Since it was half-term, I took the boy out for the day. My choice was the planetarium at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which melds my two great loves: space and having to traverse the entirety of London, with a chatty six-year-old, twice in one wet afternoon. Our journey involves two buses, a tube, an overground, and 20 minutes of walking either side. Time was, all these various modes of transport would be a big plus for my son, who used to whoop and cheer as trains arrived and scream with contagious delight at every bus driver he met. As he moans about how long everything is taking, I realise for the first time that those mundane pleasures of the everyday world have left him. No wonder, I think with egregious lachrymosity, he has his eyes set on the stars.
Being a six-year-old, he is stocked with questions. We have both presumed he will get some time with space boffins, ready and eager to answer any queries from 4ft-tall astronomers in training. It’s just that my son is equally insistent that they’ll be eager to learn something from him. As we take our seats on the tube, he lays out his prolix plan: a set of 14 questions sorted into four distinct classes; 4 x easy, 4 x medium, 4 x hard, and 2 x EXTREME.
‘That might be a bit ambitious,’ I tell him, while also gently suggesting that the object should be for him to learn something, not to catch the scientists out. We compromise by whittling his list down to three questions of mildly escalating complexity.
A fellow passenger watches this discussion admiringly and I feel that reflected glow of pride I get when anyone witnesses my son being volubly clever in public. Unfortunately, she catches his eye while he’s in full flow and is sucked into his tractor beam. ‘Are you going to the planetarium,’ he asks. ‘No,’ she chuckles, ‘I’m going to see my granddaughter.’ ‘Oh,’ he replies, ‘how old are you?’ It is merely the opening salvo in a bruising cannonade of questions, covering her life, likelihood of death and, inevitably, the prevalence of asteroids. It ends only when she gets off at the following stop – one which, I’d bet any money, is not her original destination.
When we arrive, we have a quick bite and head into the atrium, where there are not pictures of planets, but pictures of Earth itself, from space. Any qualms I might have about this bit of false advertising are quashed when I see his excitement, not least when he discovers a satellite shot of Ireland and insists I send a picture of it to his nana. Then we take our seats in the auditorium and get a guided tour through the cosmos, projected in spectacular fashion in the domed roof above. My son is captivated, even more so when the lights come up and a friendly young physicist announces she’ll take any questions we have.
He bounds from his seat like a court reporter and makes sure he’s the first one there. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘this is a difficult question.’
‘That’s OK’ she replies, ‘I’ll do my best to answer it for you.’
‘Oh, you’ll have to,’ he says, his time come at last, ‘but good luck, anyway.’
Article by:Source: Séamas O’Reilly
