We Hates It, Precious

There used to be a good reason for daylight savings, when most of the population was engaged in agriculture and mechanization was rudimentary. There isn’t a good reason now: most of the arguments I’ve heard for the delay in a return to daylight savings time in November is so that the kids can have some daylight in which to go trick-or-treating. What this twice-yearly travesty brings us is millions of people (and their pets) grumpily going through a Sunday off-kilter; it can take some people days to adjust.

In California a proposition passed in 2018 by 60% of voters to make daylight savings time permanent. It hasn’t gone anywhere, even though Arizona and Hawaii don’t change their hours. In Spain, Prime Minister Sánchez asked the European parliament to consider the same thing last week: it doesn’t save energy, he says, and it impacts negatively on human health.

Spain is in a peculiar situation because most of it is really in the same time zone as the UK, but Franco pushed to have it be on European time, much further east. This is purportedly the reason the Spanish eat dinner so late: it doesn’t get dark till much later than in France. I hope this whole custom eventually gets abolished everywhere. For now, we grump.