Scions of the Fabulous Ennui,

In a strange way, a string of related occurrences stretched from anger to amazement over more than a month. I suppose the plot would have resulted in much the same yield because of my type of dedication to the phenomena in question.

They woke me up. I was enraged, it was the early hours of the morning and people were shouting outside. On failure to sleep, I turned to BBC Radio 5Live and it was the weather slot, it could have been the dentistry slot, the book slot, the Gabby Cabby, the world football slot or some nincompoop calling up to say that they had seen a bee that day but it was none of these. The weatherman ended his segment with a few notes about noctilucent clouds, reporting that they had been spotted frequently this summer. As a past part-time student of meteorology, I decided then that I’d like to see some post haste, and I added them to my list just below aurora borealis and Chick Young being chased by ball lightning.

The lookout took place casually, when outdoors for other pursuits, I’d be gazing upwards. The search for noctilucent clouds intensified one evening, disgusted with the lapping up of spoon-fed drivel, I left an engagement and took to the roads for a while, I knew that I’d eventually have to retrieve those who supped. On the back roads only a few miles from town, the sky was unperturbed. I can’t say if I saw noctilucent clouds or not.

With the arrival of the annual Perseids meteor shower, heralded by the BBC, the time was right to head back into the darkness, but only after the conclusion of Jurassic Park, it’s a filum about a bad wiring, a dodgy electric fence, a buffet, kitchen accidents, limping and dinosaurs. Towards Falkland Hill, we went, but, of course, stopped in the small lay-by just inside the field, past the bit where the road is bridged by branches from trees on either side – the mouse flyover.

With the cattle lowing, and a baby awake, somewhere, we adjusted our eyes to the darkness. The night sky as we saw it might have been a good compensation should we have failed to witness what was to come. I saw more stars than I ever have, it was almost perfectly clear, satellites were tracked and I’m certain a trail of lightness across the sky from the north was a thin noctilucent cloud. In the quiet, with our trained eyes, we began to see the meteors from all directions. I estimate 20-30 from 2230-2330 hrs, a halt to proceedings was called due to the temperature fall (that’s global cooling). In hindsight, with a greater degree of confidence of sightings, we could have prepared better: warm clothes, blankets, deck chairs, hot beverages, vol-au-vents, cocktail sticks with small cubes of cheese and pickled onions. The planning committee for the next cosmic event, they’re recognisable by their peaked caps and overalls, are already in action.