Preserved gold

The best part of my day by some margin is when I'm eating marmalade on toast with a coffee chaser for my breakfast. I am, at this point, allowed to read non-improving books, by which I mean literature. My second favourite part of the day is when I know that I will fall asleep and both the cats are curled up with me. The rest of the day is fair to average.

Marmalade is the sun in a jar. It is bitter and sweet.

It is more precious than gold.

I asked my friend Richard - who is a keen amateur astronomer (I could have asked my friend Issi who has studied astronomy at a high level) about the moon. And indeed, apart from during lunar eclipses, one could always see a 'full moon' from somewhere in space. This is nice... It is always full somewhere, except... I like this kind of thing - this is always true, except when... This is the state of reality as we know it, except when... the admission that there is always an exception.

He explained to me that a blood moon is when the only light reaching the moon during a lunar eclipse is red light bending around the earth through the atmosphere. The moon looks red and were you on the moon you could walk around in this strange red light and see the earth as a black sphere with a red rim.

And we talked of how the moon can look yellow or green and even blue depending on the particulates in the atmosphere and which frequencies of light are filtered out.

He said how sunsets are so brilliant thanks to the pollution in the atmosphere. And then we realised that ancient people would only have seen golden sunsets - unless there had been a volcano somewhere. Then the sunset sky could be blood red and surely they'd see this as evidence of some coming catastrophe.

The marmalade is a memory of pre-pollution sunsets, a message about the bitterness within the sweetness of our 'success' as a species.