Of all the oddities of Daylight Saving Time, one of the oddest is that the United States shifts the clocks the second Sunday of March, and much of Europe does it on the last Sunday of March.
Maybe even more weird is Israel and some nearby countries, however, which switch on the last Friday of the month for the Spring Forward change, but then on a Sunday for the Fall Back change. Go figure.
And then there’s Iran, which changes on the spring and fall equinox, no matter what day of the week it comes on.
But let’s just focus on Europe, which for the first Spring Forward change in a long time doesn’t include Great Britain, home of Greenwich, and the home of Greenwich Mean Time, otherwise known as Universal Coordinated Time, or Zulu Time… because why have one name when you can have three!
Photos taken by me when I drug my family to the Royal Greenwich Observatory on vacation because I am that big of a time nerd.
Brexit has not yet hit the clocks, and those in England will change this weekend along with the rest of Europe.
I’ve written before about how I thought the European solution was the best possible solution, and then I wrote about how it is now failing, in Europe.
In short, the idea was, I thought, that the European Union decided there would be no more clock changing, and each member country had a year or so to figure out what time zone it wanted to land in permanently. It turns out that I had it a bit wrong, that they would only #LockTheClock after all the member countries decided which time zone to land in.
So where they landed is that no country has wanted to decide. They talk about it, but nobody has taken action.
It is a hard decision, and perhaps nowhere is it harder than in Spain, which has a particularly, well, Spanish approach to time.
Back in WWII, Franco wanted to align Spain with Germany, and adopted German time. If you go there (and I recommend it highly) you will see that the sun sets in Madrid at 9:49 p.m. on the longest day of the year. That’s late!
The crazy part (to me, anyway) is that the Spaniards are just getting going at that time. If you go to dinner at 9 p.m. even a popular resteraunt will be empty because the real Spaniards don’t eat until 10 p.m. or later. After all, that’s just when it’s getting dark.
So, should Spain get more aligned with the sun? Right now “solar noon” in Madrid comes at 2:16 p.m. on June 21st, so you could make the case that Spain could make a two-hour shift and still have some sunlight to spare.
But longtime readers of this blog know that I don’t think I should be dictating the “proper” solution to anyone in any U.S. state, and certainly not to any European country. If having the sun stay up that late is the quintessence of Spain, who am I to judge? If Spaniards want instead to have the clock aligned to the sun in ways that are more similar to their neighbors, that’s great, too.
All I know is that just as with everywhere else in the world that forces the barbarism of clock changing on the populace, this coming Monday will be deadly, with increases in heart attacks, strokes, traffic accidents, etc. The list is long and scary, and the Spaniards should do something about that along with all other civilized countries.
Will it be the European Union that leads the way to clock sanity? It was the Europeans who started the whole mess back in WWI, maybe they will be the ones to end it?
If I had to bet, I’d actually say it’s the U.S. that will lead the world on this topic. Our country is bitterly divided right now on so many topics, but on this one there is unsurpassed unity.
More proof that #LockTheClock is the ultimate in a bipartisan topic:
Make Daylight Saving Time permanent: Sens. Patty Murray and Marco Rubio https://t.co/dyjtleQYim via @usatoday— Scott Yates, #LockTheClock (@lock_the_clock) March 27, 2021
The one exception
I think it’s a bad idea to change the clock twice a year. (Well, only once a year is it deadly when we take away an hour of sleep, but…)
There is one country, however, that I actually encourage it. For now.
I was fortunate enough to visit Ukraine a couple of years ago. It’s an amazing country that has suffered enormously under Russian AND Trumpian manipulation and occupation, and yet manages to be optimistic and friendly.
The people there want to break away from Russia in every way possible, and one of those ways is by keeping time with Europe, and not Russia. Europe changes the clocks, Russia doesn’t. (Perhaps the one move Putin has made that I agree with.)
So for the people of Ukraine, changing the clocks is another way that they can signal to themselves and to the world that they are European and democratic.
My only hope is that everyone in Kyiv, and the rest of Ukraine, takes it easy on Monday morning when the alarm clocks will go off an hour earlier than expected, leading to all those negative health impacts.
And with a little luck, perhaps the U.S. will lead the way to bring freedom from the tyranny of clock-changing to the whole world.
Photo by me taken in Independence Square in Kyiv in 2018.