Dec 2020 – The Bohemian Waxwing

Winter 1963

Unburdened by the concerns of grown-ups, extreme weather is thrilling when you are young. I was eight when the Big Freeze of 1963 started; and I loved it. The south west of England had the worst snow before New Year. Scotland’s big storm arrived in January after school had restarted. Today we are used to accurate weather forecasts. This was not the case in the sixties. During crucial hay and harvest times my father would phone Prestwick Airport to get a better idea of what was coming our way and adjust his decisions accordingly. Very bad weather often arrived with little or no warning.

On snowy days a message would come round the classrooms instructing any children from farms and other outlying areas to go home early. Our classroom looked south across the main Ayr road towards Shankston Wood; in reality an old pit bing covered in dark leafless trees. As the children from the more remote rural areas trooped off to their buses, we looked out at snow blowing past the black woods like billows of white smoke. Eventually all pupils were released and we set off across the playground in high spirits. Snow was drifting across the ground like sand over a beach. Some daft boys lay down and let it pile up against their backs, giggling.

Our father or mother always collected us from the school gates. We lived about a mile from the town on a farm 600 feet above sea level. In winter the weather up there was significantly colder than it was in town. On this snowy afternoon my father came for us early and we set off uphill in the Triumph Herald. Our own farm road was about 300 yards long, flanked by hawthorn hedges, with a steep bit in the middle caused by mining subsidence. As my father turned off the main road into our ‘roadend’ we could see that drifting had already started. Visibility was very poor. We felt the car rising and falling over the developing ridges of snow.

My Uncle Willie, Dad’s younger brother, had been to visit him during the day. Willie’s own farm lay a few miles up the river Stinchar from Ballantrae, about 50 miles away. He had already set off for home that afternoon but been forced to turn back. It looked like he might have to stay with us – an exciting and unique event. Uncle Willie was always good fun and sometimes brought us gifts – like chinchilla rabbits.

In a last pointless attempt to effect his brother’s escape Dad asked the apprentice mechanic to help dig out Uncle Willie’s car. I remember standing at the upstairs landing window, gazing down into the yard, watching the indistinct dark figures struggling in the white-out. They soon gave it up. A phone call was made to Ballantrae to say that Willie would not be home that night. My aunt, alarmed, said it looked like snow was starting to cover the house as she couldn’t see out of the ground floor windows.

At home we all sat down for tea in the kitchen in front of the Aga, wondering what the morning might bring. Excitement mounted with the continuing frenzy outside. We always had baths at night followed by a snack then off to bed with our hot water bottles. The wind was coming out of the west, the direction our bedroom windows faced. We pulled back the curtains to be confronted by a blank whiteness. Snow was sticking to the glass. All night the wind howled round the house.

In the morning the snow covering the windows kept our bedroom dark and ice had formed on the inside of the glass. We rushed to the front windows to look out. There was a large yard in front of the house – where our Uncle’s car was now buried. Beyond it, on a rise, lay the garden. Trees surrounded a lawn and beyond that there were vegetable and fruit beds enclosed by a tall beech hedge. Snow drifts the size of sand dunes arched across the yard, into the garden and over the hedges. There was a beautiful curved drift in front of the garage where the wind had swept round it. Everything sparkled in the slanting sunlight under a blue sky. We dug ourselves out of the back door.

As the farm road had completely filled up to the top of the hedges, we were snowed in – as far as normal transport was concerned. The main road had been ploughed clearing a path wide enough for a single vehicle but we had to wait another week before the National Coal Board sent a JCB to excavate our own road. Meanwhile all goods and people had to be moved in and out of the farm by tractor, across the fields. The fields had been blown almost clear by the ferocity of the storm. It was a great way to go to school. We returned home on foot which made our mother nervous as the snow drifts on either side of the main road were taller than us and the traffic, although sparse, was unpredictable. When cars appeared we clambered into the drifts at the side to let them pass. To complete the last few hundred yards to the house we had to take to the fields again.

The hinterland of the estate: another farm, a large eighteenth century house and some cottages, were connected by unsurfaced back roads. The one leading south from the farm steading had a wood on one side and a hedge on the other and had also filled up with deep drifts. Between the road and the wood lay a small burn running in a ditch. The burn had frozen solid and the ditch had disappeared. The snow was deep enough to dig tunnels and chambers into it that lasted for weeks. Once, having walked half a mile over the snow in dazzling sunlight, I wasn’t able to see properly for a few minutes after coming indoors. A sort of mild snow blindness.

When the farm road was finally cleared we resumed milk deliveries with our fleet of diesel lorries. Diesel starts to thicken into a gel as the temperature drops and the lorries would often get a few miles from home before conking out due to blocked fuel lines. The fuel system could even become air-locked and require bleeding before the engine would start again. The mechanics would occasionally use blow torches on the fuel tanks to prevent this happening. On the return journey lorries coming uphill got stuck on the steep bit and cinders and hessian sacks were thrown under the wheels to improve traction.

It froze continuously for the next six weeks, the thaw only coming on the fourth of March, my ninth birthday. Uncle Willie, his farm completely cut off, ended up staying with us for several days. When he got home he found the drifts had indeed covered the ground floor windows of the farm and the nearby steep-sided valleys had filled to the point where they were no longer visible.

Looking back, there was little evidence of any surviving wildlife during the weeks of intense cold. It was only as an adult I learned that an estimated 70% of small birds had perished. There certainly seemed to be nothing for them to eat.

Other big winters happened in 1978 and 1979. In one of them two friends were stuck for three days in a queue of cars at the Ord of Caithness where three people died. They both suffered frostbite.

In January 1982 I was the medical registrar on call in Dunfermline on the night the lowest temperature in UK history occurred at Braemar (-27.2 C). I had no idea how cold it was (-25 C in Dunfermline I believe) when I was woken by the hospital telephonist in the early hours of the morning to attend a cardiac arrest. I threw my white coat over my cotton pyjamas and sprinted across the car park to deal with it. About an hour later I was making a slower return journey and was struck by the brilliance of the full moon and the glittering ice crust on the lying snow. I stopped to contemplate this beautiful scene but very quickly got the sensation of icy fingers reaching through my clothes into my chest. I hurried back to the ‘on-call cottage’ and although I’d only been outside for a few minutes I experienced pain in my fingers, ears and the tip of my nose as the circulation returned.

In terms of sheer depth of snow I have never experienced anything like 2010. Heavy falls kept coming with no wind and no thaw until there was about three feet of lying snow on undisturbed surfaces. My two-seater in front of the house was an unrecognisable blob and many of the garden shrubs bowed down then broke under the weight.

Let’s hope the recent wintriness is not a harbinger of a big winter but I still cannot throw off my childish excitement about extreme weather. The exception is wind. I cannot see any good in it and I may scribble something about the 1968 Hurricane – another experience I will never forget.

Happy 2021.

Christmas Past

Our childhood Christmases took place on a farm in Ayrshire, a mile from the nearest town and 600 feet above sea level. Even so, white Christmases were infrequent. Many mild winters were spent waiting in vain for a decent snowfall to take the rust off the sledge runners; but we did get a lot of hard frosts. The old curling pond half a mile from the house sometimes froze solid allowing the creation of huge slides. Wellingtons were no protection against the ice and our feet had to be thawed out in basins of warm water in the kitchen afterwards. It made your toes ache.

On the lead-up to the holidays a couple of rocks stuck up out of the rapids. The first problem was the annual SDF Social Club children’s party. With 120 staff there were a lot of children. Dad held the party in our hotel. I had to perform an excruciatingly childish grace (Thank thee Lord for the food we eat, Thank thee Lord for the world so sweet, Thank thee Lord for the birds that sing, Thank thee Lord for everything… Amen) to the assembled company. This humiliation was followed by party games like The Farmer’s in His Den and Bee Baw Babbity. The latter was a kissing game. I once tried running away but was hunted down by Martha the Hotel manageress.

Shudder…

My father then gave a film show using his own Bolex projector. I recently discovered the catalogue for the cartoon films he hired in Glasgow. He supplemented these pieces with some family cine. Despite having promised never to do it, he showed a film of me, dressed in full cowboy regalia of fringed hat, waistcoat, gun-belt, wellies and ‘Lone Star’ spurs, trying and failing to get onto my pony. She was adept at taking a deep breath when you tried to tighten her girth, then breathing out when you put your weight on the stirrup. The saddle then slid down under her belly. Hilarious – and tremendous ammunition for those who would use it.

After this affront was over, the lights suddenly went out and Santa arrived on his sled loaded with presents. The sled was made of plywood and was kept in a store room behind the cafe for the rest of the year – we discovered. Santa had his hood up and with his big beard and moustache only some deep-set twinkly eyes were visible. We were called up in turn to shake his leather-gloved hand and receive our present. Those of us in the know recognised the voice of the dairy manager and his signature miasma of cigarette smoke.

Later in life there were the primary school parties, which I also dreaded. That awful cavalry charge from one side of the gymnasium to the other when the boys were told to take a partner. Did you converge on the most desirable option and find yourself in an unseemly maul while the object of boyish desire made her selection, or pick a mid-range model and beat the rush? After this pairing game ran its course the teacher would cue the appropriate Jimmy Shand record and a clumsy Gay Gordons, Dashing White Sergeant, Strip the Willow or Canadian Barn Dance would follow.

It wasn’t all bad. I quite liked doing the March of the Mods – and I once won a dance competition with Janice Harrison. We did the Shake and I got an Airfix model for a prize. I can’t recall what Janice won.

Back home, the Christmas tree, always a Norway Spruce, stood in the hall in a disguised galvanised bucket. It was braced with kindling sticks and weighed down with gravel for ballast. Needles started falling off immediately. We decorated it with those fragile glass balls that had glittery bits and silver sunburst inserts. We added some glass toadstools, tinsel and tree lights. The shades covering the light bulbs had scenes from nursery rhymes: dishes and spoons, cows and moons. If one bulb went, all the rest went too. Re-ignition was a laborious process involving changing the bulbs one by one until the deceased party was identified. The tree was always topped out with a star because my mother felt there was a hint of idolatry about angels and fairies.

Our Christmas cards hung on strings between the wall lights above the fireplaces in the hall and in ‘the lounge’. There were a lot of pheasants in the snow and olde stagecoaches. We put up a modest number of paper swags that mysteriously un-concertina’d themselves when pulled apart. We also had paper bells and fat snowmen that expanded from their folded-up state with a faint crackle.

Given the strength of my mother’s Christian belief and my father’s role as an elder of the Kirk there was surprisingly little religious symbolism. I am sure this reflected the traditional Presbyterian suspicion of Christmas, which was not even a public holiday in Scotland until relatively recent times. It seemed to include the word ‘mass’ after all. An exception to this secularism was the large cubical red candle my mother placed on a window ledge at the top of the stairs. It had four paper decals of stained-glass Christmas scenes, one on each side. Over time it slowly burned down in the middle to illuminate the windows. The lighting of it filled us with tingly anticipation. The scene on the window side shone out into the black nothingness of a Scottish winter night.

When you live on a farm there is no Christmas break as others might understand it. The animals need fed and attended to just like any other day. In fact, you may be even busier due to the absence of the usual staff. Because we had a milk retail business on Christmas Day my father and I often had to deliver extra supplies of cream and milk to grumpy chefs in hotels and restaurants. He felt it was important for customer relations that we were constantly available. The black bakelite phone in the morning room was ‘switched through’ from the office in town at the end of the working day and a tear-off notepad with carbon paper to make copies was placed beside it. Some customers – like the posh Miss M from Park Circus in Ayr – liked to micromanage their orders. We suspected they deliberately phoned out of hours so they could speak to my mother in person. Miss M always seemed slightly irritated if it was me who picked up. Last thing at night we took the ‘lines’ out to the dairy manager’s office next to the ‘platform’ where the lorries would load up in the morning.

Granny and Grandad came to stay for the duration of festivities. They were my mother’s parents, my Dad’s mother and father having died long before we were born. Grandad was a meticulous planner and a very competent driver. He always put a hundredweight bag of fertiliser in the boot of the car over the rear drive wheels for added traction on snow or ice.

When they arrived the burden of keeping us entertained passed to our grandparents releasing my mother to her endless kitchen drudgery. My father was always occupied elsewhere anyway. The card table was set up in front of the fire with upright kitchen chairs so as to be more businesslike. Granny and Grandad started us off on rummy, whist and ‘Slippery Anne’ before we finally graduated to their favourite game – bridge. I never had the concentration to play really well and quite liked being ‘dummy’ so I could wander off to the kitchen for a snack. Grandad thought I should have stayed and learned how to play out a contract.

Warmth was always an issue at home. We had central heating of sorts powered by a solid fuel boiler at the rear of the house. There was no access to it from the house. Dad had to go outside in whatever weather prevailed to stoke it from a pile of coal. There was something delicious about doing it when it was actually snowing. The radiators were warm, but not hot and functioned merely to take the chill off the room air and melt any ice feathers that had formed on the inside of the windows overnight.

After nightly baths we were tucked tightly into bed with our hot water bottles, pinned down by cold sheets covered by wool cellular blankets, feather quilts and a counterpane. In a masochistic way I enjoyed seeing how long I could tolerate holding a bare toe against the hot water bottle. Getting up in the morning in the lowest temperatures was daunting. Mum would turn on a rattly fan-driven electric heater and hold our clothes up in front of it to tempt us out of our cocoons.

Rooms you actually wanted to sit in needed an open fire for real comfort. Stores of coal, logs and coke were piled up in a shed behind the car garage and fetching new supplies of these also involved an open air expedition. Heat wasn’t a problem in the kitchen where the solid fuel Aga stayed lit for the entire winter. It was a welcome source of comfort for frozen fingers and toes. Dad would come in, lift the lid over the hot plate, rub his hands, and complain of being “starving of the cold” an expression my mother, from the East, found perplexing and annoying. However it is in the dictionary as a Scottish and North English term for feeling extremely cold. Perhaps it comes from the German sterben meaning ‘to die’.

The quotidian ritual of riddling the ash out from the bottom of the Aga and filling it up with coke through the hole in the top went on throughout the season. We were never allowed to riddle it ourselves in case we dislocated the thing that held up the burning coke. That would have meant shutting the stove down to re-site the part. The brief intrusion of fumes into the kitchen during filling left an acrid taste in the mouth. In the other rooms the open fireplaces needed cleaned out every morning and a fresh fire built to be lit later.

A pleasant refuge from the elements on a cold night was the byre. Dozens of large animals produce plenty of heat and the smell of the cows combined with sawdust, turnips and sharn* was not unpleasant. On proper snowy nights flakes drifted down through the ventilation gap that ran along the ridge of the roof like a bovine Pantheon d’Agrippa, while the satiated cows lay chained in their stalls, grunting sleepily.

My mother’s strong faith undermined her commitment to the fantasy of Santa Claus. She felt we would not believe her about God and Jesus were she to be caught lying about Santa. It took minimal pre-school questioning from me to extract a confession from her. As a result it was very difficult to get us to go to sleep as we knew the presents had to arrive before Mum and Dad went to bed. Eventually Mum allowed us to open one present and a box of Edinburgh Rock before we fell asleep. I can remember waking up in the early hours once with a stump of half-eaten rock stuck in my hair.

And then it was Christmas morning.

*Noun: (chiefly Scotland): The dung or manure of cattle or sheep. From Middle English: scharn

The Verb ‘To Bird’

As a country child of the Sixties it was necessary to ‘make your own entertainment’ when not at school or in church. This consisted of outdoor pursuits involving dogs, a variety of other small animals, cows, horses and the slaughter of wildlife. We supplemented this with reading on inclement days. Books had a prominence then undimmed by electronic distractions.

To me the best books were those precursors of the scientific tomes of adulthood produced by Ladybird Books. They produced guides to many things but I particularly liked the ‘What To Look For’ series illustrated by the peerless C F Tunnicliffe.

The Ladybird book of BRITISH BIRDS and their nests was bought for me in Gatehouse of Fleet when I was four. We were staying at Cally Palace. It is the first family holiday I can vaguely remember and we have cine footage of it. The staff kept stale bread behind reception so that we could feed the ducks on Cally Lake. My father knew Mrs Murray-Usher and we received one of her famous Christmas cards annually.

The Observer books were exciting because they looked more like proper textbooks or field guides that a grownup might use. Birds interested me and I had both The Observer’s Guide to Birds and The Observer’s Guide to Birds’ Eggs. Later, at Christmas 1964, my father’s cousin Robert Osborne, a birdwatcher, gave us The Oxford Book of Birds, illustrated by his friend Donald Watson. The dust jacket is now tattered and fragmented – from use, not lack of respect.

For years Spotted Flycatchers nested in the Virginia creeper above the front door at the farm. My father was very fond of them and bought a watercolour by Donald Watson of an adult perched on honeysuckle holding a Small Tortoiseshell butterfly. Two juveniles are in the background waiting to be fed.

Inevitably I started a birds’ egg collection. That’s what boys did in the Sixties. It was exciting looking for the nests and I once witnessed a wren’s egg hatching through the side entrance of the globe-shaped nest. I only took one egg from any clutch – which the parent would soon replace with a new one. I have heard that the collection of fresh gull eggs for eating involved taking one egg and marking the rest so that you could return the next day and identify which one was new-laid and therefore didn’t contain a gull embryo.

My father had our local joiner make me a glass-topped display case to show off my collection. The eggs were bedded on cotton wool within plywood partitions. The eggs first had to be ‘blown’ by putting a small hole in each end and forcing out the contents using wind power. When my Uncle heard I had started a collection he asked if I had a hen’s egg in it. I asked him why I would need such a thing and he said firmly that no collection was complete without a hen’s egg. The next day he handed me one and said, “There you are. Blow that one.” The family watched as I tried my utmost to expel the contents without success. The egg had been hard-boiled. Afterwards I noticed tiny petechial haemorrhages in the whites of my eyes as evidence of the effort I’d made. I often wonder if the surface of my brain looked the same.

My childhood coincided with the peak use of primitive pesticides in the UK and I am sure this contributed to the striking lack of raptors around our farm. DDT was a notorious cause of fragile eggs in raptors as the chemicals become concentrated in their bodies from eating contaminated prey. It was not unusual to discover dying wood pigeons around the place, presumably having ingested treated grain.

In the byre, and even in our kitchen on the farm, we had electric fly killer devices mounted on the walls. These heated up and vaporised solid insecticide which fumed off into the air in places where we produced milk, prepared our food – and breathed. Perhaps my mother was concerned about it because as I recall the ones in the house were usually switched off.

Later, as a teenager, my interaction with birds became much more destructive. I may post something later on guns, but suffice it to say that I had sufficient expertise with a .22 Webley Falcon air rifle to cause the demise of many, many sparrows and starlings. I kept my old school blazer until it became a victim of moths. In the pocket was a handful of lead pellets, which we referred to as ‘slugs’.

For my 21st birthday Robert Osborne – my dad’s cousin whom I mentioned above – gave me a pair of Zeiss East* 7×30 binoculars with a leather strap and case and a copy of Collins Pocket Guide to British Birds, the precursor to the legendary Petersen, Mountford and Hollom. This was my first proper field guide but both these gifts were stored away without being used. Urban pursuits were much more interesting.

Birds didn’t feature in my life after that for over a decade until I began my radiology training at the Royal Infirmary.There I met my friend Rob Jones who was in the training year above me. Rob had a very wide range of interests: athletics, chess, military history, castles, food, wine, art – and birds. Having ascertained that I once possessed a collection of eggs he asked me if I wanted to go out birdwatching with him. By this stage I had progressed so far down the lounge lizard route that I no longer had any outdoor clothing – only impractical smart car-to-bar stuff. However I still had my as-new, unused, pair of East German binoculars and a field guide. I said I would be interested in going out to look for birds and when I asked where we would be going he said, unexpectedly, “Musselburgh”. This did not sound promising but I bought some walking shoes and waterproofs and one Saturday morning we set off.

What was once a big sandy beach north of Musselburgh racecourse was enclosed by a massive concrete rampart so that it could be back-filled with water-borne ash from the coal-fired power station at Cockenzie. The amount of unburnt coal these ash deposits represent is incomprehensible. The ‘settlement lagoons’ within the wall incidentally created a sea-viewing platform hundreds of yards long extending from the mouth of the Esk to beyond ‘the scrapes’ and their concrete, roofless hides. Scrapes are shallow pools intended to attract wading birds. The hides have to be such spartan affairs because the locals have predilection for setting wooden hides on fire. Adding topsoil to the ash pans created a vast weedy, grassy plain frequented by breeding skylarks, stonechats and winter migrants. It became one of the best sites for rarities in the UK.

I noticed that Rob’s binoculars did not look as if they had been made in East Germany. I also noted he had a telescope.

At first I didn’t grasp the necessity of constant vigilance and treated the day like a nice walk and a chat. After I missed what would have been my first ever peregrine falcon flying low overhead I decided I really ought to concentrate. At the end of the day I’d seen birds like mergansers, goldeneyes and divers from the pages of my childhood books I thought contained only fantasy creatures never to be seen. I also discovered that making an identification was not at all easy. The birds might be too far away. The light might be bad. They might be bobbing up and down on a choppy sea or they might be in atypical plumage. Also, I had no idea what noises they might make. Most troublesome of all, I had no concept of what birds were common or where they might be expected to turn up. I needed an experienced teacher. I was hooked.

So what does one call this bird hobby then? In the UK it is generally known as ‘birdwatching’ – a passive-sounding title. In North America it is called ‘birding’, yet another of the US noun-to-verb evolution. I bird, you bird, he or she birds, we bird, you bird, they bird. Birding does sound a bit more active than birdwatching. Whatever it is, it is certainly not ‘bird-spotting’. I cannot pinpoint why this is such annoying term. Maybe it’s the similarity to train-spotting with all the humiliating geeky baggage that implies. What is clear is that it is still very much a male pastime. The inside of the Collins guides had the following:

Many years into my birding life my attention returned to my egg collection. There were my prized possessions; the eggs of wrens, lapwings, song thrushes, blackbirds, starlings, curlews, chaffinches, yellowhammers… and by now I was acutely aware that it was illegal to have them. Lots of bad publicity surrounded egg-collectors, people I had come to regard as deranged or evil – or both. I wondered if my eggs might be of interest to an official collection. I phoned up my trade union, the RSPB, for advice. The gentleman at the other end did not hesitate. “Destroy them.” he said. “You cannot hold a collection of wild bird eggs.”

So I did. I smashed them up and put them in the bin. Even though no one would ever have known I had them. I felt I had to cleanse myself of them but I can’t avoid some pangs of regret.

The handsome bespoke display case survived. We filled it up with other little treasures and nicknacks: silver napkin rings, art nouveau spoons, silver egg cups, glass animals – and a painted goose egg. Mike Gill, head of the Art Department at Watson’s, kept poultry. He painted the blown goose egg with images of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and gave it to us one Christmas.

*At the end of World War II the division of Germany also split the factories of the German optical firm of Carl Zeiss. Its headquarters were in Jena, which ended up in the DDR. The West German part of the company continued to innovate and improve their product making the highest quality binoculars. Meanwhile, in communist East Germany the Soviet Union dismantled the factory and removed it to the USSR as part of war reparations. There they continued to manufacture optics to the pre-war designs. The binoculars were still of good quality and much cheaper than the West German version, however they fell further and further behind in technical refinement. Buying Zeiss East was a more affordable way to get decent optics – but with the unification of Germany in 1990 manufacturing ceased in the former Eastern Bloc and the factories closed.

On the Moon…

It’s midwinter. The full moon at midnight is dazzlingly bright and almost directly over our heads. The Moon looms large in our collective conscience. Lunacy is everywhere in our words, phrases and popular songs: harvest moons, honeymoons, moonshine, moonlighting, over the Moon, once in a blue moon, many moons, moonlight flits. In November we get a ‘woodcock moon’. Migrating woodcock use it to find their way across the North Sea to the east coast of Britain. In the morning they are often found in unexpected places; behind walls, in gardens or even on window ledges, as they recover from their exertions. Despite its influence on us the Moon doesn’t feature much in our superstitions – although my mother thought it was unlucky to see a new moon ‘through glass’.

Partial Lunar Eclipse July 2019. The shadow of the curved edge of the Earth is projected onto the lunar surface. ©Allan Stevenson

The Moon is 385,000 km away from us, 30 times the diameter of the Earth, and it takes light from the moon 1.3 seconds to reach us. The movements of the Moon and the Earth are not particularly complicated. Almost everything goes in the same direction. Looking down on the Earth from above the North Pole, the Earth rotates in an anticlockwise direction. The Moon orbits the earth every 27.3 days, in an anticlockwise direction, and the Moon and Earth together orbit the sun – in an anticlockwise direction. The direction of rotation of the Earth means that every ‘object’ in the sky: the Sun, the Moon, the planets, stars and galaxies, rises in the east and sets in the west.

To observers on Earth the Moon looks bigger at the horizon than it does overhead. The reason for this illusion is under debate. The truth is, the Moon measures slightly less at moonrise and moonset because it is 4,000 miles farther away from us at those times than it is at midnight. The width of the Moon is roughly equivalent to that of Australia and its total surface area is about the same as North and South America combined. Contrary to appearances, the lunar surface is not very reflective. It is comparable to ‘worn asphalt’ but appears bright to us in an otherwise black sky.

As it orbits us every 27 days or so the Moon seems to progress slowly across the night sky from right to left, from west to east, through the various constellations of the Zodiac. At the time of a new moon the Moon lies directly between us and the Sun and is briefly invisible. As it passes beyond the Sun it forms a thin crescent lit from the right which follows the Sun to the western horizon at sunset. A week after a new moon it reaches the first quarter when it is half-lit and starts to lag a bit farther behind the Sun. In the second week the waxing ‘gibbous’ Moon grows until it is a fully illuminated disc, a full moon. This happens when the Moon, Sun and Earth are once again lined up – but this time the moon is on the opposite side of the Earth with the Sun shining directly on the whole of the Moon’s disc. At full moon the Moon rises as the Sun sets and at midnight it is directly overhead. In the northern hemisphere we are used to seeing the crescent moon lit from the side but in the Tropics the Moon is lit from below and the crescent Moon lies on her back.

The crucial secret to understanding time and the apparent movements of the Sun and the Moon is that we on Earth are moving at terrific speed around the Sun. Although the Moon completes an orbit in about 27 days in sidereal (star) time, the Earth has moved during that time, placing the Sun, from our viewpoint, in a different part of the sky. Because of this the Moon has to travel for another 2 days to line up with the Sun and become another new moon. This means that on Earth the interval between one new moon to the next is 29 days and not the 27 sidereal days taken for one complete Earth orbit by the Moon.

Observer ‘X’ sees a new moon 2 days after the Moon completes a circuit of the Earth

There is another time anomaly also related to the Earth’s movement. This has to do with the length of our day. In sidereal time the Earth rotates once every 23 hours and 56 minutes, not every 24 hours. The Earth is always moving around the Sun and from a fixed position on the Earth’s surface – your house for example – the Sun rises 4 minutes later every day than the time taken for one complete Earth rotation. Clearly we can’t have a system of time that is dissociated from sunrise and sunset so our days are not determined by one rotation of the Earth but instead by the time from from one sunrise to the next – 24 hours.

This linkage of time to the Sun means that the stars don’t stick to Earth time either and the constellations above us move slowly westwards throughout the year by the same missing 4 minutes every day. Eventually, 12 months later, they return (roughly) to their starting positions (4 minutes x 365 = 24.3 hours).

Confused?

Despite the outwardly majestic progress of these event and the rock solid feel of terra firma beneath our feet, the speeds involved are jaw-dropping. The Moon orbits the Earth at a brisk 1 km/sec but the Earth and Moon together are hurtling round the Sun at 30 km/sec. That’s 67,000 mph in old money.

While we are vaguely aware of the Moon’s phases, something additional has to happen before we really pay attention. Lunar eclipses are relatively common because the Earth casts big shadow that the Moon can stray into. While these events often make the news it is usually well down the agenda. Solar eclipses on the other hand are much rarer and hit the headlines.

The solar ecliptic is the plane of Earth’s orbit around the Sun. All the planets of the Solar System lie on the solar ecliptic. Although close to the ecliptic, the Moon’s orbit round the Earth is very slightly angled at 5°. If the Moon orbited us in the plane of the solar ecliptic we would have solar eclipses all the time – which would be fun. Instead we have to wait for the rare occasions when the paths of the Moon and Sun intersect. The most recent eclipse visible from the UK was a partial one in March 2015. The last total eclipse was in Cornwall in August 1999.

At these moments we are compelled to contemplate the intimidating scale of celestial events. How odd that the Moon, 385,000 km away, happens to be just the right size to cover the sun completely. But the Moon is slowly moving away from the Earth at the rate our fingernails grow. Eventually it will be too small to totally cover the sun and all eclipses will be annular. We just happen to be alive while it can still cause a total eclipse.

Total lunar eclipse shortly after totality, January 2019 ©Allan Stevenson

Subtotal solar eclipse, March 2015 ©Allan Stevenson

Famously, we on Earth only ever see one half of the Moon; the near side. The invisible far side is not actually a ‘dark side’. It gets as much sunlight as the rest of the Moon but we never see that side from Earth. This is because the Moon’s slow rotation is in synchrony with its orbit so that the same hemisphere is always facing towards us. Our moon is the largest moon relative to the size of the planet it orbits and almost all the other moons in the Solar System are smaller than it.

In fact our moon is so big that the Earth and Moon together can be seen as a binary planet system. The centre of rotation of the Earth and Moon does not lie at the centre of the Earth. Like an adult swinging a large child in a circle, the Moon is heavy enough to make the Earth lean backwards slightly to compensate.

The Moon’s fixed plane of orbit has one other effect. Like the sun, the Moon’s elevation in the sky changes with the seasons. Pleasingly, this is the reverse of the Sun’s positions. The full moon at its zenith in midwinter (as it is now) is high in the heavens while in midsummer it stays low down towards the horizon.

It is fortunate that the word moon has so many rhymes. Where would the popular song be if we called it Selene, Luna – or Cynthia?

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