Hydrogen Supernova in the Sky

My bedroom window gives the best view of any in the house. Because It's a fair- sized sash window, it can be thrown open in the summer, letting in the green smell of the trees and the cool fresh air off the top of the hill. At the moment, everything behind my house is a riot of colour (admittedly this colour is mostly green, but frankly after the winter I'm so bloody pleased to see it I don't care) – greens of every shade, branches of thick, creamy white blossom on the cherry trees, and smaller bursts of delicate white on the apple trees; thick clumps of a fragile pink on another tree. Red London brick on the houses, red tiles on the roofs – it's beautiful enough during the day, but in the evening the setting sun lights the brick up in a rosy ochre glow, contrasting with the cool pastel colours in the gardens.

It never really gets dark in London – I've been over this before, I think, and some of my friends have expressed a belief that living somewhere like that is at best unnatural and at worst indicative of sociopathic (or at least masochistic) tendencies (now that I think about it, this might be true). But as far as I am concerned it does do something quite special.

If I lie in bed at night and pull the blind back from the window slightly, I can see my stars. Obviously, because of the light pollution, There aren't many. In fact usually I can only see one or two – if I were out in the street I might be lucky enough to see a couple of dozen at most. My friends who grew up in smaller towns and in the countryside laugh at me for this. “Those aren't stars” they say. “Those are the pitiful remnants of the milky way which survive London killing off the rest of them with its damnable light pollution” (or words to that effect anyway – I suspect most of them find the issue somewhat bemusing) and I suppose from one perspective this is true, but it ignores one crucial fact – the stars I can see from my bedroom window are my stars. When all of them are there, I couldn't tell you for a thousand pounds which ones were mine.

So when I walk back from the pub at one in the morning, or saunter down the street just because it's dark, it's summer and I can – I make a point of saying hello to my stars. Given the nature of sound as a series of vibrations in the air, and space as a vacuum, the fact that the light reaching us from stars is thousands if not millions of years old and of course the star's nature as non-sentient giant balls of hydrogen undergoing nuclear fusion, I'd give you fairly good odds that they won't hear me.

I say hello to them all the same. After all, they are my stars. If I don't, who will?