D riving home from Oxford after a night at the theatre, I stopped in the middle of nowhere and lay down in a dark field. It didn’t seem odd at the time. It was a clear night.
My brain was still busy from Adrian West’s one-man touring hit, The Night Sky Show . A half-moon was low in the sky, and I was passing through a rare local pocket of low light pollution. So I paused to look at the stars.
By the time my eyes had adapted, damp was chilling my bones, but I was too excited to shift. The sky was blacker and brighter than I had imagined possible: a bottomless ocean of darkness whose depths revealed themselves as I gazed. I had expected sterile emptiness, but the night was alive with diamond-bright piercings of light.
The more I looked, the more new stars I noticed. New to me, anyway — in fact, each pinprick of light had been there for unimaginable aeons. But that night, for once, I was noticing.
.
