Is there such a thing as a human right to night?

The street lamp as bright as the Dog Star is back to its full glare outside my house.

I won a small victory earlier this year when I persuaded the council to fit a shield to one side of it after threatening to throw myself out the window because I couldn’t sleep.

But the other day, an engineer arrived in a van with a crane lift and took the shield away. I wasn’t there, a neighbour witnessed it, but when I got back home the street lamp was sporting a makeshift strip of black gaffa tape around the top, shielding only a tiny bit of light.

I contacted the council and a day later the contractors who fitted the original shield got back to me and admitted that the shield had been taken off after a neighbour rang up and demanded the light be restored to 50 million watts because it illuminates a footpath in front of my house.

As a point of fact, with the gaffa tape around the top, it does not. Whether it did light the path before the shield or the tape was fitted I cannot say, but I don’t recall the footpath ever being well lit. And why in the name of all that is holy should it be?

We live on a village green and step out of our front door on to the grass. There is no road, just an unmade track. That is why we, the residents in this small line of houses, came to live here, surely?

It seems hard to understand how anyone feels the need for a street lamp as bright as Sirius A. But even it were acceptable to put a street lamp wherever there are houses, the darn lamp does not light up anything useful.

Most popular

Gareth Roberts

Have I Got News for You is a sad, unfunny spectacle

It is sited in a very strange place, away from the footpath, towards the end of the line of houses, so that the only place it casts its intergalactic glare is directly on to my cottage and the one attached to it, and forwards of that on to the expanse of grass that makes up the village green.