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Wednesday, 12 August 2009

Looking for a new Husborne Crawley

The ritual for Perseids Meteor Watching was certainly well-attended last night.  I hope that wasn't entirely down to Young Keith combining it with a Pimms Party.  But it was lovely to see so many over a four-hour spell around midnight.  But a little advice on decorum before tonight's second day of watching
The Perseid Meteors.
Consider - the comet Swift-Tuttle was an original habitant of the Solar System.  Billions of years old, this wanderer sees the awesome stretches of loneliness beyond Pluto.  Silently it sheds its dust as it wanders past the sun.  After a thousand years of floating with a cloud of its brothers and sisters, a speck of dust hits the Earth's orbit at 100,000 miles per hour.  After four billion years of cold, there is one moment of extreme heat as the meteorite burns up.  And somewhere below, in Husborne Crawley, some smug get with a knowledge of Kirsty MacColl songs shouts out "it's only a satellite!"
Let's get this straight.  It's wrong to wish on space hardware.  But these are genuine, awesome, transcendent moments of divine awareness and revelation.  So, in the words of the Prophet Kirsty herself, I wish you'd care.  The correct liturgical response to seeing a shooting star is "Aaaaaaaah!" 

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