Who said you
can’t cram more than 24 hours into one day? Last Saturday I travelled to England from
home and had a whole 2 hours extra. Now if you’re wondering why, there’s a
perfectly logical reason. Firstly, the UK runs 1 hour behind Central
European Time; and secondly, the last full weekend of October marks the end of
Summer Time when the clocks get put back.
At the end
of August, people are already talking about the ‘nights drawing in’, but by
November we’re in completely new territory. Suddenly it’s getting dark at 5 in the afternoon and there’s
still a month and a half to go before sunset times even start to creep upwards
again. Unless you decide to move south of the Equator, there’s not a lot you
can do to beat the gloom. Just grin and bear it as best as you can until the
earth’s axis starts titling in ‘our’ favour again.
Time zones
and seasonal time shifts are strange phenomena. At this time of year, I can’t
help feeling happy about living in the west of a time zone. You have to feel
for the Poles who have to put up with sunset times of 3.15 p.m. in the depths
of winter, whilst the Spanish might still be enjoying some rays of winter
sunshine – however feeble – almost 3 hours later. And of course, the further
north you go, the shorter the days become. I once had a fascination with
looking at webcams in northern Norway
in deepest December, but gave up because they were suicidally depressing – and
I don’t even live there.
Daylight
saving measures were first mooted in the late 19th century and
governments have been tinkering with them ever since. The map above shows the
countries and states that currently implement daylight saving measures. They
were actually brought in as a way of conserving energy in the summer months
during the First World War, at first in Germany, and then the idea was quickly
copied by other industrial powers in the northern hemisphere. The principle
behind daylight saving measures is to make the best use of daylight in a way
which benefits the majority of the population, taking into such factors of
(road) safety and the needs of the economy. In the late 1960s, the UK government introduced
British Standard Time, with clocks running on 'summer time' throughout the year,
so in fact, the country was a full hour ahead of GMT. As I know from first-hand
experience it meant going to school in the dark, but it was a lot lighter in the evenings. The experiment was abandoned
in 1971 ostensibly on the grounds of road safety.
Even in a
country as compact geographically as the UK, daylight lengths can vary
considerably from the north to south. In winter, the Shetlands experience less
than 6 hours of daylight around the solstice, whilst Cornwall in the far south-west has over 8. (Of
course, the reverse is true in the summer, when there are 5 hours of darkness
in the northernmost outpost of the British Isles.)
Furthermore, there's almost an hour's difference in sunset times between the west
and the east of the country. The variation in times and lengths of days means
that there are advocates of change (or non-change) around the country. The
Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) favours a return to
British Standard Time, with summer time (GMT+1) all year round. Going one stop
further, some business people argue for the adoption of Central European Time,
where the UK would
effectively join the same time zone as the rest of Europe.
Outdoor workers and farmers in Scotland
however, are loath to see any changes to the current system, reasoning that
summer time throughout the year would mean sunrise times as late as 10 a.m.
A report in
the NRC Handelsblad at the weekend pointed out yet another complication caused
by the time shift. Many scientists, like Till Roenneberg, professor of medical
psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilian University
in Munich – the
subject of the NRC article - have argued that our body clocks are naturally
attuned to sunrise and sunset times. By not listening to our biological clocks we
put our health at risk. When the clocks change in the autumn, the additional
hour, as well as the longer nighttime hours, give our bodies time to adjust
and recover our natural sleep patterns. In the spring however, the ‘loss’ of an
hour can take as much as a month to recoup in terms of sleep. Other studies
have revealed that both suicide rates and the incidence of heart attacks
increase after summer time comes into effect in the spring.
Changing
the clocks poses other intriguing problems as well. I've often wondered what
train drivers do in the middle of the night when the clocks go back. Presumably
they go more slowly, or maybe stop for a nap and a cup of tea. And do they get paid
overtime for this ‘extra’ hour? Self-evidently the reverse applies in spring
when – somehow – they have to make up time. One supposes that traffic is scarce
at that time of night anyway, so they can put on a spurt.
So what did
I manage to do with those two extra hours? Simple: I spent my time penning this
time-related blog.
