Rest in peace, the ‘big light’. Good night forever to the brutal clarity of a daylight bulb, the pores it reveals, the frightened balls of dust, the terrible truths. I have been a lamp activist for some time now, picketing for the end of overhead bulbs, fervently arguing the case instead for delicate pools of yellow light, the way lamps create an atmosphere of low, sweet joy as opposed to, with the big light, a certain cruel deadliness.
One of my jobs – and I take this quite seriously – is the daily turning on of the lamps. I walk in a leisurely fashion through my house, more of a sweep really, turning off the main lights that my family have switched on unthinkingly, no matter what the time of day or season, and turning on the little lamps. The purchasing of these lamps I take seriously too, adding one or so a year, usually vintage, sometimes slightly broken, in the face of my family’s bemusement and occasional despair.
Last year, for a birthday card, my boyfriend painted a picture of a lamp I’d bought at auction that particularly offends him. Inside the card was a poem. There were five verses, some describing my compulsion to buy things that baffle him, some detailing how the lamp’s glaze is reminiscent, he claims, of semen. We’ll dip in midway: ‘Underneath a trestle, of smoky glass ashtrays, stood a bulbous brown ceramic lamp of the ugliest display. Most likely from the 70s (a pottery nadir), this sculpted apparition gets worse as you draw near. For covering its glossy surface you would not expect, to find a sort of spit-like off-white foamy jizz effect.’ It concluded gently, like a sigh. ‘Eva scooped the jizz lamp up as though she were its mother, and rushed it home to meet its ceramic sisters and its brothers. Her partner was agog to see this totem of bad taste and asked her why she’d said she was just shopping for toothpaste. But even though he rolled his eyes he knew it was his duty, to love a thing that she loves, and to try and find its beauty.’
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What he missed there was that I was doing it for him. Sitting across from him at dinner, I turn on the lamp to create the illusion that we are at an intimate Parisian bistro in the 1950s rather than the London suburbs on a Tuesday approaching an apocalypse. Romance is not possible under a 100-watt LED bulb. I turn on the lamp in my youngest child’s bedroom to create the illusion that this is a place of joyful abandon rather than a room gritty underfoot with tiny plastic toys. I turn on the lamp in the living room to suggest an elegant salon, alive with poets, rather than just us on the sofa bickering over Netflix.
Is it such a crime to want everything to look gorgeous? As I turn on the lamps I sing like the Emcee in Cabaret: ‘We have no troubles here! Here life is beautiful, the girls are beautiful, even the orchestra is beautiful!’ All because of the light, the delicate, pink-shaded, moody light, which illuminates a room in just the right way to make it seem, instead, like a scene. Is it a particularly feminine pursuit? Perhaps. Is it crazy that more people don’t realise how much sweeter domestic life can be when they turn off the big light? I think so. Does gentle lighting become more important as the world gets harder? Undoubtedly.
