Driving at night brings its own challenges; from the obvious tiredness of some drivers who cannot keep in lane, to those who are blasé and go from one lane to another without signaling – though that happens in the daylight as well, to your own idiosyncrasies. Mine is not being able to see the road clearly even with headlights on. I also noticed before I stopped doing it how I would drive much faster in country roads because I expected to be able to see the headlights of oncoming cars, until the day I nearly hit a tractor that had no lights.
But the oddest things about driving at night that I don’t experience with daylight driving is that the closer I get to home, after leaving the crowded motorways and the last city behind, the fewer and fewer fellow travellers are around until on the lonely country tracks with not even a dog walker out I get home, and this time I didn’t even have my dogs here. It was a slow drive into utter loneliness.
Though of course it was only the transient feeling of this journey, I did think there are far too many people for whom this describes their lives and it must be a difficult transition from the chaos of the many to the sparse wilderness of being alone. That is the time when those with strong minds survive the best.