A celestial observation
Today is the three hundred and fifty-fifth day of the year. An important number, since it matches the number on the front of the city bus that takes me home at the end of an average working day after a slight pause on the university campus. A campus where the odour of learning is omnipresent, as an aside. We are dangerously close to the end of another calendar page, and with remarkable foresight I have already laid in provisions of such pages for the next trip around the sun.
It should also be observed that today marks the winter solstice in our hemisphere. Elsewhere, in the antipodes, the locals are getting ready for a day at the beach. (Well, even in Florida they are doing that, but hereabouts we’re busy putting on a second set of longjohns, just in case). In our normal, top of the map world, it’s dark. According to my Celtic ancestors, we should now begin to fill with hope, because each passing day will get longer. And colder, but that is the fault of Canada.
When the gang were busy building Stonehenge, which is really designed for a celebration six months away, what could they have been thinking on such a date as this? I can see it now, where the guy is shaking his handheld calculator and assuring the boss that things went much better when they still had sliderules. Did they walk around to the other side, hoping for a longer day?
Anyhow, it’s just by chance that I took a quick Google to find out the exact time of this event, or I would have been late wishing “Happy Solstice” to my son. Even so, I don’t think he had any idea what I was going on about. Today was sunny, but I was safely on the way home by sundown, ready to start my holidays, so I can’t claim to have noticed if the day really was shorter.
In fact, since the situation can be viewed in two ways, I think I’ll celebrate that this is the longest night of the year. After all, when the alarm rings in the morning, I bemoan how short the night has been. This time, it will have been a few minutes longer than all the others.
