My children have often asked me this question over the years and I have to say that it is a very good question. Why indeed?
When the children were small, I used to wonder why on earth I bothered trying to get them into a nice routine for that to then be completely unsettled by clock changes. As they have grown up, it isn’t such an issue until we had a dog. Dogs, it would seem, are not party to the whole clock change.
I was thinking about this long and hard at 3:55 am this morning when I was sat in a darkened kitchen with Liberty sat at my fee, wide eyed, tail wagging ready to play. She tends to be an early waker which would be fine, except her crate is opposite my bedroom door and when she is ready to get up and take on the day, she gently whines to let you know she is there. If you try and ignore her, she gets louder. To avoid waking the whole house, we take the path of least resistance and get up with her. Sometimes, she lets us lie in until 6:30 but is often awake at 5 and raring to go.
So imagine my delight this morning. As I was sipping my cup of tea, I was wondering not for the first time, why on earth do we still change the clocks?
The origins of clock changing dates back to World War One when it was considered a good idea to encourage people to get up earlier and have more daylight hours to work in and also saving energy at the same time. Whilst we fondly call our twice yearly ritual of changing clocks
British Summer Time, there are in fact 70 countries in the world that have a system of daylight saving.
There are reasons to believe that it may become and thing of the past in a few years time and I for one will not be sorry to see the back of it. It has continuously wreaked havoc in my life over the years when I have forgotten, changed the clocks the wrong way or generally found myself up in the middle of the night with either children or dogs who did’t get the memo. Those people who delight in telling you that you will get an extra hour in bed clearly were not parents of dog owners.
I now have a wonderful week ahead of me waking up at silly o’clock until the dog gets back to waking up at a normal time again, so if you need me I will be the permanently tired person slumped on the table moaning about changing the clocks.
Oh dear! 3.55am sounds horrendous. My defective body clock doesn’t cope well either. It would be so nice not to change them, but if we didn’t, would we be stuck with GMT, because that’s the ‘proper’ time? I’d definitely rather be stuck with BST because I prefer the light evenings.
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Yes you do make a point about the lighter evenings and my husband is enjoying his early morning dog walks now it is lighter again. I just hope the dog settles back into a normal wake up time again soon!
I never have an issue with it. My son copes fine (although it annoys him if he’s sleeping over at the farm, and they tell him he can’t get up until 6am new time), and always has since being a baby. I had no issues as a child walking to school etc. My (weird) OH is a farmer, and he relishes having the extra hour to do work (yep, he really did get up at at the new 4.30 to get extra time in). We also have dogs – outdoor ones admittedly, including puppies this year. I didn’t hear them at all barking, although I suppose if the OH went over early, they were either still asleep or ok with him waking them.
What I find strange, is that this has been going on for years (and as you say, for plenty of other countries – I only realised a few years ago that it wasn’t just us), but it only seems to be in the last 5 years or so that people have been moaning about it. We just dealt with it before, and it never made a difference as kids, or growing up. We just adapted, yet now there are movements to change it (the previous trials to change it were by all accounts I’ve heard, a total disaster and messed up people more than the hour change).
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It is true that we did get on with it when I was younger and in many ways it is easier now with so many devices auto changing which makes it easier. I have noticed the difference since having children but I can see the benefits of the extra daylight in certain industries. It will be interesting to see if they do decide to scrap it.
Nikki,
Permanent GMT would mean that around the summer solstice, it would be getting light by 03:00.
Permanent BST — we had that from 1968 to 1971. It was known as British Standard Time, and it was not well liked (as per Emma’s comment).