The Plough and the Stars III

At our old house in France, called Marreau Haut, my bedroom was upstairs, in the eaves of the house, and had a huge wooden beam running directly through the room, cutting it in two. Other beams covered the ceiling too which gave the impression of being inside a giant treehouse all the time, surely the only way to live these days. But an even better feature than this was one which allowed me to gaze at the stars every night-the balcony built into the roof, which afforded a panoramic, sweeping view across the valley, awash with a patchwork quilt of fields.

One of the best aesethetic qualities of this region, to me at least, is the undulating depth of the landscape, so that as you take in these vistas, you could actually be in a Constable landscape painting, such is the vivid contrast of colours, the picture-perfect nature that awaits every turn in the road of brow of the hill.

Can you guess what took centre stage once that burning ball of orange dipped below the horizon, leaving the parched land to recover before its next assault? How did you know...the Plough, in all its glory, and a night sky to rival the beautiful scenary below it, not with a dazzling array of colours but instead a sense a grandiose and depth that other worlds should, you know? And all that other existential crap, looking beyond mankind, transgressing boundaries.

Every night I would climb up from the balcony onto the roof, take up a position on the sloping tiles so I wouldn't fall off, and, beer in hand, watch the evening unfold before my eyes. Each year during August the sky would light up with shimmering tail after disappearing trail of shooting stars, as if someone up there was sprinkling stardust over the world, coating it with a fine layer of sugar. This was better than any firework display could ever hope to be, illuminating the blackness above, the entirity of the galaxy stretching out above.

It was exhilarating, thinking that up there shards of rocks hurtled towards the Earth, crashing through the atmosphere and becoming so scorched that it burned brightly as it disintegrates, twisting away from, the intense, white heat, causing yet more immolation, paying the ultimate sacrifice for straying too close to us, the alluring pull of the Earth proving too strong for these doomed rocks.

Overdramatic? Maybe; they are only rocks after all, but when you think about it, that was what was going on, and I did a lot of thinking, up on that roof, staring at the Plough, and the stars.