Northern Lights Arrive, Haddenham Faces The Other Way

"I saw the whole thing, beautifully, on a four inch screen, standing six feet from a window that had it happening behind me," said Raymond Pettifer, a retired paint estimator from Churchway, who watched the aurora borealis over Haddenham on Friday evening in a kitchen, with the blind down, on a phone belonging to his sister in Thame.

The lights were, by every account the paper has been given, extremely good. They were green at the edges and a sort of bruised pink in the middle, and they sat over the village green for most of an hour while the village green stood underneath them doing nothing in particular. The pond reflected them. Nobody was at the pond.

What Haddenham had instead was a sequence of people turning the wrong way with great conviction. Along Station Road, six residents stood in the cold facing south, towards Thame, on the reasoning that Thame gets everything first. Two more drove to the Parkway on the theory that height helps, parked, and looked at the car park.

The parish council has not been asked to comment and has commented anyway, which is its right.

By ten o'clock the sky had quietened down and the village was fully indoors, scrolling photographs of itself taken by people in Devon. Several residents reported the pictures were better than the real thing, which is true, and is the saddest true thing printed in this paper this month. One man described the night as the closest Haddenham has come to being somewhere.

The lights may return. The Herald, which has an office window and no one willing to stand at it, will again cover the event from a desk, facing a wall, refreshing.