Here in Canberra, we moved into summer time a couple of weeks ago, suddenly making it light to half past seven in the evening, and suddenly the heating hardly comes on in the evening.

One of the supposed benefits of daylight saving is the idea of giving more people time in the evening for gardening, strolling and just generally taking the air. Undoubtedly true.

The other is saving energy. That I’m not so sure about – sure we have less heating in the evening, but it’s still cold in the morning meaning the heating is running for longer first thing – and in these days of low energy light globes, that’s probably the prime consumer of energy.

Later on, in summer when we start getting 30C and higher , we’ll need to run the cooling  in the late afternoon or evening – something we would do for less if the evening had had an hour to cool down.

Once, I’m sure, daylight saving offered clear benefits. Domestic electricity use was mostly for lighting and a bit of heating. Central heating and cooling were not common. Gas came in bottles and was used mostly for cooking.

Nowadays our energy use patterns have changed – we use gas for heating, electricity for cooling and the rest …