MISSING THE METEORS

This year’s Perseid Meteor Shower peaked in the early hours of a recent Mid-August morning and, despite being fascinated by many things astronomical, and having known that they were coming from news reports I read on the internet, in the end I still failed to actually get up to have a look at yet another celestial spectacle, and point my camera at the heavens to try to get some blurry proof that I was there.

I’m just not committed enough, obviously.

I could, of course, make all the excuses. None of these would have stopped a committed stargazer like Sir Patrick Moore back in the day, of course, who presumably had the kind of single-minded dedication that led to him eventually getting that knighthood, I suppose, something I suspect I’m never likely to be under consideration for given my lack of commitment to anything very much. However, in my (rather feeble) defence, there was some talk of the moon being too bright to make any significant spectacle, and forecasts of significant cloud cover, but I suppose I should only really admit that I really, really needed to get some sleep, and, at this time of the year, the light mornings and evenings do tend to make the spectacle of the heavens a sight that I see far too little of, as the darkness coincides almost exactly to the few hours that I do seem able to sleep through.

Come the inevitable wintertime when I’m battling my way through the snow and ice on a pitch black evening, it will only be the spectacular skies above that will make any of it seem worthwhile and I will find myself gazing once more in awe at the beauty of the stars glinting away on that inky backdrop, before grumbling ever so slightly over the fact that the “glass half full” part of me will tell me that a clear and cloudless night means spectacular starscapes, and the “glass half empty” part will know that I’ll be scraping a massive amount of ice from my car windows in the morning. A small ticket price to pay, I know, for the Greatest Show on Earth, but somehow it always feels like a right royal pain come the icy dawn.

As for the Perseids, well, there’s always next year, of course, and as and when and even if I go out and buy myself a proper telescope maybe I’ll finally have a genuine excuse to sit up half the night. Telescopes are, after all, relatively cheap to buy I’ve recently discovered. Not a pittance, though, and not the sort of thing you might find inside a Christmas Cracker or a Kinder Surprise egg, but a lot cheaper than I always thought they were when other, more privileged kids had such things when I was the kind of nipper who could only squint at the sparkling skies in wonder. I’ve had my eye on a little portable number that might double as a bird-spotting scope, and I think that I might yet be sorely tempted, if I choose to sacrifice some other treat for a while. After all, for sake of just a few quid, I get the the chance of seeing the whole universe in return. I imagine that some chilly nights sitting in a deckchair with a flask of coffee at my side might soon be on the cards.

Maybe Napoleon was right, about us being a nation of shopkeepers, because a nation of such needs people to actually go shopping, preferable without the aid of a housebrick,  to make the system work, and so everything really does seem to come back to shopping in the end.