clocks

Sunday morning was clock moving day.

Well, you're free to move your clock any day of the week, but Sunday morning was when we adopt what I believe the American's call Daylight Saving's Time. This is a remarkably succinct summary of its purpose and typically we have a slightly less meaningful name for it - British Summer Time (or BST).

The "time" part in particular makes it sound like an official proclamation that now summer has begun, whereas actually it's the same sort of time as in Greenwich Mean Time.

Which is all a round about way of saying that the clocks went forwards by one hour to take us onto BST, rather than GMT. The basic idea is that it means the evenings are lighter later.

It's always fascinated me how daily life is kinda skewed towards evening, even though mid-day 12:00 GMT is set at the exact moment where the sun hits its peak. So there are an equal number of hours of light before twelve as there are afterwards, yet by common consensus life is skewed into the evening.

The average working day is a perfect example - it starts at 9am, three hours before mid-day, but it doesn't end three hours after mid-day, instead it ends 5 or 6 hours after mid-day. We don't all get up hours before we go to work, but we do all go to bed hours after we finish work.

This of course is behaviour that's been enabled in part by technology, but even before that I'm sure it was also the case - probably since people learned to make fire.

Anyway, I'm blathering - the point is that the move to BST ensures that it's lighter later during the summer, thereby allowing people to be more productive later in the evening. Also, as an interesting side effect, it actually reduces electricity demand, as people don't need to switch their light son until later.

This is partly what's behind calls to take us permanently an hour forward. The idea is that we would go forward, but then never go back.

This is appealing in some respects, but it does cause me concern, as light in the evenings is something that makes it difficult for me to get to sleep. For example, where I currently live I have white curtains and there tends to be quite poor at blocking light. This means I've ended up pinning black bin bags to the curtains to block out the light.

When we get closer to the solstice I'll really be struggling - it'll be too light for me. So while the idea of moving to BST permanently would probably be okay, if it still came with a daylight savings shift, it would be something of a disaster for me.

In other words, if we still put the clocks forward even after the shift (so, in other words, we moved to GMT+2) I'd really have a lot of problems getting to sleep.