Going to London

Flying in to Heathrow earlier this month, just after dark, our plane was forced into a holding pattern by a backup at the airport. As we circled London and its neighbouring towns I kept noticing these luminous unnatural green patches on the landscape and couldn’t make sense of what I was seeing: water treatment lagoons, or maybe giant solar panels that somehow fluoresced after dark like radioactive watch hands? The colour was as oddly green as that glass of absinthe in the Degas painting. And then it dawned on me—football fields, artificially illuminated, hundreds of them. We were truly not in Kansas, um Canada, any more.