In August, 1982 my future husband, my eighteen year old daughter and I sat outside my mother’s house watching the sky hoping to see some shooting stars. I knew that every year around the beginning to middle of August, the Perseid meteor shower would appear. In the end, between us, we may have seen two. It got so cold that we had to retreat into the tiny cottage we were all sharing with a lodger – which is a good story for another time.

Why do I mention this? Last night the sky was reasonably clear. It’s Folk Week here in Broadstairs and there was music all around – for some reason it wasn’t folk music I could hear but songs such as ‘I Will Survive’ and ‘Stayin’ Alive’. I sat in the big wooden chair which I can rest my head against and watched the sky. There were planes, some so high up they were just a moving dot of light; I saw stars which I thought were moving because of the way the light cloud moved; I saw the occasional late-night bird flying across the sky and, yes! I saw two (and possibly three) meteors flashing through the night sky before it became just a little too cold to sit there any longer. And, besides, the music had stopped!