Tag Archives: love

How it works

Last night I did something I haven’t done for over fifty years. I watched a moon rocket take off.

I’d forgotten just how exciting it was.

I only just remember seeing the moon landings. I was three years old when my parents woke me in the middle of the night. They brought me through to the little black and white TV in the lounge to see Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. I was tired, I wanted to go back to bed, but my parents refused. They said I would remember this. They were right. I don’t remember very many other things from that age1.

I quickly grew to love rockets, though. They were on the television all the time, both real ones and pretend ones like Thunderbird 3. Everyone I knew, it seemed, had the Airfix Saturn V kit. I knew (or I thought I knew) everything about rockets. I was surprised, watching the TV last night, just how much the presenters were having to explain. About countdowns and separation and launch delays.

But of course, people nowadays don’t have the advantage of Ladybird books, in particular ‘How it works’ THE ROCKET2. I went and found my copy this morning. There’s a photograph of it at the top of this post. This is a book from a very different time, when six year olds were expected to read about Newton’s third law of Motion (see page 8).

Looking back, it seems as if they were launching rockets every week in the early 70s (I know they weren’t, but I was very young.) I quickly got bored with launches and discovered other things to be obsessed with, like trains and lego.

The trouble was, space exploration was an every day thing to me. It had been part of my world for as long as I could remember. Literally

But watching Artemis II lift off last night, I remembered just how exciting rockets were. There was the countdown. Countdowns are exciting, every writer knows that. Even Mr Spoon knows that. I watched on and off throughout the evening, watched the astronauts being fastened in, listened to the back and forth at launch control. I was there for the breathless pause at minus ten minutes when it looked as if things weren’t going ahead, I felt excitement at the resumption of the count…

And finally, the lift off. Watching that ship climbing into the sky (it seemed to rise much faster then I remembered) the sheer visible power of the thing, the thought that four people are leaving our planet… I was surprised how moved I was. I’d forgotten what it was like.

I remembered why I became an SF writer

Every so often I’m reminded that we live in the age of miracles.
I wonder how long it will be before we take it for granted again?

  1. I do remember the BBC News leading with the Beatles breaking up. I’m not sure I knew who the Beatles were at the time ↩︎
  2. If you like Ladybird books and you live near Cambridge you might want to visit The Wonderful World of the Ladybird Book Artists Exhibition ↩︎

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Lip Salve

The tin of lip salve in the picture has sat there by the crossing for a few days now.

How did it get there? That’s the sort of question we like to ask on Inspiration Thursday.

The most likely explanation is that someone dropped it, then someone else found it and placed it on the box so that the owner might see it and retrieve it.

Of course, it could be a spy sending a signal to another spy, or an advanced monitoring device placed there by aliens. That could make for an exciting story, I suppose, but I don’t think that’s as interesting as thinking about what’s really going on here.

The crossing is just outside a local shop. I go there four or five times a week to buy bread and milk and so on, and I imagine that the owner of the lip salve does the same. They must have seen it by now, so why haven’t they taken it back?

Examining motives always makes for a better story. Why would they take it back? It’s lip salve. It’s been sitting out in the bad weather. Kids might have done something to it. Would you want to put suspect salve on your lips? Really, if the owner has seen the tin, they should have taken it and thrown it in the bin.

And what about the person who put it there? What did they expect to happen? Did they think through their actions? Did they believe they were doing someone a good turn, or were they just going through the motions, like in the bag of food waste? If they really wanted to be helpful they should have thrown the lip salve in the nearby bin. Or maybe they couldn’t be bothered to walk that far.

Or perhaps I’m just overthinking it. It was just a helpful act. Whatever, it’s the sort of thing to think about when writing a story.