It’s that time of year when it’s still dark when I get to work in the morning and the evenings are getting noticeably darker at an ever earlier time.
When I came across this photo of house boats on a canal in my archive, I was reminded that we have the second half of the strange twice yearly ritual of changing the clocks approaching this weekend…
Ugh, I never remember if it should go forwards or back and I detest it, whatever it is. Forget having an extra hour to sleep in as a sweetener for half of it, Murphy’s Law always dictates that I’m wide awake those days anyway, same as I am on my days off, (even if every other working day, the alarm almost gives me a heat attack because I was far far far away blissfully dreaming in the land of nod).
(photograph © Kiwidutch)
Extra hour or not, the kids are always badly out of sync and get all bitchy for at least 3-4 days afterwards and I have to constantly re-think the new time-zone times if I need to telephone New Zealand from here.
Most of the time it’s easy, a straight 12 hour time difference, 10:00 a.m. here is 10:00 p.m. there (the same day) or 9:00 p.m. here is 9:00 a.m. there (next day). But Daylight Savings Time makes a total mess of it all.
Depending on if it’s us going forwards or they going back (or worse, not changing their clocks at the same time at all, the time difference can be 10, 11 or 12 hours, and Yes, I have been guilty of trying to ring someone at 8.00 a.m. on a New Zealand morning in order to catch them before they go to work and find instead a groggy, shocked voice on the other end telling me that yes, they were asleep because it’s actually only 6.00 a.m. in New Zealand.
My hearty congratulations to Russia for abandoning these ridiculous time changes from 2010… They already scraped three of their 11 time zones and merged them into neighbouring ones to make a more manageable nine time zones (“managable nine time zones“: Now, that’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one) and last year common sense ruled and they decided not to make it even harder than it already was and scrapped Daylight Savings Time changes throughout the whole country. Bravo!
Now all the rest of the world has to do is to have the same lightening strike of common sense and follow suit. (sigh) If only dairy cows could vote, I hear they detest Daylight Savings Time as much as I do.
.. Well, not Russian cows, (obviously) their milking schedule will be forever more … on time.
