Keep Watching The Skies
Life continues to trundle along in low gear, but I’m getting by and enjoying the personal freedom though now it is interspersed with moments of intense boredom and pangs of restlessness. I am in the running so to speak, for a council job in a department concerned with environmental and building issues, the term ‘environmental’ is used in a general sense here. It would be great to get back into Public Service life.
Apart from all of the terrible human tragedy, the recent spate of both natural and man made calamities (9/11, Asia, Katrina etc) have illustrated the relative importance of various occupations and skills. When disaster strikes we need Engineers, Emergency workers, Health Workers, and Construction Workers, in other words those people that have the skills to restore vital services, save lives, provide shelter, and boost morale. I think I have spent too much time in useless and effete bourgeois occupations! At the end of the day the “workers” skills are the only ones that matter, the only ones with any validity. Also let us not forget that these terrible events serve to demonstrate the awesome power of nature and are a mere taster of things to come if she is wounded and usurped by our own greedy and selfish demands.
But I digress, again I have been enjoying night time constitutionals on my bike, have to keep those wheels turning, the legs pumping its better than any substance I know! The routine night time trip includes Prestbury to Rainow via Kerridge and back through Macclesfield, the “Kerain” or the “Maccerainer” if going in the opposite direction, a real test of physical capability. The other regular is Prestbury to Bollington, across to Pott Shrigley and then back through Bolli to Pres or the “Bolipot Loop”.
The last couple of nights have been wonderfully mild and yet clear, once out of the lit zone and heading up into the Peaks, I can at last fully savor the wonder of the night sky. It is particularly good at this time of year as those classic northern constellations Cassiopeia and Ursa Major are well aspected throughout the night, but you can also see the milky way when reaching the high point before the descent into Pot Shrig. I just can’t help but stop and look up, and then of course I become transfixed. There is something about this type of landscape that resonates with the cosmos and I don’t know how to define it, a primordial quality, or a certain timelessness perhaps. Last night the sky scape was complimented by a lot of activity in the “approach stack” for Manchester Airport. The sight of aircraft circling high above the White Peak with landing lights projecting ten mile long beams was just surreal, like a scene from Close Encounters. Then an enormous meteor shot across the sky, it appeared to change from a dazzling blue white to a vivid crimson colour and projected shadows on the ground! I have never seen such a display and it was awesome. Unfortunately, the likely culprit could have been metallic “space junk” not very romantic, though maybe the prospect of having seen a piece of the earliest ventures into space burn up is quite romantic. My brother once told me that one is supposed to report sightings of burn ups or “fire balls” of this magnitude because A) they could have resulted in the atmospheric penetration of deadly radioactive “space junk” or top secret “space junk”. B) They could have been incoming Russian ICBMs. And C) meteors of this magnitude could be mere fragments of something much larger on the same course. So, I may have witnessed the prelude to the end of the world last night.