Requiescat in space*

This arrived today, it's Trevor Henderson's depiction of Major Tom's probable fate.  Think I might get it framed for Christmas. After death by quicksand death by shattered spacesuit visor was probably that which most preoccupied my morbid nine year old mind. Looking it up, outer space isn't actually that bad for you. It's the lack of air mainly.

*Tortured by the thought of any passing Latinists: I realise that pace is not pronounced to rhyme with space, but it looks good.

The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft

I keep spending all my lunch money in the Oxfam near where I work. Last week: 26 copies of the Flying Saucer Review for only £5.99. They date from 1958 to 1963 and they're such a weird little slice of history. The reports of sightings and other articles ("Mars and Venus Inhabited? Famous Russian scientist admits possibility") are impossibly earnest and endearingly quaint. I have to keep reminding myself that they were all published years before the moon landings. I've just read a rather desolate article from 1961 about a Swiss amateur radio enthusiast picking up a transmission that seems to be the dying words of a stranded cosmonaut. You can't get much more Cold War than that.

For the record I don't really believe in flying saucers, not ones piloted by aliens anyway. I think I used to up until about the age of fifteen or sixteen, but I remember reading a comment by Patrick Moore saying that in all his years of stargazing he'd never once spotted a UFO. Mad old badger though he is I found this more persuasive than any reported sightings.