It's very dark in Devon

I don't mean that there's a low literacy rate, or a primitive economy. No, I mean that in the most literal sense possible. When I get off a bus at 7 in the evening, I can see stars. In what I'm increasingly coming to think of as my 'real' life, I live out my diurnal cycle in an artificial world. My environment there is near exclusively human-made, the only intrusions of nature being spindly road-side trees. That's what I've noticed with a shock, being home this time. At some subconscious level I've internalized the observation that at night, things look sodium-orange. Here, they're silver-blue. The Moon and streetlights have swapped places: the dominant source of illumination, and infrequent distant signal-lights.

The novelty of seeing terrain formed by forces like rain and wind, instead of Oxford City Council Municipal Engineering held me there for a while. Bizarre, no?

Music: Flanders and Swann