The Twilight Zone

It’s that time of year when the pulling in of the evenings accelerates noticeably. Given the right kind of weather, this can lead to some interesting qualities of the light as twilight progresses.

The perceived quality of natural light is something we rarely observe abstractly, except perhaps when we visit somewhere with noted unusual and attractive light, for example at St Ives in Cornwall, or many places in Australia or on the French Riviera. Places, typically, that have attracted artists.

On Wednesday this week, at around 6.20 pm, in the banal local setting of a road junction with an excess of traffic lights, the ambient light was such that it took me straight back to autumn evenings in childhood. The sun was setting with long pink streaks of cloud contrasting with the bright cerulean blue of the clear sky. As a child, I adored this time of the year, since it implied the suddenly decreased probability of thunderstorms, which I feared, the start of the steadily darkening and excitement-mounting season leading towards the cosiness and comforts of Christmas, and what, in Nottingham, the locals call “Goose Fair weather”. This is typically a spell of calm and sunny weather with a degree of mist and fog, which coincides with the annual funfair, traditionally held in the week of the first Thursday in October.

When I was growing up in the 1950s, gas lamps were being phased out in our district, and were replaced by sodium street lights, usually of a swan-necked variety, concrete and modern. I loved to watch them coming on while the daylight still persisted: first of all the deep red of the neon trigger, and then the intense orange so characteristic of the sodium spectrum. I started to call this magical time – which a little later in the year falls before teatime – “sodiumtime”. Later on I poeticised the idea further as “The Odeon Sky”, incorporating other associations of gentle suburban civilisation. The future would be like this, always.

 
On Wednesday, though the street lighting is no longer sodium and the suburbs are scarcely gentle or civilised any more, just for a moment I was able to recapture the precise sensation and, just for a moment, felt extremely happy.