Notes on...

Let’s dispense with the obvious question first. Are they common? While there’s a clear temptation to consult Nicky Haslam on such matters, I don’t think I can be bothered. Not least because first, I am a Prusso-Italian immigrant, second, I was born in Essex and third, I adore fridge magnets. We should be honest and admit that, like everything in life, they are signifiers. The aim is to show our friends how cultured, traveled, well-read, ironic and amusing we are. They are our lives writ in ceramic. Where to begin? One of my favorite magnets, designed to strike fear and dread into any intruder, dates back to Iraq circa 2004: “Caution Stay 100 meters back or you will be shot.” No punctuation, not even an exclamation mark!

The climax of the Artemis II mission lasted just a few hours. The capsule, named Integrity, rounded the Moon, the crew becoming the most distant humans in history as they moved from its sunward side into its shadow. The familiar features of the permanently Earth-facing side made way for the more heavily cratered far side. This is not the Moon we know. The far side is different. It has a thicker crust, no major solidified lava plains and is more heavily cratered, like the aftermath of the final war. Before reaching it, the crew saw two Apollo landing sites: Apollo 12 touched down on Oceanus Procellarum (Ocean of Storms), and Apollo 14 landed on the plains of Fra Mauro, the target for the aborted Apollo 13 mission. There have been travelers here before, but not like this.

My wife found the list in the back pocket of my gardening trousers. That ought to have been a clue, but she didn’t pick up on it. She marched into the study with an interrogative stride. “Who the hell are Mimi? Orla? Charlotte? Anya? Lady Christl!?” I felt a pang of relief that she hadn’t found my “tasting notes” as well. “Charlotte – firm, puts out well, nice finish.” If my wife had been a gardener or an allotmenteer she would have recognized the names as varieties of spud. Still, I can’t blame her. The faintly porny air does persist, as do some mysteries. Mimi, for instance – a redhead, “small, but plentiful” – disappeared suddenly some years ago and no one knows exactly why.

In January 1894, an assistant of Thomas Edison made a five-second silent film of Fred Ott taking snuff and then sneezing. It was the second ever film to be copyrighted – and it started with a sneeze. The sneeze is a blessing and a curse, associated with both good fortune and ill omen. In ancient Greece it was a prophetic sign from the gods – a sneeze could confirm the gods’ blessing of a decision. By the end of the 6th century, with plague sweeping through Rome, it had become associated with illness and death. Pope Pelagius II died from plague midsneeze. His successor, Gregory the Great, declared by papal decree that “God bless you” was the appropriate response of a Christian when someone sneezes, to keep the wildness and danger at bay.