There is magic to be found when the world goes dark

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Music. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I used to have sleepovers at a friend's house, and at night we sometimes used to put our shoes on and sneak out of the house. At around three AM and then we go wandering around the sleeping suburb. It was great because nothing looked the same.

It was like the suburb had been pulled inside out. And this wasn't to prank anyone, it was just so we could enjoy how strange and magical the streets looked while everything was dark and everyone was asleep. Except not everyone. Dan Richards is here, again on Conversations, to talk about those people who live in the night. Dan is a writer and broadcaster based in Scotland, who feels the mystery and terror of the night in his bones.

Over the past few years Dan has travelled out to meet people who commandeer the overnight ferry running from Aberdeen to the Shetland Islands, sometimes through gale force winds. He's been out to meet charity workers who comb the streets of London, looking for rough sleep. He's met helicopter search and rescue teams who go out in search of people who might be freezing to death. He's met nurses on the night shift, and exhausted mums sitting up at four AM trying to get their baby to sleep.

Dan's book is called Overnight Journeys, Conversations, and Stories After Dark. Welcome back, Dan.

Hello, thank you so much for having me back on. Your book begins with this wonderful story, which was the thing that got you thinking about the world at night. It begins with you stranded on the size on the side of a Swiss mountain. Tell me how that happened, Dan. Um it happened because of fundamental uh misunderstanding of the risk

And needs of uh of going up and out, really. Uh you know, if you're going to go up and out there's a top tip for people, a couple of top tips. Um be quite fit, take some food, don't take my father, I would say. Those are the top three. Um

It was it was for a it was for a different book. We were last talking about a book I wrote called Outpost, which was about things on the edge, and before that I wrote a book that went in the footsteps and handholds of my great great aunt Dorothy Pilly, and she was a pioneering mountaineer in the twentieth century.

And as part of that book I thought, well I don't want to be vicarious, I don't want to do all this from archives, because that book would then be a dimension short so in my great wisdom I decided to follow her up some of her very severe mountains and up these very severe routes and of course realised quite early on that she was a really, really very proficient and fit mountaineer and I was not.

Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud. Um we ended up on the side of a mountain called the Dent Blanche in Switzerland, which is a beautiful mountain, uh viewed from the bottom. The white tooth. The white tooth, yeah. It'll eat you all up it turns out, if you um you go up it and then don't come off it in time. And there's a lovely word benighted, which means to be overtaken by darkness. But in our case it also meant stuck.

So um we sat down on this mountain having laboriously gone up it and then turns out laboriously coming down takes time as well. And we stopped because of weather and it was the right thing to do to stop and we had a grandstand view of the Matterhorn. And down in Zamat, down below, you could see lights moving and we were overtaken by darkness and also snow and also fatigue and in my father's case uh overtaken by the horrid realisation that he was sixty years old rather than thirty.

And my horrid realization that my father wasn't quite, you know Across this, shall we say. It wasn't all over this. Um So what are you doing here? Were you huddling on a ledge? Is that what you were doing or what? We roped uh yeah, we roped ourselves onto a ledge and sat out the night. And We had a a long night of talking to each other, which was great. t to a point and then I was looking out at the sky and when it wasn't snowing across us there was the moon

And it was beautiful. The ISS space station was going over, you had the planes going over, you had the amazing stars, you could see the Milky Way. It was astonishing and I began thinking about everybody who was awake.

And life continuing, you know, it's that T. S. Elliott line about the still point in the moving world. We were very much that And Quite high in my thoughts was the idea that a search and rescue team might be a you know, someone might have tried to be helpful and phoned one and in Switzerland that would mean that we had to

Well my dad would definitely have to remortgage his house and various things'cause a a cup of coffee is about ten quid. So, you know I imagine a search and rescue helicopter would be more than that. Um so listening to the sounds, hoping against hope that no helicopters were coming and

You know, it begins to percolate this idea of the night as a place not of universal rest, not of universal calm. The fact that there are people working the people who are working around the clock to keep people safe, the people who are out.

when other people are indoors and you know, night is universal only in the sense that everyone goes through it. But everyone's night I began to think is very individual,'cause night is a time when you're thrown back against yourself Anyone who's been unhappily awake during the small hours knows that they are not small and we all have these brains who think, Well, yeah, I could let you sleep or I could remind you of that time that really embarrassing thing happened.

And that's what I'm discussing with you on the radio today, Richard, all my embarrassing things in Switzerland. It turns out you have family members who've spent time on the night shift and there was your mum who worked nights as a night nurse on the ward. Tell me the story she told you about a strange encounter she had one night with a patient.

When I was very young, my mum was a nurse in Wales in Swansea, and she would have been very young. She would have been in her late teens, early twenties, but she was on the night shift, she was overseeing a ward of sleeping patients. And She was doing the check and you didn't want to wake people'cause it's important, you know, sleep and night can be very healing to people. It's a very calm time sometimes. And she was going round with her torch and she came to one patient.

And there was a black shape on his face. And this was the eye hospital, so people had had potentially surgery or things like that, so he had a bandaged face. And her immediate thought, you see a black shape, you think, Oh, maybe someone needs help, maybe they're bleeding or something like that But it became um immediately apparent that this black shape was actually a little bat that had got into the ward.

This was probably a little pipestrell bat, so uh about the size of your hand or smaller, and it was inquisitively picking at the bandages. And we don't have, you know, any blood sucking bats. In fact there are none in Europe. Bats have had a very bad time. I blame Bram Stoker for a lot of it. and you know, but a little perfectly probably benign bat on this man's face. And my mother was faced with a choice

Do you turn the lights on? Do you raise the alarm? Do you wake up a c you know, a uh c some people it's nightmarish the scene. You know, all of these people with bandaged faces, do you turn the lights on and shout bah? No, no you don't. But also she didn't really want to let senior uh nurses know because this was an opportunity for her just to sort the situation out. So she went to the linen cupboard, she got a towel and she wrapped the bat up.

And she flapped it out the window, and everyone slept on and everything was fine. In the night, that sort of story, that sort of encounter, it's closer. There are things in the night that occasionally crop up, that we have these meetings, and there's a lovely line in the Robert Frost poem, Acquainted with the Night. where he encounters a clock, the bright face of this clock, and it says that the time is neither wrong nor right.

And I think there is an uncanniness about the night, and it is a thing where there are magical wonders that lurk. There's frightening things but there's also amazing things in the night. It is a place of encounters and everybody's at a slight disadvantage and advantage in the night, if you know what I mean. And the night is a time to see maybe known things with fresh eyes, or encounter things only ever dreamt of. One of the most terrifying nights of my childhood was lying in bed one night.

And there was a possum outside in the tree. And I had no idea what noise. The noise that possums make at night when they're, I don't know, feeling like they want to get it on with another possum. But they tend to make this awful noise. They make this I don't know if it's the same in the UK, but they make this And if you're a little boy lying in bed that just sounds I don't know.

Like some awful demon from hell. It was it was perfectly it was doing it all night. So I lay there not daring to move in my bed in that state of perfect terror. Do you remember having nights like that as a boy? Yeah, absolutely. I remember being very interested in every night at about midnight hearing the people coming home from the pub. And they always seemed quite jolly. And I remember thinking, Well, that's something to aim for, isn't it? You know, I'll come home singing a song and

Also we were underneath the flight path of the planes coming into Bristol Airport. Um this was in south west England, so they'd be coming in from Scotland or all over Europe. And our house was the point where the engines changed notes. So you'd hear them coming in and then they would change very subtly and then they'd begin their descent.

And likewise I could hear the trains that were going from Bristol to London and you'd get these express trains which seemed to kind of grow out of the night and then roar past and then dwindle away. And I think there's a poetry to this, but also it's a way of building memories. Speaking of your mother's experience, fifteen years or so ago I spent a couple of weeks in hospital and the hospital wards at night were really quite strange and peaceful. I was on heavy painkillers, so it was

Strangely delirious time, but y you've had your own experience with that in recent years. Tell me you when you contracted COVID, how ill were you when you were actually brought in by ambulance into your local hospital? I wasn't well. I wasn't well. I mean we'd been very careful because we didn't want to give COVID to other people if we caught it. But as it turned out, we were the ones who needed to worry. When we caught it, my my partner and I.

And she rallied, I suppose, about a week and a half in and I really did not. My blood oxygen went through the floor. three paramedic in in hazmat suits turned up and took me away and I was sped to hospital in an ambulance. I was rushed in. I was not in a good way. And I think of it really as being medically sectioned, you know. Everyone was very

kind, but there was no question of me leaving. Dan did you know you were dying at the moment? Did you understand that or did you did the doctors actually have to tell you that you were in danger of dying? I think their actions even in that state spoke to me that I was in danger. Someone told me I was dying later. And they'd caught me in time. They took a lot of blood, they did a lot of tests, they put drips in and things like that.

Weirdly I was still in that state where th I felt that I had some agency and I could bargain with them, but there was none of that. There was they were I described the hospital in that moment as a place of great care but no comfort. Because there wasn't time.

And when eventually I was put on award and I was on one to one care for a while, a doctor came and had a chat with me and he was from the critical care unit and he said that they were minded to intubate because my blood oxygen they were giving me as much oxygen as they could, but my blood oxygen was still in retrospect terrifyingly low. And then someone went away and phoned my mother and they gave her all the details and they said that she should sleep with her phone in her hand.

because if they did intubate, which involves putting the patient in a induced coma so that you can put oxygen directly into the lungs, essentially you put tubes into me. For my own good, obviously it was all for my own good. But to sleep with your phone in your hand and she was four hundred miles away. And I had a conversation with the doctor about dying alone.

Definitely. I remember that. Because Anna, my partner, was only about five miles away but she couldn't have come in. My parents were a long way away. And you begin to think about all of the people that you'll miss and all of the conversations that you wish you'd had. I mean all I was told to breathe deeply and I kept waking up And I was so angry'cause I had one job, you know?

And isn't it strange that I had all these thoughts of people I'd like to talk to and messages I'd like to send, but I did nothing at all. I lay there, feeling profoundly confused and sad. And in the morning I was still there and my blood oxygen ticked up a bit. But strangely in the night also I w I had a a voice come to me twice. And it was only in retrospect that I realised that I think the voice was the writer and playwright Alan Bennett. The northern writer and playwright Alan Bennett.

came to me in the night. And it's the most I think if we had the choice of Guardian Angel we'd choose someone like, you know, Judy Dench or something, wouldn't we? Dame Judy Dench, something like that. Alan Rickman, someone someone with gravitas. And I'm not saying Alan Bennett doesn't have gravitas but

There are a couple of things here. He's not dead. So I don't know what what business he has coming to people in America. And what did Guardian Angel Alan Bennett say to you? Well he was very passive aggressive. And this voice just came to me and said I'm surprised you're not taking more of an interest. What does it mean? I don't know, but I f I found it profoundly unhelpful and passive aggressive. And I think the second time it happened I said sod off Alan or words to that effect.

And it's funny because I think that the origin of this was the would be the fact that when I was a child I had audio books. And Alan Bennett read things like, you know, The Wind in the Willows and The Winnie the Pooh books and Alice in Wonderland, things like that. So maybe his his voice is now hardwired into my head as a safe space of

stories that end well. So he was coming to me. But it was a strange thing and the irony of all of this is that wi writing the overnight book I'd thought for ages, oh it would be great to get into a hospital. It would be great to observe the night shift. And then the pandemic happened and I thought well we'll put that one on ice because it seems a bit unreasonable to ask people

for their time. I thought, well, I'm not going to bother people in the NHS at this key, you know, moment of strain. But if you turn up in an ambulance with a blood oxygen of eighty three, they let you stay for about a week. Which as a writer, if you survive to write it down, you've done your job, I think.

What kind of things are you hearing lying in bed or sensing about you when you're going through that long dark night where you're angry with yourself because you keep falling asleep when it's your job to stay awake? to keep breathing and keep breathing deeply. How aware were you of what was going on around you in the ward that that awful night?

Well, I think it's a strange one because you're hearing the machines around you. You're hearing your internal monologue, I guess. But also time ceases to flow in a normal way. I think of my hospital stay as quite twilight and actually I went back and had a bit of a debrief with the consultant who was looking after me and the charge nurse, the ward sister who with her team of nurses

was keeping me alive. And I said to them, you know, were the curtains drawn around my bed the whole time because I don't remember daylight and they said, No. Day and night were happening around you like they were for everyone. But I think as with Being told to breathe deeply and waking up because you've gone to sleep, I think my body was taking charge, you know? As you can tell, I have a busy brain. I like to chat, I like to think and go over things.

And I don't know that's always helpful when you need core function to get you out of a hole. And I think my body just put my brain to sleep, you know? Put your brain to sleep. Tune it all out, just rest. and try and and breathe, breathe, breathe. I think that's what happens. everything was ambient. There was kind of ambient fury, there was ambient noise of the machines that were helping me stay alive. And I think that's kind of true of the night in general.

So as you recovered, you went out into the world to meet people who work on night shifts. And you went on that overnight ferry in Scotland that travels between Aberdeen and the north of Scotland, and then onto the Orkneys and Shetland Islands. You went there in summer and in winter. How different did those two voyages in summer and winter look to you and feel to you? Well the winter one happened kind of perpendicular to the summer one'cause we were in a force nine gale veering cyclonic.

Which is the sort of thing that you hear on the shipping forecast over here with the BBC, but it's quite another thing to be on a ship when that's happening to you, you know? I'm astonished the ferry went out in that weather in the first place. It was about on the line of where they would sail. I mean, it was interesting because I had some access to the bridge and the crew and you're on the bridge with these incredibly hardy sailors.

And they have sea legs, which means that they can stand securely and they don't run into the walls and become instantaneously violently sick, which is how you can tell a civilian on a ship like that. They just stood there and they were sailing, but even then when they turned the big lights on to face ahead and you saw these waves gianting towards you, you know, and they were eight meter high waves. And hanging that.

and crazed and marbled, black and white, even even the captain, the master of the ship, said, Okay, I think we've had enough of that. We don't have to see what we're going into and Well Dan, is that worse? What is worse? Is it worse? pitching around without seeing those giant marbled waves you're talking about, or is it worse when you can see?

It's gonna happen anyway, I think, was the general view, and the way that the whole ship was ringing like Thor's hammer was whacking into the front, into the bow. if you imagine that the ship was going down a motorway and demolishing those overbridges, the concrete overbridges every hundred yards, that's how it sounded. We weren't going straight into the s into the storm.

the navigator plotted this course that would be a slight sort of I suppose forty five degrees to the oncoming waves, but even so And you know, there were lots of other ships out that night and we were a roll on roll off ferry and we had stabilizer fins, so even though the up and down was quite pronounced, the roll

side to side was not as bad as it could have been. But there were other ships servicing oil rigs and fishing vessels out on the North Sea that night without stabilizer fins. And your h your mind and your heart goes out to these people who are being beset by

the ultimate in elemental forces, you know. And at one point a search and rescue helicopter flew down the side of us on its way to Aberdeen and I think in that moment we were all I'm very much aware that somebody potentially was in a far worse state than we were. Dan, being in that situation when you can't see out the window, it's perfectly dark at night in these gale force winds and these incredibly dangerous seas.

Pitching about without your inner ear being able to stabilize. I know you've not been to space, but I wonder if that's what it must look feel like. Being pitched around in an aircraft where you really are not at all certain which way is up and which way is down? I think potentially. I mean the things that you have in that that are in common with being in a ship out in space or or or on the North Sea is the fact that you feel very small. You feel very helpless.

And I think night is sometimes a time when the sense that we are in charge breaks down. It's a time of vulnerability. It's a time where you wake up in the morning with the news cycle and sometimes things have happened in the night. Probably shouldn't mention this, with the ashes. 'Cause I'd go to sleep with the ashes and things would be going relatively well. And this has happened also to me with a number of elections in the States and things like that where

Things seem relatively fine and I go to sleep and I wake up in the morning and I think it's my fault of course for going to sleep, isn't it? I've taken my eye off the ball here. Maybe if I'd just stayed awake I could have willed a slightly different outcome, you know. Ben Stokes seemed in perfect control when I went to sleep, but he's had some sort of like catastrophic A psychic break during the night and here we all are.

To that end the Australian cricket team is going to organise for you to be drugged or something to put you to sleep because that's how we ensure victory is You going to bed, Dan? Well it turns out yes, I am the kryptonite of England and Wales cricket board. And I th I think there is that sense though of being out of control. I mean it's something that we strive to avoid.

in life but you can't be in control when you're asleep. And one of the things that happened after getting out of hospital that I is that I had night terrors because of the things that had happened to me. And the book is full of people and situations who are going into the night when other people are at rest in order to help or in order to in some way alleviate.

People whose nights are not calm, people whose nights are not in control, you know, be that search and rescue helicopters, be that people who go out on the streets of London to try and offer some comfort and alleviate the suffering of of rough sleepers. At the heart of the project for me was this idea of service.

Service is an interesting word and not terribly fashionable, but I it's one of the great things I think that you can do as a person is to give of your time, to give of your life in the service and care of somebody else. And that doesn't necessarily mean that you work in a hospital. It could be that that you work in the postal service. It could be that you're up very early and giving of your night to bake bread for people. That you're m nursing young children, this amazing time when young parents

Often young mothers are awake during the night nursing to infants, often incredibly young. I mean everyone starts, I believe this is the way it works with very young infants. You don't really start age three. I've learnt recently. Children do not know how to sleep, they don't really know how to behave when they emerge and you are there in the night in this amazing state of love and goodness. How to put this, crazed uh trying to negotiate.

And that's something that's happened to me recently and it gives me a renewed respect for people sort of going through the night and yet it's not necessarily discussed. It's something that people I think at a biological level try and forget, how harrowing it can be.

Yes, you have become a father in recent weeks, is that right? Yes. We had our first child on january the fifteenth. So at the moment I'm three and a bit weeks in. It's been a long year already and we are just in February, so you know. I'm enjoying it. He's a delightful chap when he's asleep or when he's happy, but when that is you know, only he is the judge. We're doing our best to facilitate a nice time for him.

No, but it but now you know what that long night is like with the baby, where the baby won't go to sleep, doesn't want to go to sleep or can't go to sleep and y you have to deal with that profound exhaustion that's if you're lucky is is sustained by overwhelming love. It's a strange experience. It is. It's one of these things that

nothing can prepare you for. Every experience of parenthood is different. I mean there are broadly similar themes, but you either get a child who will sleep or they won't, and even if they do at this stage, they may then change their mind. You know, I'm the sort of chap who goes to the Arctic and meets polar bears and yet I would say that parenthood is as fascinating, is as eye opening, is as wonderful. It gives you that overview effect as doing these things which I think, you know, we

we tell ourselves a real adventure is going into space, a real adventure is going out in a force nine gale, things like that. But actually no, the things that define us often I think are acts of care, they're acts of love. They're how you are when you're at your limit. And it's interesting to me that people don't talk about motherhood, fatherhood, young parenthood in those terms and I I have so much respect. for people who care, I think, caring professions are not celebrated enough.

It was notable that during the pandemic in the UK there was a drive by Boris Johnson's government to clap for medical people, clap for nurses, clap for doctors. Whereas I would say that paying them a decent whack would actually show more empathy and alleviation in that way. It's all very well us saying we appreciate what you do. But you try doing it, mate. And I think parenthood is one of those things where you really come up at the sharp end of it. And it gave me a sort of renewed

respect and empathy and hopefully kind of patience and love. I hope I feel galvanized by it. At the same time, absolutely knackered Richard. Absolutely knackered.

You mentioned service before there, Dan, and that seems to be a common thread in the stories of the people you met who are up at nights working in the secret world of night. Service seems to be the thing that binds the workers in those places together. and gives them a sense of what they do is worthwhile and needed.

And that's the thing that carries them through the night. I think that's right. I think there's a shared humanity to it. You know, the bakers who bake the bread are not going to sit and watch you eat it, you know, they're just sending it into the world and there is this Sense of a job well done. My grandfather worked in the Royal Mail on the mail trains.

for quite a lot of the twentieth century. After he came back from World War two he was on the Bristol to Plymouth TPO travelling post office train and he did that job until the seventies. And that involved getting up early and going to Bristol Temple Mead station and getting on his mail coach with a lot of mail that was then sorted and

amazingly dropped off and also picked up en route. They had these apparatus at the side of the line, so the steam train would be going through with an express and my grandfather's coach would be next to the loco at the front.

For various reasons. I mean, he would say so he could get tea from the engine at various points, you know, get some hot water. But also with the bags that you would hang out the side of the coach and pick up at the side of the coach in next You really didn't want any passengers sticking their head out of the window at an inopportune time because then there's a lot of paperwork to fill out.

So he would be going down and mail would be bouncing into the coach and being dropped off at speed and people would be sorting. And all of this is the work that was hymned in the nightmare film with a verse commentary by W. H. Orden and music by Benjamin Britton in the thirties. So he was doing that. And he would always talk of his time on the railways and in the Royal Mail with a great sense of pride because

It was a national service that people could send a letter down in Cornwall and as part of a network of these trains it would be delivered to Edinburgh the next morning. You know, you put a first class stamp on it and it would arrive. And these stories that he would tell me of the mail getting through even if the weather was awful or there were accidents and things like that. The mail always got through.

And in the same way whatever happens, this sense of a vital service of people being not just a cog in a machine, but people being proud to serve. A lot of the people on his train, in fact all of them would have been through the Second World War. You had this sense of community, this sense of responsibility and this great sense of pride, my mother likewise in the NHS. And a lot of the people I spoke to, you know, the search and rescue helicopter team, many of whom are ex RAF.

going out in a helicopter to they don't know what. They would get a call, a briefing call, they'd be in the air within a set number of minutes. And one of the crew that I was talking to I went to the Rescue nine one two which are based in Humberside. He said we would always go. We would always go. occasions. I think freezing fog is the time you wouldn't fly in a helicopter, or if there is so much mist or fog at the location that you're

forward facing infrared cannot see. They're a rescue asset. If they can't rescue, there's no point in them being there. But he said we would always go and you have around the clock, around the UK, around the world These teams of people who are on standby, be it in the emergency services, search and rescue, mountain rescue, The R and L I here, the lifeboats in the UK.

It's astonishing to me that that is manned entirely by volunteers, people who have jobs during the day and they have a pager next to their bed at night and if that goes off they get to the coastal station and they launch out to sea. But at the same time, the amount of people I've spoken to who don't see it as heroic, they see it as just what you do. You would go and you would try and help your fellow man.

I think for people who aren't aware of that, for people who maybe don't know this is going on in their name, to discover what goes on round the clock, but particularly in the hours of darkness. Darkness is dangerous.

These people you're meeting are living in a s kind of a secret world too, aren't they? Because it's at night. Because they're often out at sea or in a port or in some other part of the world which is hidden from the waking world. No one really understands what it is that they do. And is that I wonder if that's another thing that builds camaraderie between them, the fact that they operate in a kind of a hidden secret world from the rest of us.

I think that's right. There was the case of the ship, the container ship the Ever Given, got stuck in the Suez Canal. And suddenly everyone was aware of global shipping, global logistics. Everybody on on the T V was a sudden an expert on global logistics. But it often takes something to go wrong. for people to suddenly realize that these things exist. I mean, we're surrounded by things. If you look around, the majority of the things

where they are will have come on a container ship, probably. Everything is connected, but it is a hidden world. We rely on it hugely and so if you get a blockage like the series canal, it's very much like the world of logistics is choking. But I think we are very good at ignoring things that just work.

We are very good at taking things for granted and it takes something like a pandemic, it takes something like a catastrophe to actually acknowledge that there are these worlds and systems and people who are Helping the world go round, they're keeping us safe, they're keeping us replenished with things. And the world is often very close to going wrong. If these people don't turn up for work. We aren't very far away from being in trouble with this unless we keep things ticking over.

One of these classes of people who live in a kind of a secret world but are still operating in plain sight are people who sleep rough, homeless people. And so in London you were with two overnight workers named Claire and Ella who work for a charity called St Mungoes. Tell me about your nights that you spent with them, what they do and the kinds of people you encountered with them.

I went out for a single night with these amazing ladies and the things I saw were really, really distressing and they and their colleagues are out every single night of the year. An offering not just empathy and sympathy, but they are trying to alleviate the suffering, you know, and the charity is named after St. Mungo, who was, you know, that's famously what he did.

You were called out to attend to a couple who were sleeping rough in a side street off Edgeware Road. What was going on then? The couple were in a concrete garage, a concrete lot. They had a broken tent, they had some boxes. It was winter at the time, I think it was November when I was out with St. Mungoes. It was bitterly cold. And they needed help. The sprinkler system for some reason was operating, so they were wet, they were cold. They were frightened. They were exhausted.

But something has gone wrong when you I and I say you choose to stay in this place, the choice has become so limited, I think, to move around. You don't want to get in trouble with the police because we have criminalised homelessness around the world. You know, we have criminalized people who are in need that Yn ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl sy'n ymwneud â phobl

In the same way that global logistics, when it goes wrong, you notice fairly quickly the world runs out of lo fairly quickly unless these things are happening and then suddenly it's a crisis. Many people are only a couple of paychecks away from not making rent.

And if they don't have the support network of family, things like that, they can find themselves Sofa surfing, and then you run out of patience with your friends, and then suddenly you find yourself just wandering the streets, and then suddenly you find yourself homeless. this is a story that repeats often. And then the night in particular is a dangerous time. You're surrounded by

people who potentially have had a drink, people who are not the nicest people who are roaming the streets. You're surrounded by other homeless people. You get involved with drink or drugs to try and alleviate whatever's going on. And it spirals.

One of the things that St Mungoes in London are incredibly good at is trying to get people back to where they came from in the country, you know, because there is this Feeling this vibe, this myth that London will be the answer, the Dick Whittington thing, that the streets are paved with gold, or there is so much going on in London that someone will be able to help you.

and there is a initiative called No Second Night where people will try if they see a newly homeless person and there is a network of people who can be in touch with them, be they street sweepers or the police

uh an outreach worker will try and meet that person, they will try and ascertain their history and they will try and get them back to where they come from in the country because London is so full of people in need, that sometimes going back to where you just left you will have a better chance

of finding help, of finding some sort of solace to work yourself out, because going to a big city, you think the answers lie there. And often you find yourself in more trouble than the thing that has driven you out. When you go out to see people have been sleeping by What kind of places are they attracted to? Where do they go in order to keep themselves

safe or dry in order to pass the night? Well the irony is that they often go to places that are not conducive to sleep, they're not conducive to rest. They'll go to brightly lit places like railway stations.

It depends as well. Men and women, your needs are different because whilst men can walk the streets at night, it's a very dangerous and different proposition for a woman to Female rough sleepers will often try and hide during the night and be out during the day, whereas for men it can be the other way around.

Because you're very vulnerable. You want to be somewhere where you are visible and safe and at the same time hidden from the world because the world is frightening and people are at the end of their tether. They've not necessarily slept There's a reason that mental health among people on the streets is so poor, because if you take away sleep, you take away the brain's ability to reset.

I remember when I was at university I was visiting my parents and I gave some money to a guy who needed to get into a shelter and As a reflex, I said to him, All right mate, I hope that helps. Good night. Sleep well, sweet dreams. And it's just a reflex. And he met my eye. And he said, I don't dream anymore. It's never left me that.

How did the COVID pandemic lead to some new approaches in dealing with homelessness in places like London? Well, it's amazing a bit I mean, to draw an analogy, you know, we couldn't have meetings at home until the pandemic when suddenly everyone could get on, you know, Zoom and things like that and teams and suddenly it was possible. Because it was necessary in the same way it was possible to house all the homeless people in London.

it was possible to do that because needs must there's a pandemic on you don't want the s the streets full of bodies. they could do it in the same way when we have a royal wedding. Oh, isn't it amazing you can house all these people on trains and whatever in London. You know? Oh great. It was possible the whole time. You just You know, it's not where you felt your resources were best put, you know. So the pandemic was helpful to show what is possible.

But as with so much post pandemic, we've returned, you know, it's not the new normal, it's the old normal. People are very good at forgetting. And it shouldn't take a raw wedding, it shouldn't take a pandemic for these systems to be put in place because people deserve Second chances and respect, I think, because as I say it could be any one of us.

For the last couple of years, you and a friend have been leading night walks at a writer's festival in this little town called Wigtown in Scotland. What do you do on these walks? That that's really fun to do. Wigton is a beautiful little town in a place called Dumfries and Galloway, which actually contains a dark sky zone. If you want to observe the stars, this is an amazing place to do it because there's a lack of light pollution there.

And there's ancient forest and you can go in and you can just see the sky as our ancestors would have a long time ago. You can see it undiminished by the lights of a city or a town. We take out groups of people and and we give everyone redhead torches which allow their eyes to open up so they can really appreciate what's going on in the night sky and I poetry and music and readings and we go out and we really just observe and we open up our eyes and we open up our our minds to what's going on.

And I always do that with my friend Elizabeth, who's a dark sky ranger, which I just think is a great job title to have. She will shine her laser up in the sky and point out Andromeda, she'll point out these star systems and tell the stories that ancient civilizations projected onto these stars and it's a lovely night. Often I'll play music to people and I actually play a recording of the nightmare, the Auden and Britain recording and it

quite hypnotic. So you find this group of people as they walk along falling into step as they listen to This is the nightmare crossing the border, bringing the check and the postal order, letters for the rich, letters for the poor, diddle da diddle and we're all in sync with each other. Afterwards we might have a drink and everybody's full of enthusiasm and full of story and they're going to go home and w see the night and experience the night with new eyes. And it's a lovely thing.

It's a privilege to do it. You say you want people to feel the grace something like the grace of the overnight. What is that feeling, that grace? Is it a kind of comfort or a freedom or something else? I think the grace of the overnight is the fact that we exist in the world and the world exists in the universe and we have all of these cycles and systems operating around us

Not all the the world goes to sleep when we go to sleep. And I think to be mindful of that, to open a window and listen, to look up at the sky, to just Think about the people who are still awake and operating around us. The natural world is still going on around us. There are still cycles in the seasons that are happening. The ISS is still going over us. The world is actually full of life. and movement and labour when we are choosing to sleep and much of that actually is for our good to help us.

That to me is the grace of the overnight. It's happening whether you like it or not. And it's happening often

Dan every night on the BBC at some point just after midnight this music starts to play in. It's become quite famous. Dan, what is this music? It's really lovely, but what is it and why has it become such a loved institution in the UK?

So that is um Sailing By by Ronald Binge, which always comes in ahead of the late ships, as my friend Ron Brown calls it, and he is an announcer on Radio for And the shipping forecast probably will be Very familiar to your listeners on A B C because someone like Jim Maxwell will uh pause, at least he used to, on Long Wave and say, and now we are leaving the cricket for the shipping forecast and it

seen as this kind of quite I suppose nostalgic throwback. It was a hundred years old last year, and it is a system of giving a forecast for the weather conditions in the seas around the UK and it was put in place in the early twentieth century to go out on the then new BBC radio to tell shipping what was to happen, what was to come. And it's been celebrated for a long time as this most beautiful found poetry. Many people find the shipping forecast very

Soothing and comforting. Yeah, the language of it. I mean I have some here. Maybe I can read you a little bit of what the shipping forecast is. I would love you to please. Okay. This is BBC Radio four. Now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency at zero zero one five on Wednesday the first of march.

The general synopsis at eighteen hundred High Hebrides ten forty three expected pharaohs ten thirty nine by eighteen hundred Wednesday. The area forecasts for the next twenty four hours. Viking, north at Sierra, northerly, veering northeasterly, five or six, occasionally seven at first, becoming variable three or less later in southeast. Fair. Good. So this has become like compelling radio for people. Is it st in all honesty though, Dan, in an age of the internet, is it still needed?

Ah, that's a big question. I think, you know, what is necessary? If we only had necessary things, I think our world would be very anemic. It's nice to have, in other words. It's nice to have. I don't know that there are many seafarers who still set their watch to be awake at zero zero four eight of an evening to listen in religiously because we now have, you know, we have satellites.

weather forecasts and things like that. But actually the shipping forecast itself, it has a huge place in the national psyche of the UK and maybe around the world. People listen to it to feel comforted that it's being broadcast. They find it potentially soporific and it's something that is

something they listen to before they go to sleep or perhaps in bed. And I think it does have this found poetry to it. It is rhythmic, it is a voice it is a voice broadcasting to those potentially in peril on the sea, and people have taken it to their hearts, generations of people. The idea of the BBC ceasing broadcast, I think, would be the equivalent of the Ravens leaving the Tower of London. Well maybe that's maybe part of the appeal of it is as you say, it's very comforting and

If you do it in the right tone of voice, you can have this feeling at that time of night, if you're hearing that being reported with that lovely music, that really someone's looking out for you out there. It's all right. The world's okay. You're safe. It's a safe feeling.

At one point I was talking to people who work on nuclear submarines, the shadowy world of the submarines from the British Navy that carry a nuclear deterrent. And when they leave Britain and they dive for a period of months, they enter a um a state that is known as the forevernight, which lasts maybe three or four months, and that submarine will be somewhere in the seas of the globe, and often what it will be doing is listening.

one of the checks that they do to make sure all's okay with the UK is they listen in to Radio Four, BBC Radio Four, and if Radio Four is off air, as this, you know, helpful but non committal officer of the Royal Navy told me then they would have a pretty good idea that something might have gone wrong in London. And that would be added to the list of things that maybe they need to do something about. So the fact that Radio four is cozy and it is nostalgic, there is that. But it also

ever since I was told that story carries this kind of like vague sense of threat as well. So I think it's good for all of us that Radio Four continue to broadcast it because the alternative feels fairly apocalyptic. Yes. Dan, it's been amazing speaking with you. Thank you so much for sharing these wonderful stories about the magic and mystery of the world at night. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Richard. It's been lovely to talk to you.

Dan Richards' book is called Overnight. Journeys, Conversations, and Stories After Dark. Today's conversation was made on the lands of the Gadigal people, produced by Alice Moldovan, executive producer is Nicola. I'm Richard Feidler. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to a podcast of the first time. Yeah. Please go to the website. C. Net.au slash conversation.