We are always just round the corner from something weird.
Lou and I had been up Belas Knap, looking in pasture for mushrooms, finding a Neolithic barrow. We sat in it a wee while – the four corners have openings.
Rain always threatening, but sun always winning today and by the time we got down the hill again we wanted coffee. We stopped in the tiny village of Winchcombe, to find a truly peak small-town English experience.
The high street buildings at Winchcombe are largely for sale. The remaining inhabitants might have inspired John Wyndham. We found hot drinks in a place where as many identical straight haired blonde women with lots of make-up as possible silently used secret ploys to make it as slowly as possible. “How’s the latte?” “Surprisingly they haven’t burnt it.”
Round the corner from this glacial coffee waiting experience – watch out for the dogwalkers, they hate you – you will find a meteor painted on the side of a building. “Free Museum,” it proclaims. “The Winchcombe Meteor”.
Upstairs there’s a room. It used to hold a harpsichord. Now there’s a bit of rock in it. The rock is in a single airtight glass container marked “Duran”. There are other smaller bits in other pots, but only one Duran. “only came outside to watch the night fall with the rain”. Not a meteor. I’m getting sidetracked by an eighties pop band. This rock is NOT planet earth. It’s 4.6 billion years old so it pre-dates the earth.
There is something really delightfully overexcited about the way they’ve gone about displaying it all. It’s like a town in the mid west where Billy the Kid once threw a horseshoe.
“From the Cosmos to the Cotswolds”. A bit of the space rock landed on someone’s driveway in the middle of lockdown when nobody had anything to do. “Here’s a laminated photo of a family standing proudly by a bit of rock in a driveway.” They have photos of the family “on American television”. “This is the spike they think Billy threw his horseshoe at.” They even have pictures of three guinea pigs. “These here critturs, these was the closest durn creature to dat dar space rock! It dun fell right by where they was sleeping. Shore woke em up if they was I tells ya.”
Next-gen-Patrick-Moore, Alan Cox… no Brian? The well known Cox without a beard who isn’t into rowing. The one who tried to get us all to repronounce things like Betelgeuse and Uranus by smoldering at us. Sexy star prof. He’s doomed to talk about it on a telly screen on loop all day opposite a few bits of the space rock. Normally they burn up, drop in the ocean, go unobserved. This one landed about 9pm on a night when everyone in the world was shut in their home with their nose pressed up against the window. They tracked its origin by its trajectory. The paving slab it landed on making a distinct “Bop, bop-bop, bop, bop-bop, bop-bop” sound – that slab is in the NHM now. Perhaps in 5000 years time scientists will employ knowledge of its structure to successfully detonate a huge asteroid before impact.
It landed in the Cotswolds so everyone had tupperware and freezer bags and got it bagged up so quickly it was barely contaminated. Pure space rock. A rare and interesting thing. Did your grandad find one? Is that the unremarkable bit of rock you found in his desk? Probably not, to be honest. But I bet there’s a household somewhere, a half forgotten story. “I was sitting out on my porch having a smoke…” SPACE ROCK.
This universe is so big. We have learned so much and built so much. Time is vast and we are swept up in it for now.
We went home and watched The Substance. It’s about objectification, self loathing and how we regret our youthful arrogance years later when we reap what we have sowed. It’s a body horror just on the right side of uncomfortable not to be too funny. Feminist Get Out. I had to have a bath afterwards.
AlBarclay 