Knackered today. Spent all night watching out for the aurora.
Didn't see it. But I'm sure, if the fog on the Tyne cleared, then the Northern Lights were in the eyes of the people of Lindisfarne. Whereas we in Bedfordshire only get aurorae when there's a blackout due to having an enormous war with Germany. And I'm not convinced it's quite worth going to all that trouble.
But the terror that the aurora drew from the Beaker Folk was as nothing compared to the combined Spring Equinox, Solar Eclipse and Supermoon we're expecting for Friday. The Gibbon Moon Folk have already fled into the woods, convinced that the Moon Gibbon, having already eaten the moon, is going to have a munch on the sun also. The Independent - of all papers - has told us that "a Supermoon, or perigee moon, happens when the full or new moon does its closest fly-by of the Earth, making it look bigger than it normally does."
A new moon - like we will have on Friday - can't be seen. How terrifying can you get, ask the Gibbon Moon people. A new moon that looks bigger than normal. Their minds, being very small, boggle.
All this, happening on top of the aurora, can only mean one thing. The Internet will be awash with fundamentalists and the Daily Express telling us the world is at an end, the earth's magnetic poles will flip, Louis Van Gaal will show signs of understanding football tactics, and Jeremy Clarkson, Alistair Campbell and George Carey will admit they were wrong all along. About everything.
Already the signs of the End of the Age are moving into place. Tony Blair, after a run of success as Middle East Peace Envoy that is rivalled only by Richard the Lionheart and Osama Bin Laden, is going off to spend more time with his money. All over England, yellow flowers are springing up. And, as the Independent points out, rare celestial events - including the equinox, of which we only have two a year, and a supermoon, of which we only have six or so - are going to break out. And I mean, how often do we get a budget in the Spring?
It's too much. We've issued tin foil hats to all the Beaker Folk and instructed them all to paint themselves green and adopt a prone position until Saturday. It won't help, should Armageddon break out, but at least it'll give us a laugh.
I remember the last eclipse. The entire British Isles were promptly covered by a blanket of thick cloud, after a run of fine, sunny days, and the only reason I noticed the eclipse was that it got quite dark about the midle of the day so that I thought we must be in for a thunderstorm.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you want to guarantee a cloudy night, prophesy something spectacular in the night sky - comets, meteor shower, moon misbehaving, whatever.
That simple fact of reality makes a complete nonsense of the Day of the Triffids plot, apart from anything else.
Our little patch of the northern home counties had a good view of the sun getting slightly smaller, and then not again. You get a lot of light out of not much sun.
DeleteI ave to admit that I fought that the aurorae was something to do with the entrails of rats and snails that go into the cookpot on midsummer eve for the midsummer night festivals.
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