To hell with all these moaners -- I love the time change.
This weekend felt like the first dawning of spring in Toronto, with temperatures finally out of the subzero range and suddenly into double digits. And what really made it special was all the people seizing the year's first opportunity to get out a lightweight coat and stroll the newly lively streets far into the evening -- an evening joyously prolonged by that morning's time change.
In Canada the official starts to each season are absurdly ill-matched to our real climate (Winter starts on December 21, and Summer on June 21? Srsly?) Whereas the time changes really do match and enhance the changes we actually sense: the coming darkness in October and the promise of brightness again in March. We live on the northern shoulder of the world: I'll take the hour of early darkness the time change creates then (it's dark anyway!) in exchange for expanding those glorious summer nights when it is warm and wonderful to be outdoors in our extra hour.
Next week is March Break. Many thousands of Canadian will fly away east to the Algarve, Sicily, Egypt, or west to Baja, Hawaii, Fiji and Bali, to get a short week of warmth and sunshine. They will not complain at all at voluntarily submitting their bodies to four or eight or fourteen hours of time change -- in both directions.
But somehow a one-hour change for Daylight Saving is an unendurable nightmare? Come on.
Once again the media will roll out scare stories about increased automobile accidents and the other disasters the time change supposedly causes -- though never providing credible evidence. This morning Toronto morning radio has its usual traffic reports of endless "stalls" on the highways. Is it really the time change that causes a sudden neglect of routine auto maintenance? Time-change deniers are like vaccine 'sceptics' -- they just won't tolerate collective action for the public good.
Let's watch Vancouver stumble out to work and school in the dark next winter, only to realize that because it's winter it's dark again anyway by the time they get home. See how popular the no-time-change fad is then.
