Two Dawns
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the first moon landing.
I can still remember watching it live, staying up all night to do so. I was sixteen at the time, and my family didn't own a television back then, so I walked around to my cousin's house in the evening before and we stayed up all night to see the pictures on their black-and-white TV. I can remember Neil Armstrong fluffing his lines, and how this was not reported.
Strangely, my most intense memory is of the walk back home in the early hours of the morning, walking across the school playing-field all covered in dew, and watching rabbits eating & playing in the longer grass by the surrounding hedges. Rabbits were very rare, back then. It was only a dozen years or so since most of the rabbits in the country had been wiped out by myxomitosis and they were just beginning to re-establish themselves.
Forty years on, I stayed up all night to drive home this morning from the Latitude festival, 240 miles from Bristol, watching dawn breaking in the van's rear-view mirror as the tractor-like growl of the engine drowned out the nuances of the music on the radio. It was cool when we stopped for a break by the motorway services, red-pink skies and dewy grass.
There's a particular peace about watching morning arrive, when you've been up all night. It's a sense of quiet satisfaction, knowing that something has ween worthwhile - because otherwise, why would you have stayed up?
:o)
I can still remember watching it live, staying up all night to do so. I was sixteen at the time, and my family didn't own a television back then, so I walked around to my cousin's house in the evening before and we stayed up all night to see the pictures on their black-and-white TV. I can remember Neil Armstrong fluffing his lines, and how this was not reported.
Strangely, my most intense memory is of the walk back home in the early hours of the morning, walking across the school playing-field all covered in dew, and watching rabbits eating & playing in the longer grass by the surrounding hedges. Rabbits were very rare, back then. It was only a dozen years or so since most of the rabbits in the country had been wiped out by myxomitosis and they were just beginning to re-establish themselves.
*************************
Forty years on, I stayed up all night to drive home this morning from the Latitude festival, 240 miles from Bristol, watching dawn breaking in the van's rear-view mirror as the tractor-like growl of the engine drowned out the nuances of the music on the radio. It was cool when we stopped for a break by the motorway services, red-pink skies and dewy grass.
There's a particular peace about watching morning arrive, when you've been up all night. It's a sense of quiet satisfaction, knowing that something has ween worthwhile - because otherwise, why would you have stayed up?
:o)
Labels: travel
posted by Moses at
4:54 pm
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