Let there be lights!

Three random thoughts about lights.

1. Sneaky Fairy Lights

We put our Christmas tree up on Saturday. What do you mean that's too early? Shut up you liar. It was the first of December, which means you go buy a tree, like Jesus did, and you put on the Billy Idol Christmas album and break open a massive bottle of Baileys, like Jesus did. And it is awesome, and it makes you happy and our tree is massive and awesome.

The lights we put on the tree have that feature that you sometimes see nowadays, whereby they eschew the mundanity of a regular flashing pattern, opting instead to oscillate wildly between a number of different behaviours. They might spend a little while glowing gently and pleasantly. "That's nice," you think. Then, without warning, they all go off. Darkness. Have they broken? No, they were just taking a break before launching into a mad frenzy of random flashing. Arg! Your eyes!

Then, just as abruptly, they steady themselves into a more sensible, thoughtful pattern, wandering happily and sedately up and down the tree as if to say "Flashing? Me? The very idea! Shall we watch the Channel 4 News?" And you start to doubt your own mind. Were they flashing? They look so calm now. Maybe I'm going mad. That would explain a lot.

And then they're off again, blasting out a staccato pattern of retina scarring reds and greens. Hypnotising you with subliminal morse code patterns, altering your mind, forcing you to kill... yes.... to kill....



2. Invisible Pedestrian Lights

You're like me, I imagine. Tall, handsome, good at running. You know a lot about Blakes Seven. Once you accidentally killed a tramp. And, like me, whenever you get to a pedestrian crossing, you are faced with a small but pertinent dilemma. Who do you trust? The Green Man / Red Man double act, who look down from on high and tell you when it is safe to go? Or the many years of experience inside your head that say "Screw you, Green and Red Man! I'll cross the road when I damn well please!"

Obviously, it's that latter, isn't it? We're adults, we can cross the road without help. And, more importantly, we might be in a hurry. And, even more importantly than that, most importantly of all - what will other people think if we obey the Red Man? Imagine... you're standing at the edge of the road, you look about. No cars coming. You look up at the lights. There stands Red Man, imperious and slightly camp, commanding you to stay where you bloody well are. You look around again. There are many other people, all coming up to the road, glancing about, scuttling across, confident that Red Man is an idiot who doesn't know anything. And you just know that if you don't go too, if you obey Red Man and stay where you are, these people will look at you, and they will think "Who is this nonce? Doing what the red man tells him. What a prick. And also probably a child molester. And I bet it was him who killed that tramp!"

Shit! They know about the tramp. Quick - screw Red Man. Across the road. And across you go, and obviously, that's mostly fine. You have eyes, you can see, you probably won't get run over. It's fine. Except.

Except when there's someone also waiting to cross, and they've got their child with them, and they are obviously trying to teach this child to wait for the green man. And the child might be going "But there's nothing coming", and the adult is going "We always wait for the green man, don't we?", and the child learns not to leap into the road when it damn well pleases, which keeps the little parasite alive for just that bit longer. Whenever I see this happen, I think, "That's good. That's a good way to bring up a child. That's a good lesson to teach it, learning to wait for the green man. I mean, it would have been better not to have had a child in the first place, to have kept your loins in check and not introduced another life into this world, to steal my food, money and oxygen. Then we could both be across this road and in HMV already. But since you've spawned the little gremlin, this isn't a bad method of keeping it in one piece."

I suppose what I'm saying is... if you see someone doing that, waiting at the green man when there's clearly nothing coming, obviously trying to teach the child some basic road safety... why don't you just charge across anyway like an impatient dickhead?  Don't wait for ten seconds for the light to change. Screw that parent, or grandparent, or child abductor, and their attempts to teach the child not to leap into traffic. Show them how it should be done! Off you go!

Or, you know. Don't.


3. Idiot Quick-Change Traffic Lights

At the bottom of the slip road onto the M1 at Junction 41 there are some traffic lights and they are dickheads. They change every couple of seconds, making it almost impossible to get past them. They are like mechanical nazis, tempting you with freedom, then snatching it away. "You want to go? Ok, here we... ahhh, too late. That fifth of a second there, that was your chance. And you missed it. Ha ha ha ha ha! Oh, look - I turned green... no, gone again. Damn it, you could have gone there. If I hadn't changed instantly back. Ha ha ha ha ha! Looks like you'll be here all day!"

Bastards. I hope they rust. I hope other road signals look at them and laugh and call them 'Spank Face'. I hope they open their Christmas presents to find little parcels of sick. I hope they get invited to a big party, for all the traffic lights, and they get really excited, and wear their favourite hats, and it turns out not to be a party at all, but instead it is smelly pit full of wee and poo and it goes on their heads.

I hope their Sky Box stops recording their favourite programme seven minutes before the end, ruining their enjoyment. I hope a dinosaur does a dance and they don't see it. I hope they catch syphillis. I hope they have a beautiful dream, where they have arms and legs and human senses and can enjoy the feeling of running through a golden meadow in the warm sun, and then they wake up to the cold, harsh reality of their pointless bastard lives, and they weep and they weep.

I hope birds are sick on them. I hope God is sick on them. I hope Billy Bragg writes a sarcastic song about how they have betrayed their core beliefs in an astonishing display of hypocrisy. I hope racists torment them. I hope the Amish mock them. I hope the universe is destroyed and leaves them alone in the void, blinking pointlessly between red, amber and green, forever and ever, for no reason. I hope they die.