Recently, the powers that be have embarked on an ambitious streetlight replacement project in the area where I live. The new street lights are giant totem like black structures, a bit taller than the old ones and emit light like they’ve scooped a bit of the sun out and put it into them. It’s cataract burning stuff and I do not recommend that anyone stare intently in their direction.
Actually, they’re not too bad, and I figure they’ve put them in to combat the current buzzword social force defined as ‘fear of crime’ (FOC is not necessarily related to actual crime as you can be living in an area with no crime, having never had a crime committed on you and still be crapping yourself – apparently). Anyway, the right people say that fear of crime is partly caused by night and so they have waged war on it. No more darkness equals for kids no more fear of monsters and for adults no more fear of crime (and perhaps there’s a correlation there somewhere….)
So to cut the story as short as it should have been to start with, I now live in a town that has no night, where the people no longer fear muggers, rapists and crazies and that’s a good thing, perhaps. The bad thing is that with all this light, the stars don’t exist any more. Call me sentimental, but I kind of miss them.