One of the best things about North Europe (and, I would imagine, northern America or Asia) is the bright nights during summer. Close to the summer solstice, the sun goes down around 11-ish and already returns at ca. 4 am. As much as I enjoy the night, I really can’t function properly if I have to get out of bed before sunrise, but at this time of year I often find myself going to bed after the sun is up. Case in point: this entire weekend.

Unfortunately I only gave myself half an hour for my nocturnal expedition, because I didn’t want to go to bed later than 4 am, so I didn’t manage to find a really perfect place to photograph. The best I could do was an artificial hill in one of the parks near my house, and of course the view towards the east was mostly obscured by trees. I did manage to get a few good shots though, and these are them:

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There are few things as nice as waking up around 11 and just lounging around in your bed with a cat or two and some terrible American sitcoms until noon (or Rumblefish, if you hit the TV jackpot! What were they thinking airing a film like that when nobody who cares is home to watch? Well, except slacking film students, I suppose).

Still, time spent sleeping is time not spent watching a great film or playing a great game or reading a great book or working on TNM. I can’t help but feel it’s a bloody waste of time. I really need to learn to meditate.

On days like this, I lament the fact that I am born a night person. Do not mistake me for a “goth” or a “vampire”-wannabe or anything of the sort, I just tend to go to sleep around 3 am and get out of bed around noon when left unattended for. And it doesn’t help that I frequently communicate with people in vastly different time zones than I am, more often than not time zones that render them available for such communication after midnight falls in Denmark.

This time of year, mornings are beautiful. Part of my daily route to work is through a park road with tall trees on either side, and when the sun casts beams of light through the mist, anybody with the least bit of imagination can easily find himself traversing a land of fantasy, expecting to see elves moving silently between the trees. I only get to experience this strange, tranquil state of mind for a scant minute on the days when a morning shift has been assigned to me, because when no duties exist to force me out of bed, I will be hard pressed to find myself in a park before 9 am, when the mist has lifted and the sun settled into a more conventional position.

Then I must console myself in the fact that other parts of the day, which I experience more easily, carry a different kind of magic. Twilight is my personal favourite; just after sunset when the sky is a swirly, glowing mess of red and orange, and the colours are slowly drained from the world. As everything turns into an odd shimmering land of greyscale, strange thing appear in the periphery of one’s vision, and the imagination once again runs wild.

And the night itself should not be underestimated either. Full as it is of sights and sounds, especially in the city permeated with neon colours or in the country on clear starry nights (of which I have never seen many).

That concludes today’s vaguely poetical intermission.

• Is it half past 2 am?
• Are you still awake?
• Are you throwing or attending a party?
• Is it so damn hot everybody needs to sleep with their windows wide open?
• Are you playing loud music?
• Are you or anybody else attending the party laughing obnoxiously once in a while?
• Are you or anybody else attending the party singing along to the painfully primitive techno music?

Then SHUT THE FUCK UP AND GO TO BED, IT’S FUCKING MONDAY MORNING AND SOME OF US GOTTA GET UP FOR WORK YOU SELFISH MORON!

Thank you.