Why we originally adopted DST (Daylight Savings Time) is a mixture of reasons (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Summer_Time) but the actions were rooted in a time of war. I have thought it (un-ironically) a waste of time and an anachronism. It really isn’t needed in modern life, but it never overtly affected me until the last decade or so.
So, these days I really flipping hate it and the reasons are because I have kids and a more hectic schedule, let me rant on…
#1 Son
#1son is 8 years old and going on nine. He likes to get up at 6 a.m. and play some video games before school. This week he has only managed that once. Added to that he feels that we are sending him to bed an hour early (we kind of are as we want to re-establish his body clock as soon as possible and routine is good with that).
#1son is annoyed, upset and generally feeling that it is a personal attack on him, he is even surlier than when we told him he couldn’t have a week off school to play Mario Galaxy.
#1son is annoyed that the answer to why we have daylight savings is because more than a century ago we had a war.
#2 Son
#2son is 7 years old and Autistic. #2son likes to sleep in until seven in the morning when he is sleepily awoken and needs a little extra processing time to get to grips with the differences between the magic realism of his sleep and the neuro-typical realism of a world constructed for the differently abled.
#2son loves regular patterns as they seem easier to grasp. #’2son is out-of-sorts as some fucking idiot changed time and he cannot work out why they would do that and really cannot formulate properly how he feels about it.
#3 Son
#3son is a toddler, he is 2 years old. Ask anyone with a toddler, the changing of clocks is an auto-fuck-up to sleep pattern and sensibilities. It throws them all out of whack. It sends them all a little bit unfocussed and thus grumpy-McBastard is never far from those shores.
#3son was so disrupted by sleep schedules he took extra time to go to bed (including coming back down stairs which he very rarely does) and the next night he got up at 3 a.m. as his body clock switched itself to who-the-hell-knows and he had to come into mummy and daddy’s bed.
#Mummy
#Mummy is a very busy person who needs her sleep patterns to be regular as she spends most of her day in doctoral research and evenings switching between kids, work, hobbies and me. #Mummy doesn’t like BST DST as it fucks up her family and their routines.
#Daddy #Me
I get up most mornings at 04:30 (that’s when my first alarm is set for anyway) as I normally run/exercise between 05:00 and 07:00 before the rest of the house gets up. DST means my alarm now goes off at the equivalent time of 03:30 and my body is really saying fudge-that-shot … no I mean fuck-that-shit.
I am really tired of DST. It messes up my whole family. Very few people I know would actually want to keep it, except it seems #arsebowlers who believe it is British and not European (see the headlines in some popular press because Europe has decided to get rid of the stupid practice). I suppose some farmers might like it for some crop-rotation thing, maybe, or something, do the druids and pagans like it?
Oh well, let’s recycle this rant in October and March for some years if you please…