Last night I was at a friend’s house after work, for way too many hours, and to clear my head I decided on walking home. Seeing as I live quite far north, this time of the year is really dark. Especially at night-time. And I love it. To make it even better: It was snowing, the air was clean and it was too late and/or early to be a great rush of drunk people and their drivers. (Meaning: It was after midnight, so people were allready downtown, but it was quite some time before 3 a.m., so people weren’t planning on going home anytime soon. This = hardly any traffic outside of downtown.)
So I was walking home, in a very straight line, with an incredibly sober head. (Yes, seriously.) And I saw everything with brand new eyes. Walking home in the middle of the night sober is not something I do very often, especially seeing as it was cold as fuck, and it always is in Bodø. But I was dressed for walking outside (still in the clothes I had worn to work…) and it all looked so nice. Except for one thing:
The few people I actually met.
I met a couple of cars, and they all stopped for me, and that was nice. Drunk guys in the car-windows making faces and/or gesticulating in a very french manner were still busy trying to score downtown, and the people that passed me on the street were too drunk and cold to bother me. But they still bothered me!
First of all: They were not dressed properly.
People being drunk and falling asleep in ditches has caused deaths in the past, and will continue causing deaths, and do you know what doesn’t help? Going to parties without bringing jackets, scarfes, appropriate headwear, mittens and shoes for walking in the snow when it’s snowing outside! Come on, people, do you want to freeze to death?
Second: They were really drunk.
I think I met 4 or 5 people on the short walk who were all so drunk that they couldn’t even keep on the pavement. They kept crossing the street, maybe 3 times back and forth. And they tried using phones to call people because they clearly had no idea where they were, and so they dropped their phones, or walked back and forth on the same street or stopped for longer periods of time, often in the middle of the road.
And the thing that made all of this even worse: They were all dressed in black, with no shiny objects to make them visible to the human-eye approaching them in a car driving 30-60 kilometers an hour.
Combine this with walking in the streets, sleeping in ditches (this is only speculation, I know…) and not paying attention due to alcohol: Accidents waiting to happen.
The thing that annoys me is that there is this great invention for walking around in the dark and still letting people see you. It’s called reflectors (I think… Refleks in Norwegian, and according to Trygg Trafikk/Safe Traffic it’s reflectors…) and it’s quite genious. They sell them everywhere, they hand them out for free some places, they come in nice and funny designs, they are easy to wear and to hide when indoors, and they make it safer to go raving around drunk in the darkness. How about that?
I actually wore 3 re
flectors, and I like them. I think that they’re awesome. You wish you had reflectors as awesome as mine! (And you can! This place sells some almost just like mine, and tons of other cool ones!)
So: Questions for the readers (I haven’t figured out the polling thing yet…):
-Do you own at least one reflector?
-Do you wear it/them?
-Is it cool to wear reflectors and survive, or is it so lame that you would rather get run over and die, or maybe not be found in the ditch you thought was your bed, ’cause it was too dark, and freeze to death?
Moralizing greetings,
Frida, with her awesome reflectors!
