Dark Skies
🚂 Armchair Travels #8 // the UK and Europe
Dark Skies is the story of Tiffany Francis’s year-long attempt to learn more about the human relationship to the night sky. Travelling around the UK and Europe, Francis (now Francis-Baker) looks into subjects as diverse as the origins of Celtic fire festivals, the migration patterns of the nightjar, and the damaging effects of light pollution. In the process, she discovers the overwhelming benefits of facing our collective fear of the dark in order to feel more connected to the natural world. The book is also a love story, Francis-Baker’s year of nocturnal exploration coinciding with a turbulent but ultimately joyful year in her personal life.
I first read this book in 2019, when I was twenty-one. I decided to pick it up again this year because I remembered there was a chapter on the author’s trip to see the Northern Lights in Tromsø, and I wanted to re-read it in anticipation of my own travels in February.
To read a book I’d enjoyed so long ago was a fascinating experience. I found that, in the period that had elapsed between then and now, I had visited many of the same places Francis-Baker describes in the narrative. When I was twenty-one, her accounts of trips to the Black Forest, Coleridge’s cottage in Nether Stowey, and Sydenham Hill Wood, were appealing but meant nothing to me. This time, I could visualise the scenes she described with the clarity of memory: exploring the Black Forest with my friend Catriona one misty autumn; stumbling across a ruined folly in Sydenham Hill Wood; gorging on scones in the tearoom at Nether Stowey. Now I can add Tromsø to the list too.
It made me quite emotional to realise this. Francis-Baker is an author and illustrator whose work I have always followed closely. When I was younger, she stood out as someone whose career I wanted to emulate: a freelance writer with an interest in nature, history and travel, who wrote books but also had a more informal newsletter. In my last year at university I contacted her to ask for advice on building a creative career and she responded with a very kind and thorough email.
When Francis-Baker researched and wrote this book, she was around the age I am now. On reading Dark Skies for the first time, I can remember wishing that I was courageous enough to do the things she did: booking a solo trip to a hostel in Norway, going on adventures with the new friends she met there. Now I look back with some surprise and realise I have done all these things, in my own way. If I wanted to arrange a solo trip to a strange country and make new friends along the way, I’d have the courage and skills to do it.
I wondered whether my decision to visit some of the same places as Francis-Baker was partly influenced by the book, but many of those trips were suggested by other people. I think it’s more a case of people with similar interests being drawn to the same places. I liked this book in the first place because it served as a form of escapism: I thought all the places she visited, from the Gulf of Finland’s gentle waters to Agatha Christie’s home in Devon, sounded wonderful.
And I would still say the charm of the book is in its ability to transport readers and remind them not only of the natural world’s sublime beauty, but also of life’s simpler pleasures. I love this description of the longing for summer after a bleak British winter: ‘And deep within you something stirs, a longing for the outdoors that has been hibernating like a great bear, otherwise content to be wrapped up inside with tea and telly. The bear in you wakes, restless, stretches out his thunderous paws, shakes away the cobwebs of January, looks up to the sun and remembers long, hot days filled with wild roses, river swimming, cider in pub gardens, fresh raspberries, sunburn, bare feet, salty chips. Summer is on its way.’
And this description of the Northern Lights: ‘as the ribbon widened, it seemed to harvest colours from all over the world, reflecting the cerulean waters of the Caribbean sea, the lime greens of sphagnum moss, the electric blue of a cobalt crust fungus, the pearlescent aperture inside a seashell. In that moment, the entire universe seemed to be captured, drifting through the sky before me in a glass thread.’ I like the idea that the Northern Lights are an almost supernatural phenomenon, a highlights reel of everything that is most magnificent in nature.
Francis-Baker’s Substack newsletter is about prioritising the real and tangible over abstract anxiety and social media spiralling. Lately I’ve been thinking about a recent article from another Substack newsletter, Maybe Baby, in which the author writes that, ‘the primary difference between LLM and human communication is that the former mainly communicates in concepts whereas the latter is rooted in imagery, memory, and experience.’ This comparison immediately made me think of Dark Skies, a book full of sensory details and idiosyncratic tangents, rooted in the human connection with nature and our ecosystem. It’s comforting to read because it’s about what it truly means to be alive.
Thanks for reading! The next edition of Armchair Travels will be out on the first Saturday of April.