Sodium Light

Why is sodium light so cold?

There is an awful moment when you realise that the familiar scene that you are watching through your window should be behind a TV screen. I once saw a man lurch across an empty parking lot in Baltimore and realised, with a near electric shock, that he reminded me of Bubbles from The Wire, from scenes shot perhaps a mile away and the unreal leaked out of its frame into the real.

So when we looked out of our window in our sleepy fenland home and saw a man in a balaclava run from the building next door in the glow of a sodium gorilla lamp, I had time to laugh before the shock hit me.