Friday 18 September 2009

A trick of the light...

I’m sure that I saw something small and brown run in through the cottage door just then. It was too long for a mouse and it didn’t look like it had fur. No, I must have imagined it – a trick of the light…

‘What the fish-heads was that? It ran past me and disappeared in a flash. It was all brown and darty, I hope it wasn’t another creepy-weepy crawly thing, I hate all those legs. Now where did it go?

Is that it up there? What is it? How did it get up there? It’s far too high for me to jump up to get it - not that I’m sure that I want to get it. It doesn’t look like a creepy-weepy crawly, not enough legs - I still don’t like the look of though. I’ll just sit here and watch, it’s bound to make a move eventually and when it does I’ll decide what to do about it.

.
Perhaps I’m imagining it, having a hallucination - or maybe it’s a mirage, a Fata Morgana. I’ve never seen one but my great uncle Tiberius saw one once. He saw an upside down, long, thin fish floating on the horizon. When he jumped at it, he went right through it.

.
Uncle Tiberius used to talk to me about mirages, he read up on them; they’re usually seen in the morning after a cold, cold night. The weather needs to be calm, so that when the warm air that lies over the colder, denser, air near the surface of the ground meets the undisturbed air layer between the two, the warm and the cold, they become a huge refracting lens and produce upside-down images. Distant miragey things that appear to hover, strange ghostly objects on the horizon - islands, cliffs, ships, icebergs, even uncle T’s fish – they all appear to be stretched and float in the air like phantoms. Spooky-wooky!
.
Of course nobody called him Tiberius, they called him Tibby – he knew his mirages though.


Perhaps if I cover my eyes it will go away. That’s it, I’ll cover my eyes and count to ten and if it hasn’t gone by the time I open them again I’ll… well I’ll try something else.
.
One, two, three, four (has it gone yet?), five, six (it must have gone by now), seven, eight, eight and a half, nine (go away mirage), nine and a half, nine and three quarters, ten!

Opening my eyes - open. Has it gone? No, it’s still here. Now what do I do?

I know… I think I’ll sCat.”

There goes Misty. I wonder why she’s in such a rush? I can’t see that brown thing anywhere, maybe she chased it away…
Now watch this incredible video about a man who chases aerial phenomenon – I completely get what he does and why he does it, but maybe not about how he feels about himself.
Take a look at the MIRAGE FILM - it's unbelievable.

4 comments:

  1. Wow! 10 out of 10 for trying Misty! Talking about strange lights in Northern skies, did you ever see the Joanna Lumley programme when she travelled to Norway to see the aurora borealis? After all the waiting, she managed to see it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Misty, you have real star quality you know.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I saw the aurora borealis once - for a second - from the air - I want to see it again one day.

    ReplyDelete
  4. So that's what it was an Aurora Borealis. I don't want to see one again it was creepy.

    ReplyDelete