As Time Goes By #2

Daylight saving
a simple term for
shifting sunset

As far back as 1784 Benjamin Franklin appears to be the first to suggest what seemed then a laughable concept of daylight saving time, and it wasn’t until 1907 when Brit William Willett took up the baton and started seriously campaigning, that the idea began to catch on. He felt that Brits were wasting the daylight hours by still being in bed well after sunrise, and could reap the benefits of being exposed to more sunlight into the early evening. Nine years would pass before legislation brought it into being in Britain, and another half century before Australia jumped on board.

The phrase ‘daylight saving’ is a curiosity in itself. What is saved exactly? There are still the same number of hours of daylight when the clocks are put forward, so I can only assume the term refers to the fact we are supposedly going to save up this extra hour of sunlight at the end of the day for outdoor or social activities that we wouldn’t normally get the chance to do at that time of day.

And it’s true, we do enjoy those long leisurely evenings which get even longer as we head into the summer months. It’s not unusual for me to come inside after a long stint of gardening to find it’s nearly 8 o’clock and dinner hasn’t even entered my thinking yet. We meet up with friends, sit on verandahs drinking and chatting, stand around the barbie with a cold one at the end of a long day, walk the dog or go for a bike ride with the kids, enjoying the fading twilight while the cicadas go nuts all around us.

The thing with daylight saving is it doesn’t operate the same way as what we normally consider savings. If we’re lucky, we get to stash away a little nest egg over the years, at which point we draw from it to finance something we’ve been hanging out for. But daylight saving? Can’t accumulate that one. Can’t wait till tomorrow for a double helping so we can do more with it. It’s renewed every day, only available on a daily basis, so there’s no point in working that extra hour and still arriving home in the dark.

We have to take advantage of it every day.