As children, we’re primed by literature to think of the night as a time for adventure as well as rest, but by early middle age, we’ve mostly ringfenced its darkness for sleep (or, for the insomniacs among us, anxieties about sleep’s absence). Author Dan Richards is no exception, and it took a nuit blanche stranded 3,600 metres up a Swiss mountain to reawaken his sense of night-time’s vast and varied potential. Hopelessly lost, he drew comfort from the occasional blips of aircraft in the sky above and from moving lights in the town below: others, too, were out and about, albeit in less of a fix. What could they all be doing?
Overnight: Journeys, Conversations and Stories After Dark details his subsequent investigation into “the who and the how of the nocturnal world”. Its pages, immersive and personal, span encounters with night owls of all feathers, from the heroic (Richards hears tales of medalled RNLI bravery on the high seas) to the stoic (shift patterns leave a crane operator at Southampton docks with scant time to himself); and from the intrepid (amateur chiropterologists) to the trapped (he visits but chooses not to quote rough sleepers in Westminster, deeming it too “intrusive”).
