Saving Daylight

So, Daylight Saving is over for another year and the entire east coast of Australia is now in the same time zone. On the one hand, this makes things easier for those of us who live in the DS free zone to co-ordinated things with our southern neighbours. On the other hand, my 6pm lesson is now a 7pm lesson, so I'm sitting in my office until 8pm rather than 7pm.

So ist das Leben.

I've never understood the point of Daylight Saving. Getting up an hour earlier in order to stay up an hour later seems counter-intuitive to me. Growing up in the Tropics, there's only really about an hour's difference between sunset in Summer and sunset in Winter anyway. To gain the extra hour's worth of sunlight, most of us would be getting up in the dark - which is entirely unpleasant.

I was willing to accept, though, that in more temperate regions, where the sun rises earlier in the morning, that Daylight Savings might be a more practical concept. Then I moved to Tasmania. I came to realise you don't need sunlight after 9pm. I'm sorry, but you just don't.

Most people, by that time, have gone home and are watching the TV. You don't need extra sunlight for that. The argument is, of course, to have more daylight to play with after you get home from work... but you have that anyway because it's Summer. You already have a few more hours of daylight to play with than you do in Winter.

You leave work, play in the sunlight that is already there (because it's Summer), then go home to eat with your family... and mostly just stay there after that. Most of my neighbours weren't out in the backyard playing after-dinner cricket or footy in their saved daylight. If I was coming home late from a walk (at, say 6.45 or 7ish - the latest I'd be out), I'd be passing other people on their way home - I very rarely passed someone who was heading out to enjoy a stroll by the river in the after 8pm sunshine.

Heck, I lived alone and had nothing better to do than go outside and play in the saved up daylight, and I rarely ever did. Mostly because it just freaked me out. When I leave a building at night time I expect it to be dark. I would watch TV, even though it bored me, or read a book rather than go outside and enjoy the saved-up daylight. I was not alone. My street wasn't full of the sounds of children playing and adults enjoying the open air.

Maybe Daylight Saving worked 70 years ago when most homes didn't have a TV and people actually spent their evenings talking to their neighbours. Right now, though, I don't see the point.

Feel free to enlighten me.