We spent the weekend strolling up and down Regent and Oxford Streets and gazing at their lights. Actually, not as wonderful as I'd expected, and the best were those provided by the shops themselves.
Being a lights lover, and having roamed the globe in search of the best lit places, I think I've settled on the Disney parks as having cornered the market. Disneyland Paris, in particular, has spent vast amounts of money preserving the sort of twinkling ambience that would have Wrex in several kinds of ecstasy. But despite their having almost bottomless pockets, the problems with vandalism blight their efforts, also.
In the early days of the Paris park, there was (and still is) a walk-through attraction called the
Alice's curious labryinth , which features eight-foot-high hedges, framing a delightful maze with subtle lighting for the evenings. The most stunning feature was the inclusion of myriad twinkling lights in the bushes themselves, which imbued the maze with a delightful and mysterious aura when you walked it in the dark. Within twelve months, so severe had the damage been from the Parisian natives' interference, that the Park management not only gave up attempting to replace the lights in the bushes but actually closed the attraction in the evenings, thus losing one of the most stunningly envisaged designs in the Park.
There are those it seems, whose main delight in life is to destroy that which others find beautiful.
