What’s the worst day of the year? I reckon if you were daft enough to plough through the archives of this blog, you’d come up with plenty of worst days of the year. The last day of summer, 31st August, would be up there, as would the first day of autumn/winter, 1st September. Then, there’s the day when the fucking faux German Christmas market arrives in Bristol and, frankly, every single day until 1st March when spring officially arrives. Even the day after the shortest day does nothing to liven my spirits. Early on Sunday morning, one of the shittiest of shit changes will be forced upon us again: putting the clocks back.
The whole point of daylight saving time is, apparently, to provide more daylight during winter mornings by making it pitch dark by the middle of the afternoon. I usually notice the so-called benefits for a week or two, before it becomes dark seemingly all the time. What’s worse is that when the days start getting longer again, you don’t get the benefits until nearly April. An extra hour in the New Year, in the evening, would be fantastic. The mornings, well the so-called extra light barely matters.
We’ve always been told it’s the farmers who like the clock-changing malarkey, but apparently that’s bollocks, too. According to Google AI: ‘Farming schedules are set by natural elements like sunrise, sunset, and the readiness of livestock, not by the time on a clock.’ We don’t save energy by arsing around with clocks, there are no obvious benefits at all. But it’s not just us.
We’re on a Canary island, milking a little African warmth before we plunge headlong into the depths of winter and guess what? They’re changing clocks, too. And it makes even less sense than us doing it. It’s as if we have always done it so we might as well carry on with it. Here’s my suggestion.
Scrap the current system. Have British Summer Time all autumn and winter. Then, when spring comes along, bring in Double Summer Time so we have longer, lighter evenings. I’d vote for any political party which promised that. Tomorrow, I will gain, for a few months, an extra hour I don’t want and in exchange it will be dark by tea time. No ta.
Tomorrow’s clock-changing is utterly pointless and stupid. No one likes it, except maybe tortoises. And it’s definitely yet another worst day of the year.
