Last night before going to sleep I set my clock forward by one hour. This meant I went to sleep at 12:36am - the latest bedtime in a while. We’d had dinner with some friends, and didn’t get home until about 11pm. Because it’s the weekend I didn’t set my alarm for this morning, but found myself awake anyway at 6:07am (5:07am by pre-daylight saving time). Obviously my body clock is very used to my usual wake-up time! (Yes, my usual wake up time is 5am. In some ways I feel as though I have been practising daylight saving for a while now - shifting my body clock to get up with the sunrise.)
Western Australia is trialling daylight saving for the next three years. I’m amused by some of the vociferous arguments against daylight saving - one of our friends last night was opposed to it, arguing that his kid would be going to bed later. This is completely illogical to me. Okay, we have set our clocks forward an hour. Even if his son got up an hour later than usual this morning (according to the clock), what’s to stop a child from getting into a regular routine, and going to bed by the clock, at their ‘usual’ time? After all, the child has to go to school and so forth and the school time will be the same as always. All the routines will go by the clock. Perhaps it takes a few days to readjust - such as you do when you go to a different country and their times are different - but you do readjust.
His other argument was that we’re now an hour ahead of South East Asian countries, and it’s a pain because he does a lot of business in places like Singapore. I don’t see how a difference of an hour is going to be that much of a problem. After all West Australians who have any business connections with our colleagues and friends in the Eastern States are always faced with a two hour time difference - you accommodate it, get used to it. In fact, I would argue that with daylight saving now in WA, we are at least back to our usual two hour difference - no longer three hours behind people over East (as we were when they started daylight saving and we hadn’t). The three hours meant we were always so behind and it was often difficult to schedule interstate meetings and so on. And besides, can’t the one hour difference be a positive thing in dealings with colleagues in Asia? Say you need to schedule a teleconference with someone in Kuala Lumpur, 10am KL time (11am Perth time). Doesn’t this now mean you have an extra hour to prepare and so forth?
I think West Australians are also responsible for the argument that daylight saving will cause the curtains to fade. Perhaps some people are just unwilling to try something new.
