A full-moon night.
An ordinary-looking chap goes about his night business – brushing his teeth, changing into his night clothes, about to retire to bed – that sort of stuff. It all seems very run-of-the-mill, but you know from the background music that it really isn’t. This is a scene cocooned with possibilities just waiting to burst forth. Then the clock strikes twelve. Suddenly – his night clothes start to get stretched to breaking point, hair sprouts all over his body, his nails morph into outrageous claws and his face transforms into that of a wolf-like beast completely unrecognizable from the ordinary guy that had just brushed his teeth. The clothes are now just a ragged shred hanging from his waist. He howls into the night – that shrieking primal howl that tells you in an instant that something terrible is about to happen.
Ladies and gentlemen, the first celestial phenomenon (albeit fictional) I’d encountered as a child – the werewolf.
A boarding school childhood meant that there were enough horror stories doing the rounds (if you ever go to the bathroom late at night...) so a werewolf was really not needed to spice things up, but kids always lap up anything to do with horror stories, don’t they? Sadly though, while there seems to have been a huge revival of interest in vampires and zombies of late, the werewolf is still waiting for its modern-day upgrade. I always thought that the werewolf was the more interesting of the lot – there was a Jekyll-Hyde duality to the werewolf that was missing in others. He was the Batman of the evil creatures set – all conflicted in life sorts. And unlike a vampire or a superhero, a werewolf had no control over when he could turn into one – it wasn’t a nightly affair, or a matter of simply walking into a phone booth and changing your outfit when trouble was afoot – he had to wait patiently for the full moon night to come along.
But coming back to celestial phenomenon – if an occurrence as commonplace as a full moon could lead to the creation of werewolves, what would people come up with when something more big-ticket happened, like a solar eclipse, or the Halley’s comet, or better still, the Venus transit? In the olden days, when science hadn’t explained so much, I suppose it was more exciting – some people would see it as God being angry, some would think this was the day Satan would snatch your soul if you ventured out while the more crafty ones would take this as an opportunity to sacrifice their in-laws. Today, apart from the media hype, nothing much really happens, does it? And the media hype has also taken on a bit of a “we’re trying so hard to make it sound special that it actually isn’t that special” sort of quality to it. In the sense that yes, it is a big deal that the transit of Venus is happening, but while you know that the next Venus transit may not happen for a 100 years, something else would come along – a solar eclipse, Halley’s comet, Hale-Bopp comet, Shoemaker Levy’s comet or worst case, at least an asteroid or a planetoid from the Kuiper belt.
It’s a bit like those special calendar days that keep coming along ever so often – “Today’s date is 06.06.12. If you notice carefully and follow a complex set of calculations involving quadratic parabolic equations and the like, you’ll arrive at the conclusion that the month and day add up to the year on the date. This is a HUGE thing – it’ll next happen only in 07.07.14 – so savour this day like no other! In China, hundreds of couples are getting married in a mass wedding ceremony in Guangzhou to mark this special date”. Next thing you know it, the next special date comes along “Today is 12.12.12 – all three numbers in the calendar date are the same today. This isn’t just HUGE, it’s positively GIGANTIC – and if you do not realize it, you’ll never amount to anything in life – you’ll never be a Bournville one day! The next such date would only come along in the next millennium – 01.01.01 – that’s 89 years away. In China, hundreds of couples are getting married in a mass wedding ceremony in Guangzhou to mark this special date.”
In the olden days, though, the Venus transit used to be a lot more exciting than people turning up at planetariums and wearing odd-looking glasses. I don’t know if any of you have read “The Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson - read it if you haven’t! It has this hilarious account of a French scientist/astronomer who was keen on the Venus transit. For those not aware, the deal with the Venus transit is that, well…it’s a little psycho. It happens once and then it happens again 8 years later – so that you start getting complacent and think “Hey, what’s the big deal with this whole Venus transit business - once every 8 years – that’s just twice the amount of time it takes for a world cup to come along!” And then it happens next more than 100 years later – not in your lifetime! And then again it’ll happen in 8 years and then again over 100 years later. And so on till the end of time (or till the end of the Sun). So anyway – this French fellow was so keen he thought it would be a good idea to observe it from India – for some inexplicable reason. So he duly sets out for India on a ship – only to encounter rough seas that delayed his journey. Finally on the day of the Venus transit he was still at sea and could do sweet f**k-all in terms of taking observations or anything due to all the turbulence / whatever the equivalent aquatic term for turbulence is. Not to be deterred, he thought he’d anyway proceed to India – after all the next Venus transit was just 8 years away - no point going back, is there? So he lands in India – has all those usual troubles with food, ill-health, natives and all that (this was the 1800s, mind you) – but eventually is all set with his little observatory – waiting to take down observations – only for it to be cloudy on the Venus-transit day – which meant that once again he could do...absolutely nothing!
If you think that’s where his misfortune ended, think again. After 8 years of fruitlessness, he packs up his bags and decides to head back to France – only to discover on landing that he had been declared dead, his estate was divided among his well-wishers and his wife had married someone else!
So the next time you curse your life for being tough, think of that poor French scientist and thank your lucky stars.
