There are too many hours: Deputy editor Max Stainkamph is not one of those crackpots who thinks daylight saving makes cows insane or causes blinds to fade. He just thinks time is meaningless and made up, and doesn't make sense anyway.
I’m jet-lagged.
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Normally when I’m jet-lagged, I have the joy of being somewhere with a beach, or delightful old ruins, or amazing sights to see.
Currently, I have the same old kitchen for breakfast, the same old commute to work, the same old everything. I didn’t ask for this. None of us did.
And yet, still, I have jet lag.
I had an hour added to my life, another hour of ammunition for the kiddiewinks who want to call me an old man.
Now, dear reader, I won’t pretend for a moment this isn’t literally the least pressing issue facing anyone in the history of anything.
This doesn’t hold a candle to any trivial issues, let alone serious issues of the like we cover in this paper on a regular basis.
But as someone who writes many serious stories about serious issues, I take the chance to revel and complain and spend mental energy complaining about the nonsense issues.
The trivial.
And so I’ve taken it upon myself to be a champion for people who don’t like daylight saving — not because they’re crackpots who think the curtains will fade or it makes the cows go crazy or because it causes climate change (yes, I genuinely had a letter to the editor once arguing that) — but because I’m an old man and I don’t like change and it’s made me tired.
Also I’m a crackpot.
Anecdotally, the small jet lags are the ones that are harder to shake — a 12-hour time difference normally forces the body to correct itself quick-smart after a few days — but two weeks on from gaining an hour I still feel out of whack.
I still don’t know when my bedtime is supposed to be, or if being tired when I wake up is because I slept poorly or because I think it’s actually 7am instead of 8am.
Or vice versa. Which way did the time move again? What day is it? Who am I?
But crucially, I think what’s thrown me out as much as anything is the reminder that time is entirely subjective, and the entire eastern seaboard (aside from Queensland) just deciding, en masse, to change the clocks all at the same time messes with my head like nothing else.
In theory, could Daniel Andrews or Anthony Albanese or whoever’s in charge these days order it to be 3.17am?
Who would enforce such an order? The Time Police? The Department of Hours, Minutes and Seconds? Civilian militias armed with stopwatches and alarm clocks?
What’s to stop us all deciding to join that weird, insane time zone on the South Australian-West Australian border, which is called Central Western Standard Time and is observed by like four towns and a roadhouse?
Hear this: My hours get 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
Can we secede from the Victorian time zone, like Broken Hill did once, long ago, parting ways with NSW time and joining South Australian time?
(Or did Broken Hill change time zones last week and then change the calenders to 1956 to make it look like it’s always been a different time zone? I no longer know what anything means!)
Can we do what China does and have one time zone for the whole country, meaning tough luck to Australia’s Kashgar (Perth) whose residents now have to get up at what was once 4.45am, but will actually be 7.45am now we’re all unified under one time zone?
Stop changing time on me. It makes me tired, and when I’m tired I have minor mental breakdowns and major existential crises about the nature of reality.
Mr President, there are too many hours — please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot.
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