Jupiter Rising AKA The Total Perspective Vortex

Great day at work - pressured, but it was so nice to have Miss A back. Not that I can call her that anymore...she returned a married woman so there was much talk about weddings and love and romance. Quite the antidote to the terrible date tales I had to fill her in on!

Tonight, the girls are with their dad so after a lengthy nap I woke up to dark warm skies.

The stars were absolutely stunning - I couldn't stop looking at them. Remembered the Starwalker App on the Ipad that I've not used since I got it so spent quite a while out back under the stars waving the iPad around above my head!

It felt 'so right' to be out there tonight, on my own, looking at the stars - thinking about moving out and moving on.

I couldn't take a decent pic on my little camera - so did my best to snap Jupiter and my ipad showing where I could spot it exactly.

The teeny tiny little spot is Jupiter, the fifth planet from the Sun and the largest planet within the Solar System.

When Jupiter and Earth are closest, Jupiter is 390,682,810 miles from Earth

Looking up at the universe reminded me of The Total Perspective Vortex in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - allegedly the most horrible torture device to which a sentient being can be subjected.

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here"*

Nice phone call today with Stucks - putting the world to rights. Me tweeting about Jupiter tonight brought back memories of one of our favourite songs from those Halcyon days at Sixth Form together. When a besotted Goth would buy us 12 inches from what we both called "Groovy Records" but what in fact was named 'Grove Records'

Beautiful, haunting and very very apt.

"Born under Mars
With Jupiter rising
Fallen from stars
That lit my horizon

I'll never understand
why you thought I would
need to be reassured
and be understood
When I always knew
that your bad's my good
and I was ready
ready...to be


Through the crying hours
of your glitter years
all the living out
of your tinsel tears
and the midnight trains
I never made
'cos I'd already
played


it's a better thing
that we do now
forgetting everything
the whys and hows
While you reminisce
about the things you miss
you won't be ready
to kiss...goodbye"

Echo and The Bunnymen
The Game

* (c) Wiki