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For those of us who have to count this sort of thing off on our fingers, we are set to lose an hour’s sleep tomorrow morning when the clocks go forward. I’ve learned to depend on the American saying, “Spring forward, fall back,” as for years I would struggle with the idea that getting up an hour earlier didn’t mean it would get dark correspondingly sooner.
Whether there’s any correlation between struggling with daylight saving time conceptually and battling with the body clock, I don’t know, but a surprising number of people do find it hard to adjust to the clocks changing. Much harder, in fact, than in the autumn when the process is reversed. There are all sorts of other mental and physical manifestations of the stress that the onset of daylight saving time brings, particularly if – like me – you are not a good sleeper. You might recognise some of them in this fascinating article.
What’s been keeping me awake at night recently has been Donald Trump’s second coming. It’s my job to keep an eye on US politics, but some of the frankly disquieting stuff he and his senior people are doing is playing havoc with my sleep patterns. His administration appears to have declared war on the rule of law, calling for the impeachment of judges and threatening law firms who have taken cases he dislikes. And equally worrying is the culture war he has
embarked upon, pressuring universities over their teaching, shutting out media outlets he dislikes and going after institutions such as the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian in a bid to “eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American
ideology”.
It could never happen here, I hear you say. But this government, led by a former human rights lawyer, has just introduced a bill which would ban people from wearing face masks at protests. This, in an era where facial recognition technology is ever more sophisticated and ubiquitous. Of course, such overweening power would never be misused in the “cradle of democracy”, would it?
On the positive side, we recently invited a small dachshund to share our lives and we’re quickly getting used to each other’s ways. Dixie (for ‘tis she) wears her heart very much on her paw: she’s a pack animal through and through and hates being alone. So much so that she seems to go into a sulk and ignores us when we return home after leaving her for a while. Mind you, it might be that we’re reading too much into her behaviour. Research suggests humans are not very
good at understanding their canine companions’ emotions.
This week we also learned that we’ve don’t really know how many people there are in the world as census data has become much less reliable in recent years. Here’s why that’s a problem. And climate activists Just Stop Oil have … stopped. Here’s why getting so many people angry with them has in fact been an effective strategy.
If you watch one thing this weekend, here’s a documentary about a boy’s life filmed by his mum, a single mother who delayed a promising career as a film-maker to raise him. Victoria Mapplebeck recounts how she came to make the film and runs us through her selection of other must-see films and TV series about motherhood.
Finally your weekend health supplement. This week we learned that wild swimming is better for your mental health than open-air pools (if only they would heat rivers). Coffee enemas are silly and most likely quite harmful. But a
yoghurt a day could help keep bowel cancer away.
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