GETTING THE GREEN LIGHT

Scrunching through freshly fallen snow, I looked up at a magnificent arc of stars undergoing cosmic bad reception as the sky began shape-shifting with jerking staccato movements. A silvery rectangle materialised, then the lights concertinaed out like a Japanese sliding-screen and silhouetted the surrounding pines. The lights then reassembled, oozing smoothly like the matter of a lava lamp, before a celestial shower of stair-rods rained down. Aurora borealis had arrived.

This collision of solar-charged particles and atmospheric atoms left me ecstatic, rekindling childhood joys watching firework displays and appreciating my good fortune because seeing the northern lights is never guaranteed in Swedish Lapland. But tonight, it was -8°C and the night sky unblemished. My camera, set for long exposures, sucked out an intensely luminous shamrock-green hue naked to my eye. The aurora proved challenging to photograph, like trying to get a toddler to sit still for a school portrait yet I carried on taking pictures until my fingers froze, then watched this phantasmagoria play out until it vanished abruptly and uncloaked the starry sky once more.

I’d travelled to Swedish Lapland as the last throes of autumn transitioned to early snowfall, hoping the aurora might cast light over the darkness of a challenging year. And what better place to socially distance? Isolation is a natural state of affairs in underpopulated Sápmi, to afford Lapland it’s