When the World Sleeps.

Copyright © Mark R Kelly 2025

When the house sleeps and the streets lie still, midnight arrives like a tide, carrying memories I never outgrew. There is a strange kind of mysterious magic surrounding the midnight hour. On one hand it's the beginning of the new day, but on the other it's the dead of night.

Some regard it with superstition, others consider it the 'hour of magic', a crossroads between today and tomorrow. Although midnight wears the witching-hour badge in many old stories, the veil between midnight and 4 a.m. is often said to be thinnest, when the night is ‘up to no good.’

For me it is a place of calm and inner peace, when the rest of the household is settled and asleep. No disturbing TV noises, no traffic droning by, no dogs barking in the distance, and best of all, night's blanket of silence laid over a sleeping world.

Times like this I often think back to my childhood, lying in my bed under a collection of blankets to ward off the seeping bedtime cold from outside. Single panes of glass, set in wooden framed sash windows, proved poor defence against the bite of the night time drop in temperature during autumn and winter. Although I would often wake in awe at the patterns of frost across the inside of our bedroom window, my breath steaming, and the pinch of cold air greeting me at the start of a new winter's day.

From that period of my childhood there were three sounds that comforted me as I drifted off to sleep:

1) COAL TRAIN: Although five streets away from the railway line, the sound of the coal trains would carry clearly across the dead of night. The weight of those coal-laden trucks and the clackity-clack - not high in pitch, but low in register, was reassuring to my child brain. The world was still as it should be, and the trains still ran.

2) NIGHTRADIO: My older brother kept a transistor radio next to the bed, and would listen to the soothing voice of John Peel as he spoke of bands I knew nothing of, playing songs that had no meaning for me, but still, the warmth of sound from the single speaker was a lullaby to the land of nod to my ears.

One particular station I especially enjoyed was Radio Luxembourg. In the dark of our bedroom I'd lay quietly listening, focused on the drifting sounds of the radio DJ speaking in a foreign language I had never heard before. The station signal was accompanied by static of varying degrees - I used to imagine the strong winds were the cause, as the voices and music travelled across the night sky to our radio. I recall a particular advert run by Radio Luxembourg for Durex - something that 1970's British Radio never mentioned. Ever.

Even now, decades later, I can hear the voices of that late-night advert:
Female: "You do love me, don't you, Johnny?"
Johnny: "Of course I do."
Female: "Then you'll wear this for me."

My childhood brain, from thereon in, associated men and women who talked about love, also talked about Durex. Child logic for you.

3) FOGGY NIGHT: This third sound was dependent on weather - namely fog. Back in my childhood, as well as the coal trains, there were the busy docks of Cardiff. On a foggy night, the fog horns would drone mournfully across the dark of night, a sound that carried - as the crow flies, roughly two miles - a low, mournful bellow followed by a slightly higher note, laced with a touch of urgency. Eerie, lonely, yet insistently alive all at once. A sound I found soothing as I drifted off to sleep.

Today the coal trains no longer run, and the docks have all but closed, and the historic Radio Luxembourg of old, that ghostly dream of sound reaching out from continental Europe ceased being in 1990 - but at least the memory of it lives on inside me, and no doubt, many others from that era.

This is just a touch of the magic that midnight draws up for me - misty memories of a childhood steeped in texture, sound and ambient temperatures, of having little, making do with simple things and being content. A formative life blessed with imagination, curiosity, inquisitiveness and a boundless energy. Ideas swirling like leaves in an autumnal wind, mapped out and sketched enthusiastically on paper with felt-tipped pens, as only a child can. These things I miss: simple, uncomplicated and untainted.

In many ways I feel less alive today than I did back as a child, and part of me mourns for the children of today, innocence corrupted by social media, mobile phones and the internet. But who knows, maybe not all is lost. Maybe.

I leave you with, "Body" by the talented SYML - enjoy.