isolation – David Charles

No more indoor species! Get outside and live longer, healthier lives

That first kiss of cold air on skin makes me whimper in pleasure. It’s not long before I’m galloping down the zig-zag to the beach and throwing myself into the waves.

After seven days of four walls and stale breath, the sensory wealth almost overwhelms me. Opening the windows, standing at the sill in the sun, and running shuttles the length of my hallway could never replace the 360 degree embrace of even the shortest walk in nature.

Don’t get me wrong: I know seven days is nothing. I tested negative for coronavirus and, after a few days of headaches and a sore throat, I felt absolutely fine. But still: seven days of isolation, going nowhere but inside, mentally and physically, showed me the paramount value to our health of nature and the outdoors.

An indoor species

It’s hard to get solid data on exactly how much time we spend in nature, but a 2018 study found that 894 office workers in the UK spent, on average, only an hour and ten minutes outdoors on work days. Monday to Friday, on average, these office workers spent 95 percent of their time indoors or commuting.

On Saturdays and Sundays, the office workers typically spent two and a half hours outside—much better, but that still means that 90 percent of their time was spent indoors. Here’s the kicker: this data was only collected on rain-free days in the warmest months between April and October. Taken over the whole year, 90 percent is surely a low estimate, even on a weekend.

If you’re thinking that this only applies to pasty-faced office workers, then I should point you in the direction of a two-year study that followed the daily acitivities of more than nine thousand randomly selected people in the United States. The study participants reported spending 93 percent of their time inside either enclosed buildings or enclosed vehicles.

It’s fair to say that statistician Wayne R. Ott’s comment in his 1989 review of activity patterns research holds up today:

We are basically an indoor species. […] In a modern society, total time outdoors is the most insignificant part of the day, often so small that it barely shows up in the total.
~ W.R. Ott quoted in Klepeis et al. (2001)

A pandemic-shaped mirror

What’s fascinating is that we don’t realise what we have become. A 2018 survey of 16,000 people across North America and Europe found that fewer than one in five of us can believe we spend so much time indoors. But we do—and no more so than now, during this thing that’s happening.

One study, published last August in the Journal of Urban Ecology, found that the pandemic has reduced the usual recreational activities of ‘outdoor enthusiasts’—particularly those living in urban areas. I can certainly vouch for that! But what about the rest of humanity?

By analysing Strava data in Oslo, Venter et al. estimated that the number of people enjoying the great outdoors shot up by 291 percent after lockdown in March, with walkers, runners and cyclists favouring routes with green views and tree cover.

Both studies are backed up by research from Pennsylvania State University, which found that, while ‘specialised recreationists’ found their outdoor playtime cut by half a day per week on average, everyone else was outdoors half a day more every week.

Lockdown is nothing like a free pass to go and play outside, however: a survey of 604 people in post-lockdown Ireland reported that, on average, participants spent only 8 percent of their time in the great outdoors.

It’s possible that the urge for the outdoors is simply because there’s bugger all else we can do. But it’s also possible that it’s an instinctive, therapeutic response to something bloody awful happening. And we’d be correct.

What has the outdoors ever done for us?

A comprehensive review published in January 2020 found that as little as ten to twenty minutes outdoors in nature can have significant positive effects on our mental wellbeing, reducing our heart rate, blood pressure and feelings of depression, anger, fatigue and anxiety, making us feel calm, refreshed and reinvigorated.

Because of these stress-busting effects, merely living in a greener neighbourhood makes you live a longer, healthier life—no matter what your socioeconomic status—and reduces the risk of preterm birth, type II diabetes, asthma, stroke and, er, ‘all-cause mortality’. That’s amazing.

As Mitchell et al. write in a badass follow up to the ‘longer, healthier life’ study referenced above:

If societies cannot, or will not, narrow socioeconomic inequality, research should explore the so-called equigenic environments—those that can disrupt the usual conversion of socioeconomic inequality to health inequality.

Nature is that disruption. Green space is a political ‘screw you’ to those who want a society of haves and have-nots.

But the miracles of nature don’t end there. The natural world can also make you feel more generous, more grateful and less selfish. Exercise in the outdoors can increase your creativity (both divergent and convergent, since you ask), your memory and your attention, as well as protect against cognitive decline as you age. Wordsworth was a neuroscientist when he wrote:

Books! ‘tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
~ From The Tables Turned (1798)

In Toronto, researchers discovered that living in a neighbourhood with just ten extra trees made people feel as good as if they were given $10,000 or magically made seven years younger. Spending time outdoors can even roll back the effects of myopia in school children.

In conclusion: we love going outside because that’s where miracles happen. As the grandmaster of nature research Qing Li writes in his 2018 book Into The Forest:

There is no medicine you can take that has such a direct influence on your health as a walk in a beautiful forest.

‘We’re all in the same boat (except your bit of the boat is on fire and our bit has caviar) (oh and we lied: they are entirely different boats)’

A popular catchphrase of the pandemic propagandists is ‘We’re all in this together, we’re all in the same boat.’ As a sworn relativist, the only time the phrase ‘We’re all in the same boat’ applies is when we are, indeed, all present in the same water-bourne vessel.

It’s certainly not a fair way to compare the lived experience during the pandemic of the wealthy billionaires who saw their assets increase by more than a quarter last summer and, shall we say, the ‘unwealthy’ immigrants unable to work during lockdown who are being discouraged from accessing welfare support and threatened with punishments by the Home Office if they do.

Likewise, we are not all in the same boat when it comes to green space. Evidence from Portugal and Germany found that the poorer a neighbourhood is, the further residents have to travel to access green space—and the fewer amenities (toilets, benches, cafes and so on) they find when they get there.

In the UK, nearly 34 percent of the wealthiest citizens live in the greenest and most pleasant of our land. The comparible figure for the country’s poorest citizens is less than 4 percent. Access to green space is directly correlated to wealth, amplifying the evils of health inequality, at a time when people can’t travel outside their local area.

Not the same boat.

Comfort from 226 CE

Hopefully that’s got you all fired up to go and fill your lungs up with ozone, plant some trees in deprived neighbourhoods and generally blast away at the great outdoors. But I’ll leave you with one last pandemic-shaped thought from the famous historian of The Three Kingdoms.

In Weilue, Yu Huan compares himself to a fish living in a small stream that cannot comprehend the vastness of the Yangtze, or to a mayfly, who, living so briefly, cannot know the changing of the four seasons. The superficiality of his understanding, Yu Huan writes, is like ‘living in the puddle left in the hoof print of an ox’.

As the Roman Empire was to Yu Huan, so, gradually, becomes the rest of the world to those of us living in confinement—especially those self-isolating or shielding, but also the rest of us who have found our horizons greatly foreshortened over the past year.

I exaggerate, of course, but I found in Yu Huan’s 1,800 year-old words an inspiring coda that encourages me to keep striving even though I feel like I too am living in a hoof print:

It has not been my fate to see things first hand, travelling with the rapid winds, or enlisting swift horses to view distant vistas. Alas, I have to strain to see the sun, the moon and the stars, but, oh, how my thoughts fly!
~ Yu Huan, Weilue

Isolation Veganism

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been eating what I’m calling an eggy vegan diet: vegan plus eggs. (On the eggs: not many, and none in the past week.)

Why am I doing this? Mainly because there has never been a better time to make radical changes to my sturdiest habits — and that definitely includes my diet.

Contrary to appearances, this post is less about veganism and more about habit making and breaking, using as an example a fundamental part of our daily lives that a lot people believe is almost impossible to change: diet.

The story begins with fragility and its opposite: antifragility.

We are all antifragile

Extreme constraints like those we face in lockdown are often seen as negatives, but without anything holding us in we’d be nothing more than puddles of carbon and water.

Constraints aren’t just fundamental to our existence; they’re the only reason we have anything worth living for: the arts, crafts, science and even play.

In golf, players have to get a little white ball into a marginally bigger hole 410 yards away. That’s the game. But skill only comes into the picture when we add the limiting constraint: the players have to move the ball with a metal stick. Without this constraint, Tiger Woods isn’t worth $640 million.

Constraints ostensibly make things harder, but in so doing make things possible.

This guiding principle explains why humans are, to borrow the neologism of Nicholas Nassim Taleb, antifragile. Fragile objects shatter when mishandled. Robust objects are impervious to mishandling. But antifragile objects actually improve with mishandling.

It’s a wild concept, but true nevertheless: press ups only make you stronger by first breaking down your muscle fibres. At school, understanding begins with confusion.

Similarly, if we adopt an antifragile mindset, the rough treatment we’re suffering under Covid-19 will make us stronger. A sudden upturning of our nest might be mistaken for a vindictive catastrophe; it is rather a ‘moment of change’.

Isolation as a global ‘moment of change’

‘Moments of change’ are occasions where the circumstances of an individual’s life change considerably within a relatively short time frame.

Remind you of any recent events?

This definition comes from a 2011 report by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which summarises the ‘moments of change’ research, analysing these rare opportunities for changing our behaviour, our habits and even our most primal conceptions of who we are.

The NEF study picks out some common moments of change that happen occasionally in most lifetimes: leaving home for the first time, the transition to parenthood, moving house, retirement, energy crises and global recessions.

But I can’t think of a more dramatic moment of change in my lifetime than the Covid-19 pandemic.

Change your environment, change your behaviour

Habits, by definition, are automatic patterns of behaviour: actions we take without really thinking too much. They can be remarkably stubborn and resistant to change — but they’re also tightly bonded to our surroundings.

Think about how hard it would be trying to work down the pub compared to when you’re in the office. You’re the same person — your habits haven’t gone anywhere — but the different environments cue different routines and end up completely changing how you behave.

The opportunities presented by moments of change come about because most of our habits are actually interactions with our immediate physical and social environment.

For most of us, these interactions have been disrupted by self-isolation. The transition from your workplace to working at home is an obvious example of the disruption in environmentally cued behaviour that a lot of us are feeling right now.

But what’s happened to your shopping environment, your eating environment, your exercise environment, your socialising environment? If you’re anything like me, then everything has been thrown up in the air.

All our habitual environments have been shaken up, interrupting the routine behaviours they usually cue.

As NEF put it:

When something interrupts performance of the old behaviour, the need for some degree of conscious direction returns — and once this has happened, the behaviour may be more susceptible to change.

Right now, interruption is happening on a massive scale. Suddenly, we all have to exercise a ‘degree of conscious direction’, perhaps for the first time in many years. The habit discontinuities we’re all facing are opportunities to change our routine behaviour in our relationships, work life, consumer habits, physical fitness and — why not? — diet.

Veganism, dairy and the microbiome

I’ve experimented with vegetarianism before, and for the last five years meat hasn’t been a huge part of my diet (barring one spectacularly ill-fated experiment in 2017), so abstaining from flesh was never going to be an issue.

But then there’s dairy.

Every breakfast for the past three years, I’ve unerringly eaten 250g of high-fat Greek yoghurt, with oats, raisins and nuts. Not, you’ll note, vegan.

A large proportion of meals also came with grated cheese and I’d frequently demolish an afternoon snack of creamy nuts: that’s about 100ml of double cream in a bowl filled with nuts. Not, you’ll note — heck, that’s scarcely edible for most people, let alone vegan.

So going vegan — even eggy vegan — was not going to be easy on my gut.

Lo and behold, my first four days without dairy were peppered with splitting headaches and slothish lethargy. From previous dietary experiments, I’d been expecting this miserable side effect, so I knew how to barrel through.

I like to imagine that these headaches were my dairy-loving bacteria putting up one hell of a fight. On the fifth day, though, they are defeated: starved out of existence and replaced with bacteria that prefer to get their nutrition from celery sticks and tempeh.

This explanation, if not completely upheld by science, is at the very least ‘sciency’, as I explain in this post about quitting sugar. No matter its degree of accuracy, this ‘explanation’ eases me through the temporary fog of headaches and tiredness, out to the other side: eggy veganism.

I have taken this moment of change to try on an alternate personality that’s interested me for a while.

It doesn’t have to go any further than that, of course, but there are intriguing case studies of vegan endurance athletes, the vegan diet is currently ranked as the most nutritious, and there is good scientific evidence that a vegan diet imposes a lighter load on the planet (and no I haven’t had an avocado yet).

But will I want to maintain the diet when lockdown ends?

We don’t want ‘normal’

Historical data from the NEF report suggest that behaviour changes made under pressure don’t tend to last once the crisis is over. Indeed, the hope that everything will go back to normal is why many people are happy to temporarily surrender their usual lifestyles in the first place.

It’s almost certain that I’ll be offered meat or dairy when I return to society — most of my friends and family aren’t vegan and I’m not so wedded to this lifestyle that I’d turn down food if they’re kind enough to cook for me.

But forget other people, after lockdown I myself will be tempted to choose dairy much more frequently than I am now.

Before Covid-19, I went food shopping every couple of days; at the moment, it’s once every 7-10 days. That means I only have to ‘resist’ buying meat or dairy once a week — easy.

My shopping habits feed (pun intended) directly into my eating habits. Change my shopping environment and I change my eating environment: at home I only have eggy vegan choices now.

When society opens back up, will I maintain my new shopping habits? Will my post-lockdown shopping habits, whatever they are, support or undermine my new eggy vegan diet? I don’t know.

But those of us who have used this moment of change to try on an alternate personality — and decide that we want to keep it — must reject the almost irresistible return to normality. We don’t want to abandon our old habits temporarily. We don’t want to go back to ‘normal’ any more. We want change.

It’s one thing to build good habits in this ascetic Covid-19 environment; it’s quite another making them robust enough to survive the shock of opening up. But by anticipating the challenge of impending normality — in the way that I anticipated the headaches and lethargy of quitting dairy — we have at least a chance.

Smug as

So, the big question: how did I replace my heaped bowl of yoghurt every morning? The answer, quite simply: I didn’t — I couldn’t. What in the plant kingdom could possibly imitate animal fats? Genetically, I don’t think it’s possible.

(And, no, the answer is not ‘oat crème fraîche’. Vegetables oils are exactly that: oily. They slimily slither over the tongue and cling to a clammy palate. Dairy fats are, in contrast, fatty. They somehow sink to the bottom of the stomach, leaving a feeling of satiety and a clean taste in the mouth. Mine at least.)

The answer was to cut the Gordian Knot, remove ‘breakfast’ entirely and replace it with something even better than breakfast.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve started my day with a 30g pea and rice protein shake, which I drink while cracking on with work. The green mush is much easier to digest than a big bowl of dairy and keeps me alert throughout my new-found, vegan-inspired morning work regimen.

Smug as fuck.

We’ve. Got. Time.

It’s worth saying that habit change isn’t the same for all people, in all environments and for all behaviours.

I personally find going ‘cold turkey’ has been the best approach for changing diet and has served me well when cutting out sugar and caffeine. I didn’t want to gradually phase out dairy: it would’ve been too hard for me to resist binging. The downside is that I knew I’d have four days of headaches.

But going from zero to a sixty with press ups or running is the quickest way to fail. Run a marathon tomorrow and I’ll be injured for a month. If I’m injured, I can’t build a habit. Far better to start slow and build than to rush for the line and fall.

As well as physical limitations, there are mental limitations.

It doesn’t make sense to force myself to do yoga if I’m not enjoying it. That’s why my daily yoga habit is simply to do as much yoga as I feel like. At the beginning, nearly five months ago, that was five minutes before bed. Now it’s around 20 minutes, twice a day.

My goal is not the accomplishment of some landmark. My goal is to build a sustainable, healthy lifestyle. Cold turkey is one approach and a slow-build while only doing as much as I enjoy is another. For both, I find this mantra helpful: don’t miss twice.

Whichever approach you find most helpful, if there’s one thing we’ve learnt over the past four weeks it’s to slow down and take each day as it comes. We’ve. Got. Time.

Over to us

Kintsugi is the traditional Japanese art of mending broken pottery with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. Sure — super glue also works, but kintsugi is a reminder that we can choose to see the beauty in broken things.

Our work habits are broken. Good. Our social habits are broken. Good. Our shopping habits are broken. Good. We’ve probably got another 18 months of on-and-off lockdown. What are we going to do with this fracture in our habits? Are we fragile, are we going to shatter? Or are we antifragile, are we going to fill the cracks with gold?

My eggy vegan diet isn’t nearly as smug as it sounds. After two weeks, I still get faint bouts of acid reflux and I’ve had to shelve the peanut butter. I’ve read some stuff about ‘alkalising’ my food, but until I’ve had a chance to read more studies, I’m dubious.

This is still a journey of exploration for me. Yesterday I discovered one of the great secrets of vegan cooking: miso paste — in fact, sauces in general. The hand blender has become my closest ally.

I know some of you are plant-based: if you are vegan (or close enough), then I’d love to hear what you’ve learned so far. Honestly. Please drop me an email.

Whatever you think about veganism, I hope I’ve convinced you that isolation is a rare opportunity to get inside your own head, have a rummage around, learn some cool stuff and change for the better — or at least for the more interesting.

It’s over to us now.

Fascination

A fossilised tree, 140 million years old

It may feel like our days are shrinking, that our expansive social and working lives are being stolen away from us.

The reality is that our lives are now being lived in the details, and it is in the details, as any artist or scientist knows, that we find our richest rewards.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychologist Viktor Frankl likens human suffering to gas spreading through a chamber:

[M]an’s suffering is similar to the behaviour of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative.

The same metaphor, I would argue, could apply to almost any aspect of human experience, including curiosity, fascination and excitement.

But whereas suffering expands to our limits without much effort on our part, I think most of us have to work a little harder for these positive emotions to fill our chamber.

We might feel, since lockdown, that we’ve lost the richness of experience that comes from travelling up to London for the day, cycling into the country on a weekend, or hiking the Peak District for a week.

Some of us might even pang for the forbidden pleasures of formless office meetings, or fondly remember the frustration of traffic jams that held us up, once upon a time, when we had somewhere to go.

It might feel like we’ve lost something to our days and that the nights, though sleepless, can’t come soon enough.

But those lost experiences could only ever have swollen to fill a finite chamber, the finite chamber that is our destined interval of consciousness on earth.

The experiences that Newtonian physics demands must inevitably replace those that are ‘lost’ will, if we only get out of the way of ourselves, swell to fill an identical space in our soul.

The only thing we need is a little fascination for the details.

Rather than the broad strokes of outlandish living, rather than the transcontinental love affairs, the nights out on the dancefloor, the boozy Sunday roasts with friends and family, we choose to exist for now on a smaller scale, in among the overlooked details of our lives.

Be like the mycologist, who could happily spend a dozen lifetimes exploring the thousands of fungi that inhabit a handful of soil.

From where I stand at my desk, I can see sun-facing rooftops covered in bright yellow lichen — Xanthoria parietina (‘grows on walls’).

This week, in among the details, buried in books and podcasts and open access science papers, I learnt that lichen is not one organism, but two.

Most lichens are a mutualist symbiosis between a fungus and an alga, a collaboration that dates back hundreds of millions of years.

Long before humans discovered agriculture, fungi learned to farm algae for the energy they generate from photosynthesis.

(Side note: it’s not just agriculture we have in common; fungi are more closely related genetically to humans than they are to the algae they have domesticated — or indeed to any other plant species.)

I also learnt that lichens cover eight percent of the earth’s surface — more than is covered by tropical rainforest.

Without lichens, there might be no life on earth. They mine minerals from sheer rock and form the first soils in otherwise barren ecosystems. Lichen has been found inside lumps of granite.

Lichens have given us antibiotics, Harris tweed and, as black stone flower, garam masala.

I don’t suppose that I’ll look at that rooftop in quite the same way again. Will you?

All about us are the tools of enquiry — our senses, our curiosity and vast repositories of knowledge waiting to be dusted off and discovered. (I’m talking about the Internet.)

Has anyone else noticed how quiet the world is now? How ripe for observation?

That photograph at the top of the page, of the 140 million year old fossilised tree: I would never have noticed that staggering lump of palaeontology if it weren’t for the ‘boredom’ of lockdown.

There is an openness to the world right now. In our long days, we have time to notice the things that were once drowned out by the clamour of ‘business as usual’.

Rather than asking, ‘What’s on Netflix?’, we find ourselves asking instead, ‘How does the haze form, that makes this sunset so beautiful?’

Like the lichen on the rooftops opposite, everywhere we look there are questions that could seed many lifetimes of fascination, with each new discovery opening up new tunnels of exploration like the hyphae that forage and fracture to create the mycelium network that breaks up and becomes the soil beneath our feet.

Fascination is built from the combination of curiosity and imagination; given those ingredients, it is boundless. If you’re not sure, check the ingredients list on your garam masala.

I’m currently reading Edith Eger’s book The Choice. Like Viktor Frankl, Eger also survived the Holocaust. Like Frankl, Eger also moved to the US, also became a psychologist and also wrote a fascinating book about her experiences.

In April 1944, crammed into a cattle carriage with a hundred other Jews, destined for the gas chambers and smoke stacks of Auschwitz, Eger’s mother told her:

“Just remember, no one can take away from you what you’ve put in your mind.”

These words sustained Eger during the year of captivity and abuse that almost killed her a dozen times over.

Our self-isolation is nothing remotely like what Eger and Frankl experienced during the Second World War, but Eger’s mother’s message holds true: it’s time to fill our minds.

You could do a lot worse over the next few weeks than to fill your mind with either The Choice or Man’s Search for Meaning.

If you want a companion for the latter — or if you fancy a shortcut, then shuffle on over to my website, where I have picked out my favourite passages from Frankl’s book and split them over 28 days of remarkable reading.

Bafflingly, there is no Wikipedia entry for Edith Eger. An isolation activity for someone you know?

Two ways to transcend isolation

Transcend #1: Spring Trees

Last weekend I spent four, five, six, seven hours a day rambling in the Peak District. It’s the perfect isolation activity. Solitary, wondrous: an easy way to free yourself from the invisible bonds that are tying you down.

Staggering down from Bamford Moor, I stumbled into a shady grove of stripped oaks, clad in living moss. I climbed over a crumbled drystone wall and sat with my back to the rocks and listened carefully for the sound of carbon-based lifeforms.

Back in Bournemouth, I’ve been breaking the isolation with walks along the seafront, watching the ceaseless, sleepless tide, in-out, ti-de.

I always make sure to ramble through the copse that stands on the clifftops and, invariably, my footsteps slow and I’m drawn upwards, climbing up through the stepladder branches that spiral a pine or holm oak.

My companion on these climbs is Jack Cooke, author of The Tree Climber’s Guide:

Trees anchor us in nature’s cycle; lining our pavements and filling our parks, they remind us of another kind of time-keeping, a vegetable clock that keeps ticking to an alternative rhythm.

In this strange alternative reality, trees are a comfort. All is not rosie in the garden: trees wrestle with their own diseases, of course, but they are a warm embrace when another warm embrace could be infectious.

The awakening buds and the loud birdsong remind us that life is still growing strong. It’s easy to spend my time in front of screens, refreshing, counting time until recovery. But the trees give me a reason to trust in time.

Space and time
Are not the mathematics that your will
Imposes, but a green calendar
Your heart observes

~ R.S. Thomas, Green Categories

I don’t know what’s happening and I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know that there’s a tree’s roots growing underneath me and that its branches reach up above me. That some people believe me and some people love me.

While I was away, I read a review of nature-based interventions for mental health care published by Natural England in 2016.

The mental health benefits from nature-based activities like gardening, conservation and farming are impressive:

Psychological restoration and increased general mental wellbeing
Reduction in depression, anxiety and stress related symptoms
Improvement in dementia-related symptoms
Improved self-esteem, confidence and mood
Increased attentional capacity and cognition
Improved happiness, satisfaction and quality of life
Sense of peace, calm or relaxation
Feelings of safety and security
Increased social contact, inclusion and sense of belonging (okay, maybe not so much right now…)
Increase in work skills, meaningful activity and personal achievement

There is good news outdoors.

The National Trust are closing their indoor attractions, but intend to keep the larger gardens, parks and forests open to the public, for free — even waiving car parking charges.

Close to home on the south coast, Purbeck nature sanctuary has recently tripled in size, creating the largest lowland heath in England at a site already renowned for its wildlife diversity. Life is still growing strong.

Transcend #2: Dark Skies

My last night in the Peak District was fresh and bright. I strode away from the acid lights of the youth hostel, found a sheep-cropped clearing, and looked up. The milky clouds rushed overhead, pulling back like a curtain on a light show for the rapture.

Seeing more stars than I had done for a long time, I stretched my power of imagination and learned a few nice things.

We are all poorer for our light pollution. The night sky outdoes any of our tawdry displays — but only when you can see the constellations that come alive in the dark. This is a map of the UK at night, with light pollution marked in colour from green through to yellow and red in our cities. Aim for the blackness: the Dark Sky Reserves.
The famous Plough is actually a small part — an asterism — of Ursa Major, the hind quarters of a much bigger beast that rears menacingly over the night. A mother protecting her cub, but only in the darkness. In most of our skies, the fearsome monster is reduced to an outmoded piece of farmyard machinery.
I connected the dots and found Leo for the first time. Leo is not a difficult beast to conjure, but if you don’t know where to look… He follows the Plough in the sky, facing the wrong way, with a question mark head and an isosceles rump. It’s really more spectacular than I make it sound.
In times like these, we can seek refuge in the infinite universe and feel the love come down.