In the U.S., and I believe Canada, too, you move the clocks ahead one hour tonight. (Don’t forget, you North Americans. Don’t want to be late for church or brunch.)

In a matter of hours, I will be only 11 hours ahead of you Pacific zone people. Instead of a tidy 12.

We don’t do daylight savings in Abu Dhabi. And here’s why:

At no point of the course of a year do we want to save any daylight, here in the UAE.

We live for the night. We live for the dying of the light. Because once the sun goes down, we can come out of our holes, or our houses, or our workplaces, and maybe do something productive.

It was 90 degrees today. It will be warmer every day this week. The sun here is a menace.

The idea of backing up the day an hour, artificially … well, that strikes us as crazy,  in the UAE.

We want it to be dark at 7. Because then we can eat. Go to the store. Run some errands. And not have to worry excessively that we will be struck dead by the sun. Delaying sunset till 8 … that just means less night before we go to bed, and no one wants that. We want less sun before we go to bed.

Also, we’ve got the little matter of being barely outside the tropics. The shortest day of the year here is 10 hours and 23 minutes. The shortest. This close to the equator, not much swing in the longest/shortest thing. If our shortest day is 10:23,  then our longest is 13:37. Just an hour and a half or so on either side of a perfect, equatorial 12 and 12.

Even in southern California, which isn’t exactly near the Arctic Circle, you can get days of about 9:40 in the winter, and days of 14:20 in the summer. And, in the U.S., why do you need the sun coming up at 5 a.m.? It’s not like you’re all farmers anymore. So, have the sun come up at 6 a.m. and stay up till 8 or 9. Sure.

Doesn’t work here, though. Longest day of the year, June 21, the sun will be up about 5:45 a.m. and gone at about 7:15. It’s not a tidy, equal amount of time either side of noon because the sun is directly overhead here in Abu Dhabi at about 12:35 p.m. How do I know this? Because that’s when the second call to prayer comes down. When the sun is at its daily zenith. So … we’re not quite in the middle of a time zone here. We’re about a half-hour west of where we ought to be, in terms of noon/sun’s zenith.

Another time issue here is religious. Pure and simple.

When you have an entire month — Ramadan, which is most of August this year — during which you cannot eat or even drink while the sun is up … you want that scalding star outta your life asap. You don’t get to eat until it goes down. That’s the religious law.  So you’ve got millions of Muslims here looking at the clock, waiting for sundown — so everybody can make up for missing lunch and dinner (and maybe breakfast, too). It’s hard enough to wait until 7. Waiting till 8? Could cause a riot.

So, no thank you, we will not be doing the Daylight Savings thing here. Nothing we want to save. Though you North Americans can feel free to celebrate your 7:30 p.m. sunsets … and 8 a.m. sunrises for the next month or so.