My Word | The good and bad of saving time

The only way to avoid this is to drink a pint of Colombian coffee and play Grand Theft Auto all through the night. That way, you won’t notice you’ve been mugged for an hour of your life because you’ve been virtually mugged all night anyway.

Daylight saving is good news for evening verandah dwellers but not so good for morning people. What you lose on the breakfast roundabout, you gain on the twilight swings.

And let’s face it, we all know the human world is divided into morning people and night people. Wrens and owls. There are those who are up before the rooster, pumping pedals and cows and business diaries and projects. They are then in bed before the final run of The Bachelor.

Personally, I’m a twilight person. I much prefer the mysterious descent into darkness to the frantic rush of dawn.

Daylight saving is a relatively new concept — and one shared only by the developed industrial world. In the Northern Hemisphere only the United States (most of it), Mexico, Europe, Egypt and Iran have daylight saving.

In the Southern Hemisphere, the count is even less — Chile, Brazil, Namibia, New Zealand, Fiji and parts of Antarctica move their clocks around.

That leaves vast swathes of the map — Russia, China, most of Africa and Asia — un-bothered by daylight saving.

So what is the attraction of moving the clock around?

American founding father Benjamin Franklin — who came up with the idea that early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise — proposed that people could save on candles by rising earlier to use the morning light.

Fair enough, but he was being satirical. He also proposed ringing church bells and firing cannons to get people out of bed.

He was writing around the time of the Industrial Revolution, when peasants, for the first time, had to arrive at work at a specific time to keep the wheels of commerce turning — and keep the owners of the means of production in the mansions to which they were becoming accustomed.

A hundred years later, peasants were getting cheesed off, living lives run by factory bosses. They wanted time for fishing and sitting on verandahs drinking wine and writing poetry. So New Zealander George Vernon Hudson wrote a letter to the Wellington Philosophical Society proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift for workers. George was a Wellington post office worker who collected insects, and you can’t collect bugs in the dark.

George’s idea was followed up by English builder William Willett, who used to get up early for a bike ride around London and was upset by how many people were still in bed. Obviously, his descendants moved to Shepparton.

Anyway, William was also a keen golfer who disliked cutting his round short at dusk.

When Germany began Sommerzeit on April 30, 1916, to help conserve coal, Britain and the US followed — setting the pattern for the rest of the century. Farmers hated daylight saving, factory workers relished the time after work.

So it goes today. Long evenings are terrific if you work according to someone else’s schedule, but they are a pain in the neck if you set your own clock.

It’s worth noting that Kiwi George’s collection of insects became the largest in the country and is today housed in the Museum of New Zealand.

Which proves that all work and no verandah time can make the world a very dull place, but perhaps safer for insects.

John Lewis is a former journalist at The News.