Neither of us could quite understand why we struggled to muster the energy to leave the house yesterday, scuppering our overoptimistic plans to attempt to watch the boat race live (if I couldn’t get to see the thing when I lived just up the road from it, or even when I worked at the RiverSoft office next to the Chiswick bridge in Mortlake, and therefore drank regularly at The Ship, the pub next to the finish line, then I was hardly likely to go and see it now I live on the other side of town, was I?) It was only towards the end of the day that I realised that it must have been jetlag, rather than any kind of inherent laziness on our part.
I’ve never quite understood why we change our clocks twice a year (sure, it’s great for one Sunday in the Autumn, when you get a whole precious extra hour of sleep, but then the bastards go and take it back in March). I seem to remember being told when I was little that it’s something to do with farmers in Scotland, but that never really made any sense to me–why can’t the farmers just get up an hour earlier or later? It’s not like you actually magically get some extra daylight: there’s still the same number of daylight hours each day. And if you just want to have your daylight in the evening, why do things by halves? Let’s switch to Moscow time (GMT + 3 hours) during an arbitrary period between March and September. It might be a bit dark in the morning, but think of those long, balmy, summer evenings.
I find it amusing that we spend most of the year (7 months) in BST, and only 5 months in actual GMT.
I think it was the Dilbert newsletter recently where a guy was saying that his sister argued that you actually get MORE SUNLIGHT when you change the clocks. There are people who believe in magic, it seems.