Draw Down the Stars (The Plan)

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“Coming back to the city that I never quite leave, picture you by the ocean, picture me coughing into my sleeve”

It seems fitting that this song gets the ball rolling on our little trips, partly because it is a song from one of my favourite albums, but also because it is, by and large, a song about escape. It’s a song about the city, where everyone wants to be, where you can do anything you like. Listen to those ambitious people you know, they all want to head to London, to New York, to anywhere big and shiny. Cities have everything you can ever want, as long as you have the money to buy it, and of course, the city has means to help you make money if you’re ambitious, or enterprising, or just plain lucky.

The problem is, the city never sleeps. There are always people around, always bright lights flashing, there is always something to entertain. There’s never peace, never time to stop or think, imagination and ideas strangled as something new and yet something the same as always is thrown in your face and you are ordered to enjoy. The city kills by constriction, as the song says.

I was born into this urban chaos, to me this is part of life, normal, mundane, hardly the excitement that the city promises. That’s not to say I despise everything that the town throws into life; there’s always people to see, always things to do. It’s just that, every now and then, it’s nice to gaze up at the night sky and think ‘Somewhere, beyond the orange glow of the streetlights, there is a whole new world’. And there really is. It is a well known fact that the fluorescent night that the streetlights in towns create block out so many stars. The concept of looking up and seeing The Plough in its full glory is pretty obscure, limited to pictures in magazines or documentaries on BBC 2, and yet it is there above us, things seen but not seen.

And that is where the inspiration for our first event came from: Why not escape the city and find the stars? And while we are on it, rather than just head a few miles outside of Wolverhampton and see one or two extra stars in the sky, feel pretty underwhelmed and head back home, why not find the darkest place in the whole country, somewhere so remote and unspoiled that not only can you clearly see distant stars, you can see distant planets as well? I didn’t even realise you could see other planets, I had read about Venus being visible in the night sky every now and then but thought it was probably a bit of a wind up as I had never seen anything but the flashing beacons of passing aeroplanes when I had looked up to find it. So there we have it, destination settled: We are heading to Kielder, England’s darkest village.

Not only does Kielder have a population of around 200, a post office and, quite importantly, a pub, it also has an observatory for viewing those stars, and public viewings so that normal people can pop into the observatory and view those stars. On April 29th, there is a new moon, further reducing the light pollution, and the earth is in a perfect position for Saturn to be bright in the sky. So, for those interested, I say we head up to Kielder, take a quick look at Saturn and The Plough (possibly other star formations, but I don’t really know any more), then head to the pub where we can discuss life on other planets and other such space related ideas over a pint or two of local ale.

One more thing. Kielder is 3 miles from Scotland. It’s a long way to drive up there, view Saturn, drink a few pints and head home in the same day. I say we stay the night, maybe stop off at other places on the way there and the way back. For those on a budget, there is a campsite, which seems a pretty good idea to me, why not spend the rest of the night under the stars as well? Prices are pretty low for this one – entry to the observatory comes in at £8 and the campsite is £15 for a four man tent (though inexperienced campers beware: There is no way you can fit four men in a four man tent). It is nearly in Scotland though so it might cost a bit in petrol, that said I estimate that it will cost about £60 in a Citroen C2, which, if we can split it between a few of us, really isn’t so much.

So there we are, Draw Down the Stars; somewhere dark, somewhere beautiful, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Patrick Moore would enjoy it, and so, hopefully, shall we.

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