The sun has been consulted and declines to comment.
TUSCALOOSA, Alabama (The London Prat) – The clocks went back in the night, and the only creature on my street that noticed was me, since the dog, the cat and the neighbour’s rooster all continued to live according to the sun and a personal grudge.
Sunday Morning, Old Time
I woke at what my body insisted was six and my phone swore was five, and I lay there negotiating between two sources of authority, which is how most of my adult life has gone. I made coffee on the stove clock that has been wrong since a power cut some years back, and which I now reset only twice a year, so that for six months of the year it is accidentally right.
My porch faces east, which is the whole reason I bought the house. I took the coffee out in the early dark and watched the light arrive an hour sooner than it had on Saturday. That is the single honest gift of the first Sunday in the cold part of the year. For one week the morning is generous and the afternoon is stingy, and the entire state of Alabama complains about the second half and forgets the first.
The Senate Has Not Acted
With the second cup I read about the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make daylight time permanent and abolish the autumn change entirely. Spectrum News 13 reported that the House passed the bill in the summer and the Senate stalled. The measure was introduced by Senator Rick Scott of Florida, with bipartisan backing, and the President and Senator Scott both argue that more evening light is a good thing. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas opposes it, warning that dark winter mornings could endanger children at school bus stops and workers heading out early.
The detail I enjoyed most was the legal one. The report notes that Florida is one of nineteen states with a law for year-round daylight time, and that none of those laws can take effect, because the federal Uniform Time Act lets a state adopt year-round standard time but not year-round daylight time. Nineteen legislatures have, in effect, written a firm letter to the sun, and the sun has filed it.
I have lived here long enough to know that no one in Alabama is asking for more ways to be told what time it is. We already have a sufficient number of times. We have the time on the courthouse, the time on the bank sign that is four minutes fast, and church time, which is a fixed point from which no one has ever been seen to depart.
A Letter on the Subject of Time
Because the almanacs I read for pleasure were written by men who never met a subordinate clause they did not wish to retain, I decided to answer the Senate in the proper style. I wrote this on the porch rail and have not revised it, which will be obvious.
To the Honourable Members of the Senate of the United States, assembled: Whereas it hath pleased the House of Representatives to pass a measure upon the subject of the hour, and whereas your honourable body hath seen fit to leave that measure in the condition of a ham in a cold cellar, I, a private citizen of Tuscaloosa and an indifferent keeper of clocks, do most respectfully request that, whatever be determined, you determine it before the next occasion on which I must climb a stepladder to reach the one clock in my kitchen that no one has ever been able to set. I remain, with all the patience that is left to me, your obedient correspondent.
I read it aloud to the dog, who stood up, turned around, and lay down again. I took that as a motion to table.
Midday: What the Almanac Knew
In the period I read about, a town’s time was the sun’s time. Noon was when the shadow was shortest, and the next town down the road had a noon of its own, a few minutes off, and nobody lost sleep over the difference. The almanacs printed sunrise and sunset tables for a given latitude and left the arithmetic to the reader. It took the railroads, with their timetables and their inability to tolerate a town that disagreed with the schedule, to force the matter of uniform hours. I note this because every argument I read about time today is, underneath, an argument about whose convenience wins.
And I should record, because I record everything, that the same almanacs and the papers around them were printed in a society that kept human beings in bondage and set their working hours by a bell they did not choose. When I hear people talk about the hour being stolen from them, I try to remember what the word meant to people whose hours were not their own. I do not find that funny, and I have not put it in the letter.
Afternoon: Weather and Wages
The afternoon was warm enough to sit on the porch without a sweater, which is the sort of thing the first cold Sunday does to you, a trick of leading with kindness. The forecast I found, from the FOX10 station down in Mobile, promised a warm start to the week with wet weather arriving Wednesday. I took that as a personal instruction to wash the car on Monday.
My neighbour with the cows leaned on the fence and told me the animals do not observe daylight time and never have. They get up when it is light and they want breakfast when it is not. He said the only person who ever suffered from the clock change was the man who had to explain it to the milk truck. He then showed me the farm.fm headline on his phone about what farmers earn against what they pay and said, without any particular expression, that the numbers were the only clock he trusted.
A Word From the Editors
I send this off to The London Prat from the porch, where my editors tell me the whole country of England changes its clocks on a different weekend from us and then argues about it in English news told in a straight line. They also keep a website for readers who like their news with a lean, and I have promised to send them the dog’s reply as soon as he composes it.
I came in at dusk, which now arrives at an hour I can only describe as rude. I reset the last clock. It is wrong again by a different amount, which I regard as progress. You can find more of my daily notes at The London Prat, usually written on the porch rail with whatever pen is nearest.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/