It's late. It's dark. I yawn in the back of the car while my parents drive us home. It's the 1970s, so there's no such thing as hand-held electronics to keep me occupied, unless you count a calculator with a red LED seven-segment display, which I don't have with me, or possibly one of those pre-tamagotchi hand-held games, which I don't have at all. We never had those kind of games — they probably seemed like a waste of money to my parents. You had to buy a different one if you wanted to play a different game.

I look out the window, peering over the wooden window sill. Yes, cars used to have wooden parts, back before plastic was everywhere. The sky is completely dark and the headlights only properly reveal the road in front of the car. There's just enough backscattered light, though, to get an impression of the surroundings, and they are weird. I know it's trees and bushes I'm looking at along the side of the road, but they look like cotton wool. Lumps and balls of cotton, clumped up and piled along the roadside, grey and shadowy. I don't know why I've never seen those kind of trees again since then; maybe you have to be under six years old for them to look like that.

Out the front of the car I can't see much — I'm too low down to see the road, so it's just the black sky over my parents' shoulders, until we come to a stretch of road with street lamps. They alternate between the left and right sides of the road. First, a lamp on the left strikes a pair of light rays at us, hooking onto the two windscreen wiper hinges just above the (wooden) dashboard, grabbing the car and hauling it along the road. Then as those ones fade out, the next lamp on the right latches on in the same way. Left, right, left, right, the car swings from one lamppost to the next.

I open a book and try to read a bit, but it's distracting, the way the light comes and goes. As we move under a lamppost, a patch of light forms, moves diagonally forward to the other side of the car, and I get to read a few words as it passes over my book before disappearing. The next patch of light forms on the other side and scoots the other way across the car. But I can't read — I keep finding, with each burst of light, I'm just re-reading the same few words I read last time.

Then we're back into a dark section; I slide the bookmark back into place and I'm left with my thoughts. Time to watch the cotton wool balls out the side window again.