The clocks changed today, which means the Time of Great Confusion is upon us. “What’s the rhyme?” puzzle my smartest friends. “Fall forwards… or back? Spring back? That doesn’t rhyme.” They picture themselves stumbling, falling forwards, or springing back like fresh sponge. They picture the South African rugby team, the Springboks. No one knows. It’s worse than the rhyme about how many days are in each month, which is longer than the Great Wall of China and implodes in a subclause about leap years. That threw me last month and now this.
It’s hard enough trying to keep track of Easter. That occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox. In case you’re lost that also means today. Happy Easter. At least the chocolate eggs make it worthwhile – and it’s hard to be mad at an equinox. Especially this one, which marked the start of spring. Even more than an equinox, I love a solstice. I’ll come back to that. Or do I mean forward?
I don’t understand clock changes. Not as in I don’t agree with them, although I don’t. I mean they make my head hurt. It’s gaslighty to be told 9am is not 9am. America did it two weeks before us for some reason. Scheduling a Zoom call, I couldn’t figure out whether they were EST or EDT and whether we were in GMT+1 or regular. The upshot was I left a celebrity I was supposed to be interviewing in the ether and had to pretend I had food poisoning.
The irony is I don’t change my clocks. Devices update themselves, while the clock in the bathroom has been an hour fast for 17 months, which has led to some horrifically panicked showers. I’ll now have to stop mentally adjusting the time it reads, which will lead to different, but related mistakes.
Everyone I talk to about daylight savings says the same thing. “Bloody farmers!” This is the biggest myth around. Farmers were never consulted about adopting it. In fact, they lobbied against it and still don’t like it. Buggering about with clocks makes no difference to cows or crops, which follow the sun. It simply hands a host of challenges to farmers, who have to adjust schedules to compensate. Shifts in milking time unsettle animals. So, don’t lean into the Great Confusion on behalf of the cows. They hate it.
Weirdly, in the UK, changing clocks was first proposed by William Willett, the great-great-grandfather of Coldplay singer Chris Martin. Willett loved horse riding and wanted more sunlit hours. (You could say he wanted everything all yellow? Sorry.) It was implemented by Germany and America in wartime to conserve coal. It persists today, so we can have a life in the evenings after our terrible office jobs – that we don’t go into any more.
Lighter evenings are lovely, but there’s a hefty bill in October when clocks – aha! – shift back. “What will you do with your extra hour?” people will ask. I’ll spend it feeling miserable about the sky getting dark at 3pm, thanks. “You British really hate yourselves, don’t you?” observed a friend’s mother in Australia, when our system was explained to her.
It hurts my head in many ways. Meddling with our circadian rhythms leads to increases in heart attacks and plays a large part in traffic accidents at this time. Disrupted sleep can last weeks and is catastrophic for our mental health. Studies show it shreds cognitive ability, immune function, libido. It makes us less likely to help others and even judges hand down harsher sentences. We understand more than ever what the cows always knew.
We should’ve studied Back to the Future, learned its lessons about messing with time. Not that that’s what we’re doing. Time is a fundamental concept, stitched into space itself, a dimension that arguably structures our consciousness. But an hour? An hour isn’t a thing. Like money, language and countries, we made it up. Poking it into shape, so we can enjoy postwork drinks, draws attention to the arbitrary nature of our scheduled lives. Maybe that’s the (daylight) saving grace of today; a metaphysical wake-up call.
I do understand wanting more sun. But we have more sun. If we must wake up earlier to enjoy it, falling in with our planet’s cycles, maybe that’s OK. There’s a very human sense of hubris in “correcting” for nature. It’s not her fault we bind ourselves to clocks, coordination and artificial control. I see clock changes as an industrial counterpart to the solstices, those sunlight-charged superstars of the natural calendar. There’s an instructive, yin-yang element to solstices. The fact that in the middle of June, the days start getting shorter is a reminder to not feel triumphal in the summer of our own lives, when fortune smiles. By the same token, in the depths of winter, when light is low and hope is lost, the days are already growing longer. All things are passing.
I’m writing this slightly ahead of time. Or maybe with the clock change, I’m writing it now. Or you’re writing it. If so, please can you explain daylight saving to me and when I’ve grasped that, can you move on to time zones? Do they mean that New Zealand is… in the future? What have they seen? Is that why so few people live there? Forget the cows, what do the sheep know?
