to want to scrap daylight savings?

[unicornfarts]

Rant: I hate this day every year. And it's partner in October. Whatever the (weak if you ask me) arguments were about initiating daylight savings, I cannot for the life of me understand why we need it still in this 24/7 globalised non-stop world we live in. If you need daylight to work, then work when there's daylight - who cares what the clock says?! OH has tried to defend it citing historical features of employment law etc, but I just don't accept that there weren't alternative measures that would;t mess with your body clock twice a week. His subsequent argument is that now we have it, why go to the expense of changing it.....I would argue that there are a significant number of missed NHS appointments because of people forgetting to change their clocks, and presumably there are missed business hours etc......AIBU in wanting to get rid of daylight savings?!

I love this time of year lots of love light to look forward to. I like the idea of double summertime but would want the country on same time. The further north you get the worse it b comes.

The statistics about car accidents when the clocks didn't change on the 60s may not be true today Not many people had cars then,most children walked or bused to school.The school run nowadays in the dark would be a nightmare.
I enjoy the lighter evenings too and in a few weeks will be able to drive to work and back in the light which I need as I don't see natural daylight much at work.

And there's arguments within Spain that they should also be on Gmt rather than Central European time.
They should be. There are two maps on the page below that show the discrepancies between official time and local mean time in the standard time and summer time.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_European_Time#Discrepancies_between_official_CET_and_geographical_CET

Apparently there are plans to stop doing this, as early as from next year, but I can not tell you where that info comes from, as I heard it from my DM on the phone.

I never understand the "extra hour or hour less" in bed. It's a Sunday. I get up when I wake up. There's no school/work to rush to.

the biggest trouble I had around this was when I worked saturday night shifts - the company tried not paying us for the extra hour in October!

Apparently there are plans to stop doing this, as early as from next year

There are no such plans. There isn’t even a consultation. The more pressing issue is the status of UK legal time and even that has been stalled for 20+ years. GMT does not for practical purposes exist, UT1 which is the closest equivalent is a mess with rubber-band seconds, everyone actually uses UTC(GPS) or UTC(NPL) but the law says GMT. The difference is potentially 0.9s and sooner or later it is goIng to matter in some court case.

It’s two days a year! How can you get so worked up about two days a year? I like the spring change in particular, it makes you feel like you’ve made it through the winter finally. And everyone saying ‘hurr durr you know there’s not actually an extra hour of sunshine...’ the point is that it is an hour of light at a useful time of the day.

Why "the horror" of clocks going forward blackteas?

Are you a vampire ?

"would argue that there are a significant number of missed NHS appointments because of people forgetting to change their clocks, and presumably there are missed business hours etc....."

Doubt this - as the change is overnight between Saturday and Sunday, so very few scheduled NHS appointments, and many businesses closed. I should imagine Church congregations see a hit, and some retailers/transport companies might have more late arriving staff than typical. But people will have noticed by the Monday, when schools and more workplaces reopen.

I's stay BST year round, if the changing were to be eliminated.

“Changing school start times is a stupid suggestion.”

The Swiss used to do this, though I’m not sure if they still do, so I don’t think it’s that stupid. They know a bit about organisation and clocks

It’s two days a year! How can you get so worked up about two days a year?

It’s not 2 days in a year though, is it? It means during winter I get to the office just as the sun is coming up and leave as the sun goes down. I’d much, much rather just arrive at work in the night but have a little sun in the evening.

It’s seems like most of the YABU like it because they like BST (which I agree with), so I would like to see the clocks always set for BST.

Why "the horror" of clocks going forward

Clocks going back is a shit-show, though. The same timestamp happens twice: is 01:01 on the last Sunday in October before or after 01:02? Well, it's both...

Yes, there are ways around this, for ordering the birth of twins (which can matter in some cases), for ordering the manufacturing of batch-controlled goods like drugs, for a wide range of other issues. It's not helped by the chaos of computer clocks which tick something which is nearly but not quite UTC, which has its own associated problems on June 30 and Dec 31. But timekeeping in a modern society where we definitely care about hours and sometimes care about seconds needs to sort all the messes of summer time, leap seconds, timezones (particularly the weird non-integer ones) and other hassles out.

Am I missing something? If we got rid of BST or kept it on BST or whatever, we would still have more light in summer and less in winter anyway, wouldn't we? What good does it do us?

Even in the south of England the mornings are extremely dark in the depths of winter, so I do think we need to put the clocks back in the winter. But I'd put them forward again at the end of Feb, rather than having to wait until now.

But if you said to me we're going to stick to one time all year I'd vote for BST all year and put up with the dark mornings in December/January rather than GMT all year and lose the longer evenings in the summer (where I live it gets dark by 10pm on the very longest days so it would only be 9pm if we were on GMT all year). As I don't like driving in the dark I would like as much useful daylight as possible and it is not useful when it's at 4am.

Now that we can get our time from computers, e.g. smartphones, which automatically correct their clocks, it might make sense to have clocks that adjust every day, we could make official sunrise 7am by law. This would mean that the starting and finishing times for school and work would automatically vary relative to GMT throughout the year, while appearing to have fixed times according to the new clock.

We could call it "British Natural Time", BNT.

scamp
It is mainly the changing back and forth that causes body clock havoc imo for months afterwards in the case of winter.

But also, with the October change, the jolt into darkness - without the slow transition there would have been in nature - and the way the day shuts down at about 3pm in some places, day after day, month after month, is very depressing.

Cuboid I think you must be a mathematician or philosopher! Thank you for these insights.

Yes that's what I mean - it's the jolt that's unnecessary. The days get longer and shorter on their own, why fiddle about with the clocks?

scampi - precisely!

Having googled UK sunrise and sunset times, it seems that on the shortest day of the year, in December, daylight is 8am to 4pm. So if we took our cue from that and defined "British Natural time" so sunrise was always 8am, the on the longest day of the year, which has just over 16.5 hours of sunshine, sunset would be at half past midnight!

We're currently wasting a lot of daylight hours by having them before most people are up.

firesuit - I don't understand what's stopping from people getting up with the Sun if they want to? Do people really look at the look and refuse to get out of bed if they want to enjoy the Sun, just because of what the clock says?

I appreciate that it is nice to have sunlight outside of business hours. I just don't think that changing the clock makes that much difference to justify the abrupt and harsh effect on our body clocks. In the summer there's a good 16/17 hours of daylight of which the average person maybe works 8 of them. Inevitably, we will all get sunny evenings for some part of the summer even if the clocks don't change.

In the winter it's gloomy all day with only a few hours of true sunniness. Changing the clock just an hour this way or that doesn't seem to make that much difference - for me.

But as is evident here, a couple of weeks more of sun after work is very valuable for some. Interesting to know other views.

I don't understand what's stopping from people getting up with the Sun if they want to? Do people really look at the look and refuse to get out of bed if they want to enjoy the Sun, just because of what the clock says?

School and work start times are fixed, people synchronise there getting up time with that.

If at the height of summer, there are four hours of daylight before getting up time, no-one use it for an ad hoc game of football in the park, because no-one else will be up.

If we fixed the start of the day to always coincide with sunrise, and got our fixed time commitments mostly out of the way in the first 8 hours, then we'd have a lot more daylight for our discretionary time.

It's easier to change the way we define time than to expect schools and work to vary their starting hours throughout the year, or expect people to organise to have some of their leisure time just before school/work rather than mostly afterwards.

I just don't think that changing the clock makes that much difference to justify the abrupt and harsh effect on our body clocks.

With my proposal, there would not be abrupt and harsh adjustments twice a year, there would be a tiny adjustment you wouldn't notice, every day.