I'm with you on this.
As a kid I remember my dad asking me what my favourite thing was - and being driven at night was top of the list. We had relatives living in all sorts of rural nooks and crannies, and after our regular visits I absolutely revelled in the night-time drive back home through the country dark ('and there's no dark like a winter night in the country', as Jack observes in Conor McPherson's The Weir).
My overwhelming memory is one of mystery, but also a kind of promise of great things - I never felt any sense of threat, nor even of spookiness I think. Just a kind of wonder.
As a child I'd often be taken on weekend visits to see both sets of grandparents (distaff side and datstaff side). At that age it seemed like such a long journey, from Kent to Essex, and the drive home was certainly part of the thrill.
My father, I remember, drove a Datsun Cherry hatchback, and in the days of yore, before safety was king, my brother and I would plead with him to put the back seats down so that we might lie on our backs, looking up out of the rear window. He'd usually acquiesce. My little brother would inevitably fall asleep as Mum and Dad's chatter trailed off, but I'd just gaze on upwards and bask in the mauve and amber haze as the shadows of the street-lamps passed rhythmically over my body.
And the route itself was not without entertainments. There was the Coryton Refinery, near Tilbury, brooding beside the estuary with its moody iodine skies, flames flickering from its distant chimneys.
And the Dartford Tunnel that would herald its arrival with the abrupt delivery of a draught of cold night's air, instantly sobering as the window was wound down to toss a handful of coins into the gatekeeper's automatic maw: like some unmanned ghost train on an oddly industrial pleasure pier.
The final enchantment was that of the town, laid out and twinkling beneath us as we rounded the long shoulder of the hill that formed our final straight. It was reassuring. Such brilliance and range bore an air of self-evident permanence, and permanence is the patron spirit of home beloved of all travellers, be they old or ever so small.
Lights at night, lights within seen from without, and lights at sea—I've never lost the fascination for any of them.
They strike a chord somewhere within me.