Oxford was geared up for Christmas. Many religions use the metaphor of light in the darkness. So Oxford hosted what they called a "Christmas Light Festival". As a physicist I'm programmed to study things dispassionately - objectively, we like to say. But human animals are also programmed to respond to things emotionally. So in the pictures below you see scenes in which photons are travelling towards you at 300,000,000 m/s - or you might prefer to say that you are seeing the result of self-sustaining sinusoidal electric and magnetic fields that are perpendicular to each other. You might also just say that it is very pretty. I'm sure I've quoted Bertrand Russell's remarks about light already this autumn. He pointed out that someone blind from birth could experience a wave motion on a ship and learn the Physics of light waves. But they would have no idea of our experience of light.
