Coming in as a close second: the smell of nightclubs

I'm pleased to say that there are very few things I hate. Obviously there are some; wars, genocide, the casual cruelty to the vulnerable that passes for entertainment among far too many people. Oh, and the hack-job that the producers of CSI: NY did on The Who's classic song Baba O'Riley. Even I have my limits.

There is one thing, though, that you probably wouldn't expect to see on most people's lists of things they passionately dislike. I find this odd, because it's an item that is incredibly unattractive, is universally acknowledged to be so, and is very widespread. It's the yellow sodium street light.

Street lighting has got much better over the years, and now the fashion seems to be for small, downward-pointing white lights. Unfortunately, every town of any size will be full of sodium lights, the steel columns shaped like droopy toothbrushes which cast a harsh, grainy yellow light outwards over the street. The first problem with these – and it's a fairly fundamental one – is that these lights don't really illuminate anything. Directly underneath them it's not so bad, but move any distance away and they do no more than slightly change the shadows.

If sodium lights do very little on the street, it seems to be because they save all their illuminating powers to light up people's houses. If you've ever lived in a house with one of these streetlights right outside, you'll know quite how horrible it is to walk into an unlit room at night and immediately be reminded of a motorway. Having such an unearthly colour projected into your personal living space is highly unpleasant.

That highlights another major problems with these things, actually: the light that they produce has qualities seen absolutely nowhere else in nature. Although the sun looks yellow, its light is very nearly completely white. Even in the late evening, it never reaches the lurid yellow of discharging electric current through sodium vapour. This light does strange things to your perception of colour. Red objects become black, light greens and yellows become indistinguishable from white, and yet because the light is so pervasive, your brain almost believes that it's normal. That gives you that horrible feeling that something is subtly but terribly wrong. It's most unpleasant.

(Incidentally, the fact that the light isn't as steady as it looks also helps to make it look strange. Spread your fingers and watch them as you wave them in front of a sodium light. You'll get the same "strobing" effect as if you wave them in front of a TV, and for the same reason: the light is flickering faster than you can detect, but not so fast that you can't tell that something's strange.)

The most fundamental reason for my hatred of sodium streetlights, though, is more social than anything. I grew up in a village which had almost no lighting anywhere. The only times I ever saw these lights when I was little was when I was either on a long car journey at night (and hence, I was tired and crabby) or in a big town late at night (and if you'd grown up anywhere near Colchester, you'd know why that would be a negative experience). Then there's the light pollution. If I went out into my back garden, I could look up at the sky and see a yellowish-pinkish glow over to the south (Colchester), one to the north (Ipswich) and one to the east (Felixstowe).

That's helped to associate the yellow, flickering light of sodium with the sense of being very small, very vulnerable, and surrounded. Add that to my being scared of most strangers by default, and I'm left absolutely convinced that I'm about to be mugged or screamed at or chased down the street by a bunch of psychopaths every time I walk down the street at night.

What can be done about it? Not a lot. Public constructions like that tend to last for far longer than they should, so we're going to see them around for a while. But perhaps eventually, someone might come up with a way of lighting towns at night that doesn't put me in mind of roving gangs of murderers. It's something to hope for, at least.