I May Be Gone Some Time

Hopefully unlike Captain Oates* I shall be back.  In fact I have so many posts in draft and idea form that I may even occasionally post here in my absence in NewZealand.  I've said that before though and time never seems to be sufficient and they will , for the most part, still be there and just as relevant in six months time.

So for the next six months I shall be posting regularly on A Hebridean in New Zealand.  I hope that you will join me there.

*Captain Lawrence Edward Grace ("Titus") Oates (17 March 1880 – 16 March 1912) was an English Antarctic explorer, known for the manner of his death, when he walked from a tent into a blizzard, with the words "I am just going outside and may be some time." His death is seen as an act of self-sacrifice when, aware his ill health was compromising his three companions' chances of survival, he chose certain death.

Travelling Again

Tomorrow I shall be wending my way South again.  This time though I shall not be traveling via Los Angeles or Hong Kong but via Dubai and Australia.  I've been quite lucky given the chaos that transatlantic air travel is in as a result of Superstorm Sandy.  My loyalty to Air New Zealand has been interrupted by the fact that ANZ wanted almost twice as much as Emirates to get me from Scotland to New Zealand.  So tomorrow I shall fly to Glasgow

  

After a night spent with my friend Anna I shall set of for Napier on a different route to usual.

Hopefully I shall blog again before I leave.  If I don't then it will be Saturday before I arrive in Napier and have the opportunity to return to Blogland.

The Last Week

'Last' as in previous not as in this is, or that was, the last week (of our existence).  

Living my life as I do in two halves I have always found the last week or so of each life quite difficult.  It's not so much the packing because I usually only have a small amount of stuff to transport between my worlds.  I came back from NZ last time with a suitcase weighing 14k plus my 6k cabin bag. When I went to Italy this summer I had three cases (plus my laptop backpack etc) and all the other odds and ends.  There are so many other things to be taken care of from making sure the house, car and garden are set up for the winter and all the paperwork is done to saying goodbyes.

So the last week was sort of planned in my mind.  What I had not expected was last Monday and Tuesday being such wonderful days that I spent most of them in the garden doing, you guessed, gardening and outside house maintenance.   The rest of the week was a mixed bag though.

Upper Bayble across the valley from me - a valley filled with mist on a still and frosty morning

 and in a different light

From the kitchen window

No wind - that doesn't happen very often

Dew and spiders

The spider must have been dizzy when it had finished that untidy lot

The next day the weather started closing in

and the squalls came through running South down The Minch

and the snow showers came in squalls

followed by some sun

and then more squalls

and even more

Then the week ended.

Daylight Saving Time

CJ posted an interesting perspective on Daylight Saving Time - DST (which in Britain we call British Summer Time - BST) here.  That and the comments that had been published when I read the post together with the spooky fact that my central heating time clock re-set itself automatically (it was presumably taking its cue from the German radio-controlled clock that I have in the kitchen, made me think.  And, as my friends know, that is some achievement.

Why do we still persist with DST?  Who is 'we'?  I found the answer to the latter question (shown in the map) quite interesting.  I hadn't realised (until I read Meike's (Librarian) comment on CJ's post that Russia with it's 9 time zones didn't observe DST.  China doesn't either but I've never quite understood how China works things out given that it only has one official time even though it covers a massive five geographic time zones.

Why was DST introduced in Europe?  According to Wiki Summer Time was first introduced in some countries during the First World War, then largely abandoned with some exceptions, mostly during the Second World War, until the 1960s and 70s when the energy crisis prompted a wide scale re-introduction. The practice has been fully coordinated across the continent since 1996.

In the UK the arguments seem to revolve around children going to school and road safety.  That's purely a perception on my part  by the way I've done no research on the subject.  In many ways though the energy crisis would still be a relevant factor if it was relevant back in the 70s.

Here on Lewis BST makes relatively little difference because at midsummer we have sunrise around 0300 GMT and sunset around 2130 GMT but it's light(ish) all night anyway.

Anyway then I started thinking about New Zealand where I have heard a lot of discussion over recent years and where there are some wonderfully odd things as a result.

New Zealand time, including DST, is used by several Antarctic bases that are supplied from New Zealand. This results in the oddity that the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station sets its clocks an hour further ahead during the southern summer, when the sun is constantly above the horizon, than in the southern winter, when the sun is constantly below the horizon. The extreme geographic position of the base means that no possible adjustment of the daily activity cycle can have any effect on the amount of sunlight received during those activities. However, the arrangement presumably makes real time communications with New Zealand more practical, particularly in dealing with offices.

The New Zealand dependencies of Cook Islands, Tokelau and Niue do not maintain DST. They are located on the other side of the International Date Line and differ between 22 and 24 hours from New Zealand proper.