The list of things from my own childhood, or improved versions of them, that I have the urge to buy for Miles grows. He's only two - you missed his party on Saturday, by the way - so he's a bit young for the latest addition to the wishlist:



I wish I still had my old copy, although it was falling apart and stained by dew, grass and snails when I last saw it a couple of decades ago (and the stars have all shifted halfway across the universe since then anyway). I moved on to the Atlas Coeli after a while when I became a real astronomy geek but never really got to grips with it as it was the size of a rug and more like a work of art than a star chart. I was a big nerd, I know, with my Norton's and my dog-earred copy of the Rev. T. W. Webb's Celestial Objects for Common Telescopes - Volume 2, lying back shivering on the shed roof after dark when most kids my age were indulging in more earthy rites of passage, but I still get twinges of something deeper than mere nostalgia for a time when I felt a genuine and vast, almost spiritual sense of wonder and awe as I searched out Messier objects with my 10x50 binoculars amongst the star-choked night. I miss that feeling - certain pieces of music hint at it, Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for example, but it's just a twinge, a flashback compared to what I felt back then....

You can't go back though. Well, you can, with diminishing returns, but I'm hoping I can recapture that feeling by moving forward. I hope my son's excitement on seeing the crescent moon just after dusk is an indication that he's going to be similarly inclined and that before he dismisses me as an embarrassing old fart I'll be able to introduce him to the universe.

Not one but two rather awesome versions of "The Weaver's Answer" by Family. Isn't YouTube great?

Here, mostly in the background, are Can, before they were Can, when they were called Inner Space and used female vocalists ("Kamera Song" with Rosy-Rosy [aka Rosemarie Heinikel] is many, many times better but doesn't seem to be on YouTube).

Just before the clip ends Malcolm Mooney takes over and you get a few tantalizing seconds of "A Man Named Joe" from Can's Delay 1968(aka Prepared To Meet Thy Pnoom).

And "The Witch" by the Rattles, a tasty slice of German freakbeat which got to Number 8 in the UK charts around Halloween 1970. Around the same time as Black Sabbath's "Paranoid". (It wasn't all Edison Lighthouse and the Pipkins, you know.)