Summertime – wintertime – changing time?

Running in the gloom this morning – yes, the cloud is still around although it’s nowhere near as cold as some of my Galician friends and acquaintances make out –the temperature reported on the advertising hoarding at the end of the road still said 18° at 9 this morning – I reflected on stuff I read in the paper last night. 

There’s a big debate going on about changing Spanish time to be in line with English and Portuguese time, one hour behind the current Spanish clocks. Apparently this used to be the case but Franco changed it, possibly feeling he had more in common with the Germans than the British. 

 Anyway they’re going on about children going to school in the dark, the same argument that’s always used in the UK to justify putting the clocks back, which will happen in just a few weeks from now. That’s rather scary, winter is really coming! 

The other point being made is about parents having fights with their children as you get into summer because they don’t see why they should go to bed while it’s still light. How do they think people in more northern countries, where the evenings in the summer are even longer, get on? And as for what happens up at the North Pole, well, goodness only knows. 

While I can understand keeping the children up so that they play in the relative cool of the evening really I’m of the old school that says children should go to bed so that parents can have some time to talk and so on. Don’t places like Italy and the south of France have the same problems? We don’t hear them going on about it. Or maybe they do go on but we just don’t know. 

The other thing, of course, is the working day. If fathers aren’t getting home from work until nine or ten at night, maybe they might want to see their children before these are packed off to bed. 

So you need to change the whole work pattern of the country. Maybe shops could open before ten. There’s a radical suggestion. After all, cafes open up at six or seven in some cases. And bread shops also start early. And is it really necessary for clothes shops and the like to be open until 9 at night? So there are proposals to change all sorts of timings. 

Is it possible, I wonder, to change the whole culture of a country in this way? A part of me says, yes indeed. After all, look how they changed shop opening hours in the UK. Sunday opening and so on. On balance though, that’s perhaps not such a good idea. Even for non church-goers, it was really nice to have that Sunday quiet. It’s one of the continuing charms of Spain. Sunday in England is little different from any other day for a lot of people. I think we probably lost out there. 

So maybe Spain should just stay as it is.