And so, with a teary hanky and a bit of a sniffle, it’s time once again to wave goodbye to Mars as our second-nearest neighbour begins to move away from Earth.
Did you see it? Well, according to the Campaign to Protect Rural England, probably not. Even though Mars was shining brilliantly in the southeast quadrant of the night sky, there is now so much light pollution in Britain that you’d be hard-pressed to spot a Nazi searchlight.
The mongers of doom even go so far as to single out Oxfordshire as a particularly unpleasant white spot, saying that along with Buckinghamshire and Surrey there is not a single part of the county that gives a “zero” light reading.
Really? How come then that as Mars came to within six thousand trillion miles, it was providing enough light in Chipping Norton to read by? I went outside and there it was, a reddish bullet hole in the inky black velvet drape of night.
And that was just the start. On the opposite side of the sky was the Plough, pointing me to the equally visible North Star. And right overhead, like a dribble of saliva, was the edge of the Milky Way.
It was like a Pink Floyd gig and I was out there for hours, lying on my back in the garden with a bottle of red wine speculating, like you do at times such as this, about the meaninglessness of life and how nothing really matters.
I’ve seen some big night-time skies in my time. Arizona and Namibia stand out for affording views of other galaxies, hanging like dandelions in the blackness, but last Saturday Chipping Norton was not far behind.
I therefore don’t hold with the CPRE’s views on light pollution. But even if Britain was a sodium-drenched drizzle of orange, why, exactly, is that a problem? I mean, if God had meant us to be owls he wouldn’t have given us electricity.
Sure, darkness lets you see Ursa Major, which is nice if you’re in a reflective mood, but it means that you won’t see the coffee table until it dings your shins. Or the mugger until he cleaves your head in two with his axe.
No. What really bugs me about the countryside is not pollution from light but pollution from noise.
Partly, this is because of my job. When you are speaking to a television camera you need 15 or 20 seconds of peace and quiet. Last week, when I filmed every day, it never happened. I’d get halfway through and the sound recordist would start to fidget because there’d be a distant train, plane or car. These are noises you don’t really register but they are there all right, a constant backing track to 21st-century life.
Obviously this also bothers the CPRE, which has drawn up a list of tranquil areas which are far from not just motorways, airports and cities, but small towns, power stations and railway lines as well. Fine. But who says noise pollution has to be man-made? On the basis of the CPRE’s guidelines, I live in a sea of tranquillity, a haven from the hustle and bustle of modern living, a pre-industrial sanctuary. So is it quiet? Is it hell. I know that in town you have pile drivers and burglar alarms, but out here we have crows, which combine the teeth-grating qualities of nails on polystyrene with the volume of an American tourist.
My wife is woken every single morning by the boom of my shotgun as I stand in the garden, blowing the bird life to kingdom come. This serves her right, though, for spraying the room with fly spray before we go to bed, which means that the bluebottles spend most of the night head-butting the furniture.
I will admit, however, that nature’s noisiest creation is man. There is always a weird beard flying his 35-knot microlight directly into a 35-knot head wind, so he remains in the same place all day long. And then, providing a bass throb to the two-stroke descant, you have the farm machinery threshing or drying or frightening off what’s left of the bird life.
Rising above all this are the motorcycles. The laws that govern noise emissions from cars do not apply to bikes, so every Sunday you hear them from 15 miles away, hundreds of “men” in their leather romper suits, heading out for a beer and moustache day in the Cotswolds.Happily, because they go so fast — I clocked one on the B road outside my house the other day at 130mph — it doesn’t take them long. And then there’s the sound of the ambulance, and the circular saw as the paramedics cut out the eyes from the corpses so that someone less daft can have the gift of sight.
Plainly I’m in no position to complain about the speed. But guys, do me a favour. Can you wrap the engine up in a duvet or something? I’m at an age now when I really do crave some proper silence and I have no idea where I might find such a thing — Mars probably.
Soon, however, even the red planet will be affected by the clatter of that Beagle 2 thing, built by the British. The Americans are going as well with an even bigger, noisier machine, but on this front we needn’t worry too much. Because they will, of course, miss.
