Put That Light Out!
Living in the USSR and Russia vastly expanded my understanding of the deep and merciless wars between state and family, love and power, and between freedom of thought and the tyranny of the mind. It reawakened a straightforward love for history, for its own sake, that I had as a child and had lost thanks to the dry and narrow demands of formal school, and it also brought the Atlas to life. When you have actually *been* to Sevastopol, Samarkand, Tashkent and Tibilisi, those great spaces seem to come to actual life on the page.
Living in America was much more of an education about alternative ways of doing things, quite distinct from those in Europe and the old British Empire.
My minor fascination with the differences between electrical voltage in the USA and Britain is a family joke (Well, they didn���t have to find the 110-volt bayonet light-bulbs, generally sold in Britain only for fairground use, and in very specialised shops) which were the only way of getting our collection of lamps to work in the USA, or fathom the curious effect of different cycles on devices such as record-players. I never fathomed it either, but for years after we got home from the US, we had wonderful American Christmas-tree lights which could only be made to work through huge steel transformers (which converted 230 volts to 110 volts) that weighed about five pounds each and grew alarmingly hot after an hour or two of use. It was worth it at the time.
But this curious difference symbolised for me the different ways at which the two rival English-speaking civilisations had arrived at roughly the same place. But it wasn���t the same place.
This was so in melodramatic ways. The neat little silver, red and blue diesel trains which rattled southwards past the Jefferson memorial and across the placid Potomac river could take me to places where they had chain gangs, and where they occasionally put people to death in the electric chair.
Huge-sounding snuffling wild animals could and did come rooting round the house at night, and butterflies the size of passports blundered about in the warm winds of late summer.
My suburb in Bethesda, Maryland was utterly different from its equivalent in Oxford ��� the main architectural theme a diluted mass-produced 18th-century New England rather than our own mass-produced diluted 16th-century Tudor. There were no fences, either fronting on to the road or between front gardens, though , mysteriously, they appeared round the back, where of course we had yards rather than gardens.
The local hardware store ( I love these) in Bethesda was full of huge axes, storm lanterns, stout lengths of rope and other pioneering equipment (I realised why when the tail ends of hurricanes came roaring into Maryland in late September, casually uprooting huge trees and almost flooding the basement. This emphasised John Keegan���s brilliant point that England is a garden, whereas North America is a wilderness. And what a wilderness. Travel far enough South-West and you are in the most astonishing, uplifting and exalting landscape I have ever seen, blue lakes amid red rocks, colossal faults in the earth full of disturbingly beautiful and gigantic rock formations which look like the work of an artist ��� and by night stars so numerous and so bright that, until you have seen them, you have never really seen stars at all - you just think you have.
Even in the settled North-East the nights were different. They arrived earlier and more quickly than in Britain because we were so much closer to the tropics. I also began to notice that in this supposedly ultra-modern country the streetlights were pretty small and dim, and nobody thought it strange that it was so. The nights had an Edwardian feel, as the various bugs fireflies and other winged things, of which Dixieland has so many, smacked themselves into the sides of the screen porch or brained themselves on the windowpanes, in a dim semi-twilight. It didn���t seem to encourage burglars. Most people left their doors unlocked and their houses, by comparison with English suburban equivalents, were lightly protected.
It made me wonder why we thought it necessary to spend so much electricity and effort to banish darkness from our streets at home. Nobody seemed to want all this light. Round about the time of the first Moon landing Oxford City Council came to remove the beautiful old cast iron Narnia-style gas lamps from the small North Oxford side-road where I then lived. Protests against this folly were, as usual, futile. My father managed to buy one. We dug a small trench for an electricity cable, and a deep hole for the base, and, using his old naval skills and a rudimentary pulley, we hoisted and fitted it with a small electric bulb (which was not as good as the old gas but a lot better than the glaring modern thing that replaced it on the street). It still stands to this day, slightly out of true (I think this was my fault) , breathing the last enchantments of the Victorian ages. I won���t say exactly where it is as I���m nopt sure it will do it any good to be associated with me. I visit it from time to time to see if claims that the old light was worn out, too rusty to survive etc were true. But it seems not. As long as someone slaps a bit of paint on it from time to time, I expect it will still be there, happily unchanged, for another hundred years.
As so often in those days, I worried that my resistance to the modern age was a fault in me, some form of eccentricity, especially my fury at the wilful wrecking of the railways. In almost all cases I have found that I was dead right. Now I learn that the claims made for hideous, dazzling modern streetlighting, that it makes us all safer, are, to say the least, in doubt.
People think it reduces crime and accidents. And so if people such as coroners say so, everyone thinks they speak from knowledge. But do they? Research ( with all its faults) suggests not. I was especially interested in this because of the recent arrival in my home town of LED streetlamps, installed largely on the Warmist grounds that, if we don���t have them, various archipelagos in the Pacific will be overwhelmed by salty billows because the ice-caps will melt.
Forgive (or don���t) my flippancy on this, but I think it is merited, even if you belong to the Warmist faith, as I do not. On its own terms, the argument is fairly thin. The amounts of wattage saved are actually quite small. The electricity used in making the new lamps, and the fossil fuels used in carting them about and digging the holes for them must be quite considerable too. The wattage and petrol, not to mention midnight oil, used by taxpayers working to pay for the lamps will also be quite large.
Many people don���t like them, as shown here
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2609957/Coming-street-near-lights-awake-make-people-ill.html
From what I���ve seen, they produce a strong, cold clear light which shows colours accurately and is pretty much good enough to read by. It is mainly directed downwards so should reduce light pollution in general. But I have spoken to people who greatly dislike them, and you may be among those. How is it that this rather costly project for change has got under way with so little discussion (for it is, for certain, quite a major change from what you are used to)? And is it necessary at a time when we are supposedly so short of money for such things as public libraries? Perhaps the general frenzy for banishing the night has got out of hand. Have we just got into the habit of doing this because we have not thought about it? I think this is so much more often than we think it is.
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