Let There Be Daylight

Yesterday I was accused of being part of an assiduous group that this year had allowed summer in Rodney to extend beyond prudent levels. I pleaded guilty. The insidious group is the Rodney District Council and it is true that they/we made the conscious decision after the last election that we extend summer and smiles in Rodney to unprecedented levels. We succeeded in the former; we are still working on the latter, but it will happen. Next week.

English builder and outdoorsman William Willett invented daylight saving in 1905 during one of his pre-breakfast horseback rides, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He lobbied unsuccessfully for the proposal until his death in 1915. Germany, its World War I allies, and their occupied zones were the first European nations to use Willett's invention, starting April 30, 1916. Britain, most of its allies, and many European neutrals soon followed suit; Russia and a few other countries waited until the next year; and the United States adopted it in 1918. Since then, the world has seen many enactments, adjustments, and repeals. There are hold-outs, most prominently and with most effect to us Queensland.

However New Zealand has adopted daylight saving enthusiastically and this year extended it by a further three weeks. Some advocate retention of daylight saving 365 days a year, and there is some merit in that. But we in New Zealand have never been great savers, and when we do against all expectations succeed, as we have with Dr Cullen's current surplus, we are so wracked with indecision about what to do with those savings we eventually lose them all together. Besides where do we save all that daylight? The poet and the lover would say, "In our hearts, we store it in our hearts." We cynical would say, "No good! It would only come up with the vomit from that 'heart' line."

We have indeed had a long and enjoyable summer with even farmers, who incidentally have never advocated for daylight saving, being neither poets nor lovers, getting their long needed rain just at a point when the drought was going into the beyond recovery state. But I am over it. I am happy with my coming winter of content and I take to my heart Benjamin Franklin's famous pronouncement that "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise." In this, my 57^th winter, I am hoping that Franklin got at least part of it right.