Gone by unseen
How many times have you said "it's getting dark early now isn't it?" The truth is no matter how many circuits of the sun we've completed we're still surprised every year when the days lengthen or shorten. There can be no clearer clue that we evolved in more equatorial latitudes, that and seasonal adjustment disorder (SAD) of course.
It is depressing during winter when it is dark both on the way into work and on the way home. A little daylight might be glimpsed during the day through the office windows, and a tad more caught at lunch whilst popping out to grab a sandwich, but this hardly compensates for the feeling that a whole day has gone by unseen.
Despite this I always feel a little thrill when I'm out doing some high street shopping as dusk falls in the winter. In Leeds you see the starlings coming into roost on building ledges, and exploding into flight if they're startled. I have a warm nostalgia for the times, as a child, when I accompanied my mother on Christmas Eve shopping expeditions, with the final stop being Butchers Row in the market to buy the bird for the Christmas meal. It seems a Dickensian memory now, given that shops start Christmasifying in late August, presents are bought online, and supermarkets have replaced the traditional butchers and grocers.
The end of October heralds a wee shock to the system as we fall back to Greenwich Mean Time. Each year the campaign to abandon GMT completely and switch to what is known as Single Double Summertime (SDST) grows more vocal.
Under SDST we would be GMT+2 in summer, and GMT+1 in winter. If we did this we would be in sync with all of Europe (bar Portugal).
Statistically this would cause an increase in accident casualties on winter morning commutes, but it would drastically reduce winter evening commute casualties. Additionally an eco-argument is now being brought to bear - the proponents of SDST contend that the change could "save almost 500,000 tonnes of CO2 each year" as less artificial lighting would be needed in the evenings.
The graph shows sunrise and sunset times in solid lines for Leeds throughout the year, both in our current GMT/BST and the proposed SDST. The dotted lines represent what the sunrise/sunset times would look like for both Aberdeen and London under the proposed SDST scheme. More northerly latitudes have greater extremes of daylight hours. Under SDST it would not get light until almost 10am in Aberdeen during winter.
If Greenwich Mean Time wasn't a British innovation, if some other country had put the stake in the ground declaring their longitude to be the zero point, I'm sure we would have abandoned GMT long ago.
It is depressing during winter when it is dark both on the way into work and on the way home. A little daylight might be glimpsed during the day through the office windows, and a tad more caught at lunch whilst popping out to grab a sandwich, but this hardly compensates for the feeling that a whole day has gone by unseen.
Despite this I always feel a little thrill when I'm out doing some high street shopping as dusk falls in the winter. In Leeds you see the starlings coming into roost on building ledges, and exploding into flight if they're startled. I have a warm nostalgia for the times, as a child, when I accompanied my mother on Christmas Eve shopping expeditions, with the final stop being Butchers Row in the market to buy the bird for the Christmas meal. It seems a Dickensian memory now, given that shops start Christmasifying in late August, presents are bought online, and supermarkets have replaced the traditional butchers and grocers.
The end of October heralds a wee shock to the system as we fall back to Greenwich Mean Time. Each year the campaign to abandon GMT completely and switch to what is known as Single Double Summertime (SDST) grows more vocal.
Under SDST we would be GMT+2 in summer, and GMT+1 in winter. If we did this we would be in sync with all of Europe (bar Portugal).
Statistically this would cause an increase in accident casualties on winter morning commutes, but it would drastically reduce winter evening commute casualties. Additionally an eco-argument is now being brought to bear - the proponents of SDST contend that the change could "save almost 500,000 tonnes of CO2 each year" as less artificial lighting would be needed in the evenings.
The graph shows sunrise and sunset times in solid lines for Leeds throughout the year, both in our current GMT/BST and the proposed SDST. The dotted lines represent what the sunrise/sunset times would look like for both Aberdeen and London under the proposed SDST scheme. More northerly latitudes have greater extremes of daylight hours. Under SDST it would not get light until almost 10am in Aberdeen during winter.
If Greenwich Mean Time wasn't a British innovation, if some other country had put the stake in the ground declaring their longitude to be the zero point, I'm sure we would have abandoned GMT long ago.
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