A view up my back passage [click to embiggen].
Fifty years ago, as a little five-year-old on a family holiday in heatwave-hit Cornwall, my interests were in making sandcastles, singing, and writing silly little stories. In the middle of the night (nobody slept very well because of the heat), I remember I had just finished one story about a bear who pushed down a tree to make a bridge across a river, and I was so proud of it I ran into the living-room of the rented cottage where I could hear that my parents were still up watching telly, scribbled notebook in hand, to show them my achievement.
I was a little upset that they both shushed me up, and could not understand what was so much more important then me - until my father took me outside to look at the moon and to tell me that there were men walking up there. He then took me back indoors to stare at that now-historic grainy black and white footage of Neil Armstrong in a spacesuit planting a flag in the dust. All thoughts of bears building bridges were forgotten, and a long-lasting memory was ingrained...
As the media goes to town on commemorating the half-century since that momentous occasion (just about every UK channel, TV and radio, has some moon/space-themed programming going on, and there's even a Sci-Fi Prom next month), it is a happy coincidence that today also happens to be the birthday of one Stewart Armstrong Copeland. And thanks to him, with his erstwhile band The Police, we have the perfect song to play:
Moon landings 50th anniversary
0 Comments