Dear Gerry,
I received your Christmas message loud and clear. It was there in excellent health on my ancient answering machine, ungarbled, unabridged by any bug. And as I fumbled with the tangled threads of a normal life so irresponsibly abandoned in the closing days of the last century, I began to understand your problem: you are troubled by the fact that the stretch in the evenings, already so apparent now in early January, has not been reflected by a corresponding morning stretch - by a noticeable advancement of the time of sunrise.
Well, Gerry, if we were to set our clocks exactly according to the sun - to what is called Local Apparent Time, which takes noon each day to be the exact instant when the sun is due south - then the annual shortening and lengthening of the days would be symmetrical about the winter solstice. The latest sunrise and the earliest sunset would coincide around December 21st.
But I suspect, Gerry, that you do not set your clock to LAT. You see, measured accurately by the sun, days turn out for various reasons to differ slightly in length - being at some times of the year a little longer, and at others a little shorter, than the precise 24 hours. To avoid practical inconvenience, you and I just pretend the days are all exactly 24 hours long: we use mean time.
Because of this, our clocks are usually out of step with the sun - apart altogether from the fact that we standardise our time by time zones.
The difference between "sun time" and "clock time" is called the "equation of time", and varies rhythmically throughout the year. And during December and January the effect of the equation of time is slowly to shift clock time a little forward each day, as compared to real sun time.
Now imagine, Gerry, the effect of this upon the time of dawn. When the winter solstice has passed, we ought to see earlier sunrises, but this trend is counteracted by the fact that our clocks are out of synch with nature; they show a progressively later time each late December morning than they ought to, which provides a trend for an apparently later dawn.
Only as the month of January matures does the seasonal effect accelerate sufficiently to overcome this chronometrical illusion.
Then your mornings become noticeably brighter - as, indeed, I hope they will continue metaphorically to do for as long as you may live in this millennium.
I remain, dear Gerry, like every letter writer in The Irish Times, Yours, etc., Brendan