As my attention started to drift on the final leg of a 195 mile round trip the other night, I realised that the orange glow on the horizon, from whatever city/town is out there, has gone - now it's a white glow. But being white and like moonlight, it's much less obvious. In fact, I think I only really noticed because of the lack of orange glow and knowing what that would have looked like.
It won't be long before only olde fuddy-duddies will remember seeing that glow.
Back in the day, in Oz, the glow was always white from colour corrected mercury vapour lamps, & some incandescents, then those godawful sodium crap things took over.
They were still very rare in Western Australia when I went to the UK in 1971, but all over the place there.
The rule for cars driving in town had just changed to "dipped beams", but very few Brit drivers did that, driving around on their parking lights, instead, as they had for decades.
If a car had no yellow in its paint colour, it was pretty much invisible.
The same was the case for people's clothes, from the driver's point of view.
I nearly got knocked over by a dark blue "invisible taxi" on one occasion, on a zebra crossing!
On my return home, I noticed that the scourge of sodium had started to take over, there, too!
On another trip to the UK, in 1974" I parked my pink Ford Cortina hire car in a smallish car park, & went to visit some people.
On my return, after dark, I couldn't find a pink Cortina, but there was a
yellow one!
Not really that much of a hassle, as the key ring had the Reg number on it, but it had me going for a while.