Sometimes you just know something is different. it's a subliminal thing. You don't think about it, but rather it suddenly occurs to you that the world is not following the same old ritual. Such a minor epiphany happened to me last night. It was quiet. Too quiet...

Now that my street is blocked by roadworks, traffic is diverted, and no longer uses the road to travel between the town centre and Old Town up the hill. At least most people are diverted. I've seen a few confused attempts by drivers of 4x4's and lorries to negotiate the full scale model of the Somme battlefield a few yards down from my front door.

It makes you realise how much we do on autopilot. These people, who perhaps ought to show a bit more savvy when confronted with a road sign and a change of circumstance, are simply following their ritual too. They've probably driven up and down the road every day for the last decade.

Mind you, it wasn't just the roadworks. The snow was falling last night too and that created an empty sort of ambience in Swindon. No-one wanted to go outdoors I suppose, but no-one was walking around, and as I looked out the back window last night, it was to a very festive scene.

The presence of background noise in towns is so pervasive we just don't notice it anymore, unless you live on a busy road like I do, but even then it all becomes ordinary. After a day of workmen yelling and lorries engines vibrating outside, the peace and quiet was actually quite strange. Here I was in the middle of a town and nothing stirred.

At least I'll be able to sleep for once.

The Digging Goes On

The brave and courageous workman using his jackhammer to dig up the sewer down the street has finally succumbed to the cold. They've now brought in another drill on a caterpillar vehicle with a hydraulic boom. There's quite an impressive trench along the road now, floodlit, and plenty of rusty metal panels holding the earthworks in place.

More And More Stars

I see from the internet news that astronomers have discovered swathes of new stars out there, mostly the lukewarm red dwarf ones that last the longest. Normally this item wouldn't be especially interesting because A - You can't see them without several radio telescopes in orbit, B - They're small and well behaved, and C - None of them are about to crash into the Earth and prove Hollywood was right after all.

However, their claim to fame is that seeing as many are already 10 billion years old (Our sun is 4 or 5 billion years old and middle-aged - let's hope it doesn't have a crisis), then there's an extra probability of finding life on worlds orbiting them. Normally that would be fantastic except A - Virgin Holidays haven't managed to build a means of taking tourists there, B - Humanity has a habit of destroying newly discovered eco-systems, and C - it's unlikely they've evolved beyond something squishy that eats, bonks, and lacks any good conversation.

But you never know. In any case, now that we've discovered all these places, how about discovering means to get there? How else can I buy Orion slave-women? Not so keen on salt-sucking monsters though. Just in case you thought I was completely chauvanistic.