There's a great old progressive rock track called the Nightwatchman. I don't know who its by, but its someone like ELP, King Crimson or Brian Eno and has some haunting electric guitar chords which wail into the sky.
I was in the town of Ribe tonight and wandered out from the Hotel Dagmar at 22:00 (in the daylight) to take the tour of the town with the Nightwatchman. There were about 30 of us that had decided to join him as he sang his verses to us, the town and the sky and patrolled to the edges of Ribe, which is a small mediaeval town in southern Denmark.
It did progressively get darker, but the photo I took of the Hotel at the end of the tour was somewhat later, when the hotel was shutting off the lights to leave just candles burning for the short night.
The town of Ribe was once a major centre in Denmark; the largest trading port and did well until around 1580 when there was a bad town fire and then 1635, when there was terrible flood, followed by plague from which Ribe didn't ever really recover its trading position.
"Dronning Dagmar ligger i Ribe syg - Queen Dagmar lies in Ribe, sick", as the old Danish folk tune goes,
In some towns in Europe you see the three XXX on signs and as a symbol. Amsterdam has it as the town symbol, for example. They mean, if you see them, no Fire, no Flood, no Plague.
XXX
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