Chance of a lifetime or more …

Well I thought last night was going to be a restful conclusion to an otherwise not-much-to-report day.

I haven’t been feeling 100% since coming back from Spain – nothing to do with the RyanAir flight from one part of Paradise to another – it seems that I have been trying to get the flu. It’s been 30 degrees every day this month and getting the flu in the middle of a quite warm summer seems a little unexpected.

So I prepared a “Spanish” dinner (sit down at 8pm). I don’t know why the Italiani make such a point of the late start to a Spanish dinner because I recall being the very lonely diners in the heart of eateria country on the Navigli in Milano last summer when we had to wake the maitre-d up from his slumber at the entrata to get a meal at 6:30pm. Just when we were thinking that the food must have been “off”, we copped an invasion into the ristorante precinct with Italian diners looking to sit down for dinner at 8:30pm!

Anyhow I cooked a very tasty meal, ate it and washed up. For those who have been following these sagas and paying particular attention to every riveting incident I should say that practise with the housework has improved my stamina. I now find that, mostly, I can accomplish all three of these activities sans interruption (ie without a rest).

I thought I would relax on the terrace for an hour before retiring for the night so I fixed myself a nightcap and settled into the terrace chair. I spotted the moon ascending over Rocca Massima (as it always does) but this time there appeared to be THREE crescents climbing into the sky. I blinked a few times, wiped my tired eyes and squinted at the sight again to observe the situation unchanged. I was sufficiently intrigued to take the journey downstairs to get my camera (phone) and my glasses of the seeing kind. When I reascended with my glasses on I realised that my eyes had, in fact, been playing tricks with me. There was only ONE red crescent. Whilst it looked a bit different I didn’t pay it terribly much attention, notwithstanding the fact that the night previously it was a full moon! As I continued to generally peruse the sky it dawned on me that the crescent was actually reducing its size and changing colour from red to pink. I then became intent on watching its progress and spent about twenty minutes following the action until “Wham” the crescent disappeared leaving an orange glow where the moon had previously been. It became apparent that I was observing a lunar eclipse with the Earth wedging itself between the sun and the moon.

As I continued to watch, the orange glow turned to pitch black and the slight illumination of the sky and the land turned to pitch black as well! Only the street lights of Giulianello and of Rocca Massima could be seen against a backdrop of pitch blackness. I don’t mean really dark blackness, I mean tutto nero – the type you get in the theatre when they turn all the lights out and before the screen lights up. Everything became the same total blackness. I don’t ever recall seeing such a sight. It was impossible to distinguish the hills from the sky which made the lights of Rocca Massima appear as though they were suspended in mid air with no visible means of support!

Bewitched by the experience I dashed off a Whatsapp message to my beloved (who had flown to Sydney that day) telling her of my “unusual but spectacular” sighting.

I then reflected on my observations and thought: “This must happen every couple of months”. Moon rotating around Earth, Earth around the sun, an alignment was surely a rather frequent event, so I did what any simple mortal would do in such circumstances – I tackled Google on the frequency of such events. Imagine my surprise when I entered “lunar eclipse” to get back “Friday 27 July 2018 total eclipse of the moon” with a photograph of a blood red moon (taken, I think, in Australia or south east Asia). Then the Google comments indicated that people would get different vision depending upon where they were observing it from. Australians and south east Asians would get a really good view of the blood red moon in full glory, Europeans and Britons would get to see the total eclipse and north Americans would miss the event entirely.

It also went on to say that this would be the longest total eclipse (1 hour 43 minutes) of the moon this century and it wouldn’t happen again until NEXT CENTURY!

Now let’s put that in perspective. That means that, those of us who missed it, and our children who missed it and their children who missed it WON’T get another chance in their lifetime! It means that the next generation that will get to observe what I quite casually witnessed from my terrace will be our great, great grandchildren – provided they are in the right spot at the right time and the event doesn’t occur at some unwatchable hour (like the World Cup).

No-one had bothered to tell me that this event was going to happen and the townhouses in our village showed no sign of collapsing under the weight of the unevenly dispersed village population all looking in the same direction at the same time.

It was completely by chance and the result of random specific events that I was on that terrace looking in that direction at that moment in time! Ain’t it the truth? In this life, timing is everything and you don’t always know when that time is about to arrive! As Australia’s most notorious bushranger, Ned Kelly, said (moments before a trapdoor opened to render his body taught with a rope holding his head high) “Such is life”.