The Northern Lights were as dazzling as Elton John when he was spangly and even better than Elizabeth Debicki
WHILE the good people of Majorca were out and about this week making snowmen, half of Britain was sitting in the garden trying to catch a glimpse of the Northern Lights.
Rare meteorological conditions combined with some heavy duty Ibiza-style solar partying meant that they were clearly visible as far south as Wiltshire.
The news got even me off my backside, so I stopped watching the new series of Drive To Survive — which is mostly a collection of people saying “push” in weird European accents — opened a bottle of wine and headed up to my roof terrace with a deckchair and an anorak.
Soon, I needed a second bottle of wine. And then it clouded over. But I didn’t notice because I was polishing off a third.
The Northern Lights can do this to a man because they are as spectacular as watching Elton John at his most spangly, jumping the Grand Canyon, on a burning purple quad bike, during an alien attack. Especially if you’ve had a few.
There are many wonders in the world.
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Hong Kong harbour at dusk. The Namib Desert. And Elizabeth Debicki’s legs.
But they all fade into insignificance compared to the Northern Lights. Seeing them should be on everyone’s bucket list.
I caught them just once, on a flight back from Detroit to London, and they were so mesmerising that I didn’t know I was drooling until the man in the next seat offered me a tissue.
That’s why I fully understood the thinking of a chap I met in Sweden last year.
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He told me he’d promised his dying father that one day, he would see the Northern Lights and had booked a three-week holiday in Lapland to fulfil that wish.
I couldn’t see how this would benefit his dead father all that much. Especially as he went home when his time was up, disappointed.
To have a realistic chance of seeing the Aurora Borealis — to give it the correct name — you need to be well north of Scotland, between August and May. You also need a cloudless sky.
And there needs to be a lot of solar activity, so that the sun’s particles are feeling really frisky when they collide with the gas atoms in our atmosphere, creating the ever-moving curtain of sound and colour.
Basically then, you need a lot of luck and something to keep you awake. (Not wine: That doesn’t work at all.)
Happily though there is a cheat if your goal is an Instagram post.
Often you can’t see the Northern Lights with the naked eye, but if you point a phone camera at the night sky, they show up perfectly.
Hate to rain on parade
OH no. It seems that at some point this month, Britain’s weathermen are due to go on strike. How on earth shall we manage?
Who will warn us if a tropical storm is on its way, or a plague of locusts, or a heatwave that will melt our heads?
No wait. This is Britain. We don’t get any of these things. Tomorrow it’s always going to be 57F and drizzling.
And we don’t need someone with a bad suit and a big green screen to tell us that.
THIS week, doctors announced that taking an 11-minute walk every day will substantially reduce your chances of dying early.
That sounds great, but hang on. “Eleven” minutes seems rather precise. Would nine minutes do? Or seven?
Or could I live to be 100 if I walk to the fridge every day, to get another pork pie?
Plop by for a surf
SO let me see if I’ve got this straight.
A Canadian company is planning to blast a new mine so that hundreds of tonnes of something called Brucite can be excavated and converted into magnesium hydroxide.
This will be loaded on to a ship . . . and then released into the sea off the coast of Cornwall.
To, er, help solve climate change.
Really? Because I’ve done some checking and it turns out that magnesium hydroxide is better known as milk of magnesia. Which is a well-known laxative.
I can’t imagine the region’s surfers will be very pleased about this new initiative.
Because when they get back to the beach every evening, they are going to be absolutely covered in fish diarrhoea.
Actors are, er, acting
AN actor called Jessica Barden said this week that when posh stars like Emma Corrin take gritty northern roles, it’s just “working-class tourism”.
She reckons that to play a working-class role you should be a working-class person.
Right. I see. So on that basis Anthony Hopkins should never have got the part of Hannibal the cannibal.
It should have gone instead to that German fellow who is currently serving time for killing his boyfriend and then cooking him in garlic and olive oil before sitting down to eat him, accompanied by a nice South African red.
IN a speech to a room full of sleeping people this week, Sir Starmer said that planning laws need reforming. So far, so good. They do.
But then he said: “The default at the moment for wind farms is that if any one or a number of people object, then the whole system is based on them, rather than the vast majority who want to move forward.”
Wind farms, Keir? Wind farms???!?! Noooo. You mean farms.
That'd be daff
MARKS & Spencer was forced to apologise this week after one man went on Twitter to say that they shouldn’t be displaying daffodils next to spring onions.
He says that if someone were to muddle them up and eat a daffodil, it would be like swallowing a box of tiny needles, and that, shortly afterwards, they’d be talking to God on the great white telephone, while vomiting up bits of bone.
Sounds nasty. But I think most of us will be OK, because a daffodil is a foot-long green stem with a pretty yellow flower on the top. And a spring onion isn’t.
Confusing the two and buying the wrong thing would be like popping out for a tin of corned beef and coming home with a bottle of bleach.
AN idiotic story appeared this week which said that food in my farm shop costs a lot more than it does in the nearby branch of Aldi.
Yes. It does. Because I charge customers what it costs to grow and prepare the food, rather than selling it for what the supermarkets are prepared to pay. Which would mean operating at a loss.
The problem of supplying supermarkets is now so severe that many farmers are saving their money and not growing anything at all.
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And that’s why we now have so many empty shelves.
I SAID last week that a Ford Sierra Cosworth, like the one above, was expected to fetch £180,000 at a classic car auction. I was a bit wrong. It actually went for just shy of £600,000.