No Xmas talk today, I promise

The dark nights are getting on my tits already.

I know there’s nothing I can do about it (short of moving abroad somewhere) but it still hurts. I love the Autumnal colours, I love the cool, crisp air and I love sense of change and adaptation in nature, but the fact that I drive home in the dark now is a killer. Working regular, old-fashioned ‘office’ hours has its perks, but at this time of year it means I spend all of the available daylight from Monday to Friday with my work head on. I guess I have to make the most of the time that I get at weekends, but I’m normally feeling knackered by then, and I want to use all my remaining energy on my wife and child.  

It might not be an accepted thing to say these days, but we’re definitely affected by the seasons internally, right? You can’t tell me that the human body, over tens of thousands of years, didn’t develop ways to heat itself better in Winter and cool itself better in Summer. There must be mechanisms in place that kick in automatically, making us store more fat and crave more sugar, when it starts getting colder and darker. We might not migrate (more’s the pity) but we surely react in other ways? Don’t we all start feeling as tired at 4pm in November as we do at 9pm in June? Doesn’t it make sense for us, as a species that used to exist outside, to be controlled that way?

With that in mind, I am composing a proposal for my employers, in which I am allowed to adjust my working hours in line with my natural body rhythms. Longer hours in Summer; shorter hours in Winter, to allow for the drop in energy. If they go for it, I’ll only come in for three hours a day for the next three months, and then find another job in Spring.

RC 7-11-19