Mood Swings:
Summertime, and the living is... easy?
By
Youssef Rakha
It wasn't until after adjusting the clocks for the summer that the weather cooled following a few days of intense heat. You couldn't help but feel that there was something paradoxical, if pleasing, about the notion of summertime this year; the clocks altered before the weather. Older, less educated people were typically a little confused. "But doesn't 7 really mean 6?" they would ask repeatedly. Children, oblivious of the most restrictive dimension of life, took it all in stride. The happiest development was the late afternoon breeze, which gave you an almost physical sense of liberation. In the past, clock adjustments used to occur long after the stifling humidity had set in. This year, to coincide with the Easter holidays and the accompanying atmosphere of crowd-free, more tranquil Cairo, the gift of pleasant weather proved all the more rejuvenating.
Yet for those of us who struggle to be early risers, being deprived of a valuable hour of sleep might well detract from the enjoyment. Say you normally go to bed at 2am and you have stayed up a little later reading. Suddenly you cast a sidelong glance at your bedside clock and it's 4am. The anxiety of knowing you will have to be up and running in less than six hours begins to engender insomnia. Eventually you reason with yourself. You smoke a cigarette, fetch a glass of water, spend a little time in the loo. Soon you are much more calm, indeed calm enough to be swept away by sleep. But by the time this happens it is already 6 or 7am, a fact of which, though you may be warned by morning light seeping through the shutters, you remain purposefully, blissfully oblivious. You dream of a pleasant stroll by the corniche. Distraught, impossibly late and altogether furious with the summer, you wake up at 3pm.
At the other end of the stick, an extra hour of sunshine can make all the difference in the world to the photographically oriented. It makes it possible to arrange to take pictures according to a more convenient schedule. It saves you the trouble of having to employ a flash. More generally, it places you in a better frame of mind for the night to come. The single most disappointing feature of winter is the abrupt brevity of the twilight period preceding night, something you notice as much in Egypt as elsewhere. In places like England, summer sunsets are ridiculously late; it is only disorienting and displeasing to realise that, while the sun continues to shine brightly across the horizon, it is already 10 or 11pm. Closer to the equator one has the opposite problem: for insomniacs, at least, having woken up in a foul mood at 4pm, they only have an hour or less to live before it is completely, irrevocably dark. Through spring the situation will improve somewhat, but it is not until the clocks are adjusted that sunset begins to coincide with a more reasonable hour like 7, and eventually 8.
The history of time change is beset by contradiction. In theory, at least, adjusting the clocks is supposed to produce a more well-rounded day, with enough hours of sunshine (or darkness) to facilitate hard work and adequate rest. Yet in practice it often amounts to mere confusion -- and not only for the aforementioned older, less educated people. In the context of a temporally flexible society like Egypt's, at least for the first few days after the time change occurs, an appointment at 7, for example, may be confused with one at 6 -- or 8. Certain notoriously late people even pretend they have forgotten to reset their clocks to explain why they have kept you waiting. This will be particularly problematic in situations in which the time change amounts to two hours. People are simply confused, less confident of themselves and others. A lie about time is more likely to be believed when no one is sure any more what time it is exactly -- or why.
Letting the mind roam in this vein, one cannot help but question the notion of clock time in the first place -- its immediate implications for a humanity divorced from the rhythms of nature. In the past, at least in some point in history, human beings would prepare for sleep shortly before sunset and wake up at dawn. Such is the original design of both organism and planet. Yet humanity has messed it up so much that it is increasingly difficult to sustain the argument that a sun- oriented rhythm is feasible. No doubt one could wake up at dawn, go to work, come back and go straight to sleep. But what kind of healthy, well- rounded life would this be? Traditions of society are such that one must stay up long, long after sunset if one is to socialise or seek pleasure. Unfortunately what this means is that one wakes up long, long after dawn. Thus the vicious circle continues.
