Messing With Time - Putting The Clocks Forward and Back

Why do we still bother to put the clocks forward and back every spring and autumn? Sure, in October, it's always nice to wake up Sunday morning, look at the clock at the side of the bed, and then realise it's actually an hour earlier, and you get to lie in bed even longer (or jump up and have more time to do something productive, if you're so inclined).

 
In March, when we 'spring forward', messing around with the clocks doesn't seem so rewarding. Not when you wake up feeling like it's really early, and it's actually an hour later than it should be. A whole hour has just disappeared and been lost. Rubbish! 

It's a good job we have lots of digital things in our house, most notably our mobile phones which we use to check the time in the morning, otherwise we'd have completely forgotten the clocks went forward!

Turns out daylight savings time is actually much more of a modern phenomenon than I thought. I always thought it was a relic of the past, an agreement to keep the mornings lighter for farmers during the winter months. Don't know why I thought that or where it came from. 

 
In actual fact, daylight savings time occurs because of the industrialised world wanting more useable hours of daylight during the summer months. It was only first proposed at the turn of the century, when people began to feel like they were wasting early hours of daylight asleep, and missing out on possible sunshine in the evening. So, in 1916 it was officially adopted in Europe, and later the United States. It then faded in popularity and went through a number of experiments, before it again achieved widespread adoption in the 1970s. 

Now having less wasted hours of daylight is something I don't object to. Who would? But really, it's a case of the modern world adapting the natural seasonal shifts of the world's axis to modern life, as opposed to the other way around. In actually fact, why should we mess around with clocks, when all we'd really need to do is just shift our sleep and work patterns?

 
But of course, that's not that easy. It boils down to a case of pure and simple convenience. It's much easier to mess with time and move some hands on a clock, rather than shift our lives around.  

Still, there does seem something unnatural about tweaking time. Time travel never seems to go to plan...

 
Incidentally, remembering whether the clocks go forward or back is quite easy, and is probably the best use of the American term for autumn. You spring forward, and fall back.  

Don't say I never tell you anything!