16th April

A neighbour called round yesterday evening to show R his new telescope. Inevitably we all ended up out in the garden, crowding round, moongazing like eager hares. The children were once again up late; term hasn’t started yet for us, we have an extra day’s grace for some reason, although R starts his new job today – bizarre for us not be waving him off somewhere. K is still under the misapprehension that “bedtime doesn’t happen until it’s dark, silly Mummy”, so of course she deemed it right and proper that she should be bidding goodnight to the stars. And what stars there were. We are so lucky to live out here, where there are no streetlights, no hazy orange glow from a city. Just sky, huge and arching, and endless stars, holes in the floor of heaven. I am hopeless at spotting constellations, mesmerised by individual stars and planets, missing patterns (although my favourites, the pleiades, lurked slyly at the edge of my vision). The boys, young and old, squawked excitedly (in a gruff, manly fashion, of course) as they ticked them off. J has always been starstuck – when he was tiny, one of his greatest compliments was to tell me that he “loved me more than space”. His head is always filled with comets and constellations, stars and supernovas, his dream to boldly go where no man has gone before, (splitting infinitives all the way). I looked at his absorbed, enraptured face and wished I could bottle the memory and use it like perfume.

K and I just gazed and gazed, the sky wheeling above us, the earth beneath or feet giving the old illusion of being stable and stationary, while the galaxies dance. There’s a lullaby that I used to sing to both of them when they were babies, asking if they wanted the moon to play with, or the stars to run away with. As they grew older, neither could ever decide. The moon, the moon, I’d think silently, don’t leave me for the stars. Not yet.

“Are the stars looking at us?” K asks sleepily. Maybe they are, I answer. I wonder what they’d see on our pretty blue planet; oceans and forests, mountains and valleys? Or the haze of pollution and urban sprawls? “They’d like our house, I think”, says K. Hope so.