Saturday 25 October 2014

Daylight saving time!

In the early morning it's dark outside but tonight we will turn our clocks back an hour so that it won't be quite so dark tomorrow.

Yesterday I heard the usual debate on wether to have the extra hour of light in the evening instead of the morning...and it brought back some very vivid memories.

We have tried it before and I remember it well.

As a single mother I had bought an ancient Wolsly built like a tank to get my children to school...

It was my first car and was very ugly. It was maroon and beige outside but had red leather bucket seats and a walnut fascia which made up a little for the outside!

Getting my tank started every morning was a test....of both endurance and ingenuity. I could take out its plugs to dry with my hair dryer and did this far too frequently. But once it got dark in the early morning it was difficult to see where the plugs were!

During the experiment which must have been late sixties I think, starting my car in the dark proved a very testing time!

Getting my son to school on time was a challenge every morning during the winter and the darkness did not help!

I hear the debate now going over ground already covered fifty odd years ago....and there is no easy solution...we are stuck with reduced hours of light now until the Spring...but my personal recollections of driving my children to school in pitch blackness make me hope that we don't try it again...

The only good thing about the last time experiment was that it was too dark to see the car in all its maroon glory...there are no photographs available...only the well off had cameras then and I was very hard up!

The choice of morning or evening doesn't affect me now, I can live with whatever gets thrown at me but maybe staying in the same time zone as our European neighbours is a start.....don't all shout at once!

 

1 comment:

UKViewer said...

I think that there is an argument for having different time zones in the UK. Those in the far North suffer more than we do in the south with darker mornings and earlier evenings. Someone suggested that Scotland should have a different time zone from GMT - or + and it would make sense, whether international business would agree I'm not sure, but given that they already operate across different time zones, I don't see why it would cause any undue hardship to either to the Scots or the British?