I see the moon, the moon sees Me

I have a bit of a love affair going on with the moon.  It’s a bit odd as I love the Sun as well.  I have some serious Seasonal Affect Disorder going on, and since the Summer was rubbish this year I am hanging out to get some NZ Sun on this pasty white skin of mine.

The weather is London is terminally grey.  I struggle with the grey.  It infects everything, even your skin.  Londoners in January are a miserable lot.  It’s cold, it’s grey and no one has any money.  And because of the grey, you often don’t get to see the moon.  Or the sun for that matter.

So when I get to see that gorgeous big moon in the sky, I get quite happy.  It currently gets dark at about 4.30 or 5pm.  That means that often I leave in the dusk, and return home in the dark.  I have been walking home recently and so have been able to see the orb at its best.

There is a fair amount of folklore associated with the moon and I wonder if that has me hooked.  I love a good fairy story or myth… There are some beautiful songs written about it as well.  One that stands out for me is out of a movie called ‘The thing called Love’.  My Mum and I watched it when I was a teenager one night.  I have no idea where the others were that Friday.  But we set up camp in the extension to our house that was not finished and sat under blankets and watched this movie.  The song has a second verse that goes – ‘There’s a full moon tonight/and I’m bathing in its light/naked as the day that I was born/there is no shame beneath this sky/I have kissed the past goodbye/and mended up my broken heart so torn.’  We loved it so much we rewound the video (yes it was on VHS) and put the tape recorder up to it and recorded it so that we could listen to it later.  My Mum had visions of me learning to play it on the guitar.  I was not brilliant at playing the guitar so it’s probably best for the song that I didn’t!

I also remember the great moon that we used to see out our kitchen window, I would sometimes find my Mum standing there with the light off having a look at it rise over the hill there.  A low yellow moon always held us both transfixed.

Or it could be a case of being brainwashed a little by Disney.  When I was a kid I loved The American Tail, you know the story with Fifel the mouse who was moving to America where there were no cats.  I loved that song Somewhere out there and it has the general gist of that if you are looking up at the sky, somewhere out there your loved ones are doing the same thing so you are connected.  Maybe I like looking at the moon cause I think that my Mum is doing the same thing? 

So this week whilst it is still freakishly warm for London, has seen some clear and bright days, and this leads to clear nights.  I love walking over Vauxhall Bridge on my way home and seeing the moon there, and reflected in the Thames.  I smile as a I walk home and kinda feel as though the Moon is watching over me, keeping me safe.  I guess it’s been a slow week for me if that is the most important thing that I have to write about!