Lights came about because I wanted to write something about the family holidays I went on as a kid, specifically the very particular atmosphere you get in a caravan park at night. The place where Charley is staying, and indeed the shower block she visits is ripped straight from my childhood; I was even told the same story Charley is listening to at the beginning, although I think it was a mischievous older cousin that passed the tale on to me.
I sometimes think that our early childhoods become our mythologies, reinforced by the stories told again and again by family members at Christmases and weddings- “Do you remember when Daniel got us thrown out the slots?” or “Were you there when we saw the lights in the sky, and Nan fell in the ditch laughing?”. I look back on those days, and particularly the holidays we took in that caravan, and they seem both impossibly distant and gloriously strange.
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