer adjusting to having to get up an hour earlier. Indeed, a mate of mine complained, quite legitimately, that in summer he gets his morning stiffy at the bus stop!

Then there’s the pain in the arse of dealing with appointments and such like over the border in Queensland and trying to work out just what is the time up there, and then changing back again.

I reckon people who crave that extra hour of sunlight after work should simply start and knock off an hour earlier and leave the rest of us cranky old bastards in peace. Fat chance of that! So, next summer I’m putting my clocks back an hour instead of forward and I’ll work to Uncle Norm Time.

When told the reason for daylight saving time, the old Native American said ‘Only the government would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.’ Anonymous

Time is an illusion’  Albert Einstein