A Waste of Daylight Saving Time

I am reminded by glancing from the yawning awning over my lounge at Havertrope Hall - part of the wing of this ageing pile which fell into the North Sea in last winter's gales - that dawn rises late and dusk early at this stage in our Earth's annual orbit. Daylight Saving Time (DST) changes to Winter Time (Standard Time) in 70 odd countries at this time of year. I've been ruminating on daylight saving, flattered as I am to be asked to be consultant to the local government of North East Driffield. The Borough Council has spent the past century, on and off, since the introduction of daylight saving to save fuel in England during World War One, investigating the possibility of changing daylight saving to bring the people of this locality of East Yorkshire into line with global climatic changes. Every time Driffield has been on the cusp of making a decision about the town hall clock and the clocks in the public conveniences at the end of the small market square, there's been a delay for some reason. I recall an incursion into the council chamber in 1973 of a particularly large and irritating swarm of bees. There have been other less dramatic but no less effective distractions. During the past decade the pace of debate has increased. The fact is the rest of England doesn't have the fog and gloom which blows down off the wolds into Driffield. Our local debates have acquired global resonance. Rumour has it that various recent changes among the countries which already use daylight saving have been influenced by our deliberations. Venezuela has decided to put the clocks back half an hour. The president has announced that this should encourage the people to work harder because they'll be getting up when it's light. I couldn't claim the dignitaries of Driffield are entirely responsible for this, but they and I may have semi-influenced our South American demi-cousins. I admit to a few moments of hesitation and rather debilitating flatulence when I heard that the local council of North West Driffield have followed the impeccable research by the Korea Development Institute, Korea Energy Economic Institute, the Korean Transportation Institute and the Korea Culture and Tourism Institute, who all conclude that the benefits of daylight saving are hard to prove and that they shouldn't join the rest of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in doing it. I admit also that when Australia adopted daylight saving in 2000 during the Sydney Olympics there was no evidence that electricity use benefited, or athletes moved faster I might add. I further admit to sending the president of Venezuela a message by pigeon post detailing our arguments in North East Driffield for putting back the clocks forty three minutes last year and seventeen minutes this year. Although I can't prove the pigeon ever arrived, I surmise our demi-cousins have spotted the arithmetic average is 30 minutes and gone for it. This is more likely than the scurrilous rumour they've gone for the half hour purely to distinguish themselves from the USA.
The whole business is complicated and takes some remembering when you're a globetrotter, which I somewhat freely admit I'm not. There's been confusion in the USA for literally months about whether they're in or not. The daylight saving arrangements were in during the First World War and out after 1919, in from 1942 to 1945, subject to local State arrangements from 1945 to 1966, till nobody knew what time it was anywhere. Imagine, a coach driver on the 35 miles between Moundsville WV. and Steubenville Ohio had to stop 7 times and make sure every passenger had changed the time on all the watches, in case anyone was taken short and needed to use the local conveniences. Since the 1980s they've somewhat regularised the position and people can go to the toilet without this additional worry. In countries such as Canada, Mexico, Russia and the USA in the Northern Hemisphere, the clocks in public conveniences are put back in late Autumn, whilst in Southern Hemisphere countries such as Australia, Brazil and Chile they're all put forward. I admit to a typo in my message to Venezuela, in which I said we put the clocks forward in the Autumn. The confusion at the president's press conference early in December when he announced the changes can almost certainly be laid at my door. It obviously doesn't weaken the case for North East Driffield appointing a part-time astrologer from the Centre for Error and Repetition at the University of East Yorkshire, to estimate the odds on an asteroid zooming across our Earth's above-mentioned orbit and rendering this entire debate irrelevant. Which is where I come is, as Professor of Irrelevant Studies in that same university, of course. But that's another story.