Bollocks. Screw the farmers. I don't even eat dairy, so I don't care. If you can't already tell, I am not a fan. Passionate hate is what I have for this time of year. Across my 43 years, I have experienced daylight saving 85 times and I have never gotten used to it, understood it, worked out why it exists, or who it is for. All I know is that my body hates it. Forget about thriving. When Dr Strange mucks around with the multiverse timeline, I can barely function.
Twelve years ago, when I became a parent, my hatred for this twice-yearly ritual only got worse. Kids are light sleepers at the best of times. You try telling a toddler to go back to bed because gremlins secretly changed the clocks and it's only 6am. It doesn't work. My kids aren't going to let me enjoy that extra hour's snooze. So don't tell me this is the good one. When you have kids, there is no good daylight saving.
Don't listen to my sleep-deprived anecdotal evidence. Listen to the experts. Research shows it really is bad for you. Car accidents go up. So do heart attacks and strokes. American hospitals report admission rates rise 24 per cent when the clocks change. "That's how fragile and susceptible your body is to even just one hour of lost sleep," sleep expert Matthew Walker told Business Insider recently.
You know who else hates daylight saving? America. Right now, the country that is doing so many things wrong is doing one thing dead right. The US senate has passed the Sunshine Protection Act, and if it passes the house of representatives too, all Joe Biden has to do is rubber stamp the thing and it becomes law. From 2023, daylight saving time could become permanent. Canada and Britain are wisely exploring similar options.
We could do the same thing in New Zealand, but we don't need laws, bills and Biden. There's a solution so simple I don't know why we haven't put it in place already. Jacinda, I hope you're reading. Are you ready? It's going to blow your mind. Here goes.
Next time we decided to do this cooked clock clusterf*** of a thing, we change the time for just half an hour. Next April, we could all just put our clocks forward 30 minutes and be done with it. Not a second more, or less. It's a meeting in the middle, Switzerland in the daylights savings war. Morning risers will get their sun, evening lovers will too, and the farmers will be fine.
What's half an hour? It's an episode of The Simpsons, with ads. It's a family feast, according to this popular Jamie Oliver cookbook. It's a decent walk, a solid bike ride, a great swim. It's a nice nap. Just half an hour. Then we never do daylight saving again. It's done. Over. Finished. We never have to tinker with our clocks again.
Sure, Shihad's opening lyrics of 'Home Again' — "Put your clocks back for the winter" — would be rendered obsolete. But I'll still sing along and remember all the times we did dumb things with our clocks twice a year, until we didn't.
