Magical moonlight

I sometimes wish I knew more about the stars and the whole astronomy scene. I can pick out but three constellations: the Plough, Cassio-wotsit (the one that looks like a partly flattened "w") and Orion. I can even use the Plough to find the Pole Star. I think it's the Pole Star, but I could easily be wrong. I suppose living in a town in England doesn't help one gain a view of the sky at night. Ours is such a tiny, crowded island that there is nearly always light pollution - unless one is in the Highlands of Scotland or the wilderness of Dartmoor. Neither does the cloud cover, of which we have a lot, do much to help.

The situation is much better at Les Lavandes. There are only a few street lights in the village and they are not particularly bright. What's more, they are switched off at 10.00pm. There is just a little light pollution from the town a couple of miles away, but on a clear night, of which there seem to be more than here in England, the sky is a twinkling mass.

All that is simply a lead-in to a mention of Wednesday evening. There was a Lions dinner meeting at a pub in Rottingdean, a suburb of Brighton - although residents will insist on calling it a village. The door we use opens onto a narrow terrace after which there is an almost equally narrow car park and the sea wall. When we left, we could see the lights of a fishing boat several miles out to sea, and nothing else to the south except for one bright light in the sky. No moon, no stars, just this one bright light. It was so big and so bright we thought at first it must be a plane. But it wasn't moving, so it couldn't be a plane. It was, presumably, a planet. Venus? Mars? I couldn't say, and nor could anyone else.

It did bring to mind a memory from nearly 60 years ago. I was at school in Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, and I can recall waking one night and sitting up in bed to look out of the dormitory window (at which there were no curtains). The window looked out across Ventnor, over the church tower and out to sea. There was a full (or nearly full) moon which lit a pathway across the sea. And there, in the very centre of the moonlit pathway, was a fully-rigged sailing ship. Magical moonlight indeed.