CLOCKS

re: Changing the clocks Little Richardjohn - 194th post - 15 Oct 2004 11:26
Is it really beyond our wit to alter our schedules to suit the daylight? After all, cows do it, sows do it, even ploughmen with their ploughs do it. - Or rather, don't, which is the problem.
Farmers are the classic case in point. They are dealing with animals or vegetables. Neither of which pay any attention to time-zones. And yet we're endlessly told that hours of their day will be 'lost' if we don't implement some bizarre Alice In Wonderland time warp.

But the schools! Will no-one think of the poor little children in these rural areas? Well, alter their day too - what is the problem? We live in a long thin island which spans the northern edges of middle europe and the southern edges of arctic Europe. There are going to be bits of it that have wild seasonal daylight variations. And there is nothing we can do about it. In an age of 24 hour digital broadcasting, are we really saying that, for instance, the farmers’ day has to revolve around being able to listen to The Archers after milking, which it invariably did when I was little.

We simply don't have the C19 constraints of catching the milk train or the last post which set our classic daily routine. And the radio and TV-defined schedules of the C20 are now history too.

And yet we're still frantically trying to come up with newer and madder ways to make the hands of the clock conveniently conform with the position of the sun in the sky instead of just taking advantage of the day when we can. [reply] [Complain about this post]