It was 10.45pm and our film had just finished. I checked my phone and saw a friend claiming he had just seen the northern lights — in Wembley. It had been trailed as a possibility, but I hadn’t given it much credence. Not with the light pollution inside the M25, surely. You’d need to head up to the Chilterns at least, and even then be incredibly lucky.
But I dashed to the back garden anyway. The night sky certainly had an unusual clarity, almost shimmering, and you could clearly make out the whole of the moon behind the shining crescent. But no colours. My Wembley pal must have mistaken the glow of an all-night garage for the celestial cosmos. I went back inside and poured another glass of wine. But then I saw a second friend saying they were seeing them — in Finchley: even closer. I went back outside again.
And, yes, there was now quite clearly a giant stripe of green rising directly before me — and soon a parallel stripe of red. And then more green. The sky was coloured like the inside of a giant circus tent — but it was also fluid, strobing. I roused my dozing wife and game-engrossed son, dragging them to the attic bedroom to look from there. It was, by now, incontrovertible: we were seeing the famed aurora borealis in suburban London — in Southgate to be precise — not half a mile from the North Circular.
I alerted neighbours, via WhatsApp, and could soon hear other people out in their gardens too, audibly amazed by what they were seeing. Their pictures started appearing in that chat group: enormous swirls of magenta, emerald and scarlet above our 1930s semis. It was like something from a John Wyndham novel — the night before the world goes blind and the Triffids take over.
I’ve spent years trying to cultivate the art of experiencing things first-hand without automatically recording them digitally. But this extraordinary natural phenomenon, I now learned, is an exception to this rule-for-life. Because viewing it through a camera lens actually enhances the experience, enabling the colour display to be seen more clearly.
I messaged a friend in nearby Crouch End and told him to get outside urgently. ‘Been on the shrooms?’ he replied (before soon having his own astral epiphany). It was a reasonable question. The whole idea of the northern lights for me has been associated with hippiedom since the first time I heard the phrase as a teenager in the opening line of a Neil Young song: ‘Aurora Borealis, the icy sky at night’.
Not knowing what this meant, and this being long before Google, I did what I always did when puzzled then: I asked my mum. She had lived for some years in northern Ontario, not far from the Arctic Circle, so was completely conversant and explained. And I’ve longed to see them ever since.
Not enough to properly try, however. The experience has begun to be marketed as a mass leisure activity, like swimming with dolphins or visiting Lapland at Christmas. And this was made official last year when that self-appointed arbiter of good taste, Nicky Haslam, put the northern lights on his annual list of things he finds ‘common’ — alongside Aperol and Grayson Perry.
So instead, like others of my generation who perhaps overdid the psychedelics during the rave era, I’ve lately taken to repeatedly traipsing around the neolithic sites of Great Britain, projecting onto the stone-agers who erected these monuments my own stoner fantasies of the awe they must have experienced at the wonders of the skies. And last night I had my closest encounter yet with those wonders myself. And it wasn’t common, it was metaphysical. It left me shaken.
One friend told me this morning: ‘We spent hundreds of pounds on a trip to Iceland to see the northern lights but didn’t — and now I see them on my way home from the pub in Tunbridge Wells.’ Certainly I don’t doubt last night will have been a devastating blow to the pan-Scandinavian tourist sector as hundreds of thousands of bucket lists are today redrafted.
There is a suggestion that they may return this evening. Do try to look if you missed it last night. And definitely take your phone.
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