Thursday 17 March 2011

Street lamps

I grew up in a little village in the countryside.  Small English villages are very dark in winter, and at nightime, because they don't have any street lamps.  As a small child I was very frightened of the dark - once night fell it seemed to close in around me.  I always had a little light on in my room when I slept.

When I went to stay with my Grandparents though, things were different.  They lived in a city, and there were street lamps!  I remember thinking that street lamps were the most marvellous invention.  Their warm orange glow could keep me company all night.  I lost that feeling of being abandoned to the night, which I always had in the village back home.

I still love street lamps today, and there is one outside our bedroom window.  Many people, G included, find their light an irritation and a distraction from sleep, but I like it.  When G is away, and I don't need to be considerate, I like to sleep with the curtains open so that the orange glow fills the room.

Street lamp

8 comments:

  1. They took away the orange street lamps on our street and replaced them with white ones, which don't light anything at all above three feet away from them. Boo.

    I am all nostalgic for your orange glow.

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  2. I was surprised to discover recently that I cannot sleep in a completely dark room because I am so used to the flicker of the street lamp outside my window.

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  3. What a wonderful blog site you have created. I definitely need you as my blog adviser!

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  4. I grew up in a planned community that specifically forbade street lights--in addition to clotheslines and basketball hoops!

    And I love your new lists at the top of the page. So fab! How did you do that?

    K xx

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  5. There are street lights in our village but they're few and far between. There certainly are great stretches of street that are pitch black at night, so I take a torch to book club!

    I grew up in London so it took me a while to get used to the darkness of the country. I love it now.

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  6. We recently got new streetlights here and now I can walk back from school after a winter parents' evening without my torch!

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  7. I quite like a street lamp - there are far fewer since we moved to a village. But dark is not an issue, thanks to my neighbour's recently installed security light which flicks on at each passing cat or fox and shines it's Colditz arc right into my bedroom. I am seriously contemplating rocks.

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  8. I used to get panicky and anxious at night when I was a teenager and into my early twenties, if I was in the pitch black I felt like I was suffocating and the thing that really helped was having a gap in the curtains to let light from the street lamps through. I got over this, fortunately as Jon prefers the dark!

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