Boss Radio

Ah, how I remember the good old days, those days of cycling into town to buy an LP or three then cycling home again with the records swinging gaily from the handlebars. I used to do it almost every week - What else was I going to spend my money on? - even in winter. The problem with winter was the short days. Lighting up time would frequently pop its head around the door before I got home, and back in those days the forces of law'n'order would do yer for that. Not a problem if you had functioning lights, but it's amazing how often I found myself with a flat battery, they didn't last as long in those days.

Of course, as you are all aware, batteries regenerate when unused, so I could usually expect to get maybe 10 minutes out of them before darkness overcame them.

A knowledge of lighting up time was imperative.

Lighting up time was dusk, otherwise known as half an hour after sunset, I think I may have mentioned this somewhere before, did I also mention I've just looked it up again and it's still the same? One thing I do remember was that, somewhat annoyingly, it never actually seemed dark at lighting up time. This is interesting because today I happened to notice that sunset was due at 4:21 (PM...), which meant that lighting up time would be, er... 4:51. We went out in the car (Mum's way past the cycling years), had a snack at a local tearoom, then set out into the country to monitor the sunset.

By my reckoning the sun actually set at about 10 past 4, give or take a few minutes on account of it was hidden by cloud for the last part of its trip, but that's OK, sunset is calculated at sea level, and I think we may have been a little higher than that. Whatever, to me it was still quite bright enough to see by at 4:21, which coincidentally was when I was first flashed.

Street lamps began coming on at around 4:30, by which time everyone but me and one van had their lights on, that ties in with their having to come on between 10 and 20 minutes before lighting up time, to me it was indeed getting dimmer and I put my sidelights on to pacify all the flashers who were suddenly able to see me because the street lights had come on. Actually I'd also realised that I couldn't read what speed I was doing.

At about 20 to 5 someone flashed me even with my sidelights on, and since I'd reckoned that sunset was actually about 4:10 I decided that this was an appropriate time to put my full lights on. As usual this caused the rest of the world outside of my headlamps to disappear, which I hate, but I drove on until the official lighting up time of 4:51, then I found somewhere deserted and turned my lights off.

It was dark.

So in the sixties/seventies it was light half an hour after sunset, and now it's dark. Obviously the sun's not changed, so it has to be my eyes, and mine are apparently still better than almost everyone else's. An optician once told me that over exposure to over-bright artificial light was destroying our eyes.

He was right.