by Rosemary Redfern

Created on: November 04, 2009

The practice of daylight saving time started during the second world war. It was to give civilians more time to enjoy a day and try to live a normal life before the night air raids started and as an energy saving initiative to aid the production of essential materials. These needs are no longer present but the practice has become entrenched in everyone's thinking. The discussions have raged for years because no one can decide what is the best thing to do. What started as an emergency measure has become a problem.

Nowadays no useful function is served by continuing. The inconvenience is not worth the trouble. Twice a year we all have difficulty adjusting our biological clocks, farm animals are unaware of the change and the time wasted changing all the clocks in a house is unnecessary. Energy saving is done differently now. Most of us have trouble remembering whether the clocks are to go forward or back. The little mnemonic, Spring forward, Fall backwards helps - if you can remember it.

The arguments for changing clocks also depend on where you live. Those whose homes are near the arctic circle or the antarctic have one set of criteria, and those further south or north, another. There is no real need to alter times of milking just because a tool says it is a certain hour, but we are conditioned to try and fit in with the rest of the world. Thought about like that the practice is plain daft.

What is forgotten is that whatever the clock says, the amount of daylight and dark remain the same. How humans chose to use those times is a fact of our societal organization. The clock is only an instrument for measuring an unknown concept we have designed for our convenience to allow us to run businesses, trains, airlines and communication systems with coordination. Our personal sense of time varies with what we are doing and how much we are enjoying it or not.

The world's time is controlled by Greenwich Mean Time with the lines of longitude giving changes of time zone. The issue, if we no longer altered the clocks, would be, do we continue to use GMT as the base time or do we use summer time as the measure instead, or even base the clocks on somewhere else in the world.

It always feels good in spring when the clocks go forward because we appear to be having longer days. Equally the change in autumn is depressing because if heralds a long, dark winter. Both of these are an illusion. In fact the whole discussion is about an illusion.

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