The setting of the sun was due today at just before 8pm, so I decided that around then might be a good time to go and see what I could find. It had been an overcast day so there was not much chance of an excitingly picturesque sunset to keep me occupied. This was perhaps a good thing. Due to my escalating doubts about the validity of image-making as a means to make sense of an environment, the fact that this evening was visually rather mute came as something of a relief to me, I had to admit. I did not need another forty or so views of the same few boring fields, even if they were to have been made beautiful and serene by the subtle and endlessly shifting hues of the dusky red sky.

Instead, on this particular evening, I ended up embarking on a slightly strange waiting game where I kept on having to ask myself whether it was dark yet. Initially it was simply dull, then it slowly (and imperceptibly) became duller, and then even more dull, until at some point I reached the conclusion that the level of light must have crossed over that rather indistinct border between extreme dullness and actual genuine darkness. It was now night.

All this should perhaps have been a more moving experience. I should have been revelling in the opportunity to witness the slow transition between day and night, appreciating the poeticism of the dying of the light, enjoying all of that stuff that is normally denied to us in the evenness and predictability of our artificially lit lives. It should at least have been a chance for me to escape the realm of the light switch. But since I was also attempting to document what I was witnessing, and therefore constantly having to consult the light meters on my photographic equipment, I couldn't avoid being told - with digital precision - how light or dark it actually was.

Having said all that, despite my apparent technical diligence most of my attempts at documentation failed, and so my experiences will have to remain, so to speak, in the dark. For instance I experimented with spinning around and around, trying to remain in one spot whilst constantly scanning the horizon around me; I felt I'd reached quite a remarkable speed of rotation there, and (before my inevitable loss of balance and subsequent fall to the ground) seemed to have momentarily been able to hold in its entirety the revolving sky above me. None of this appeared on camera though. All that could be made out in the gloomy footage was a small shadowy figure, bobbing slightly, perhaps engaging in an obscure dance.

I also attempted to explore horizontality, but shortly afterwards conceded defeat to the blackness of the night.