Line Up

Some things stick in your head for decades. My best friend at school opted to study the same science-based subjects, and we were genially competitive over test scores and homework marks. I remember my chagrin that he understood this cartoon and I did not. Until I found it on the Internet today, I would have told you we saw it in Punch. I have no idea why we were looking at the Spectator - of all things! - in the school library. Anything but organic chemistry, probably

The Greek myth of Leda and the Swan - or at least its title - is well enough known through painting, ballet, poetry, and the sort of education many Spectator readers get, for the cartoonist to have confidence they would get the joke. In summary, the swan is an incarnation of Zeus - a subtrefuge in order to seduce Leda, the result of which is a child. The same pregnancy includes a child of her husband, and the two are born as twins: Castor and Pollux, the former human, the latter divine. They symbolise the mysterious relationship that can exist between twins, still raising questions even today

Eventually, at Pollux's pleading with his father, they both achieve immortality and were elevated into the night sky as stars - the heavenly twins - in the constellation we call Gemini - the Roman word for the twins

It's just a myth. We now know that despite their apparent proximity in the sky, they are 16 light-years apart. But there is a twist: Pollux is a single giant star - the closest giant star to earth - but known to have at least one planet. Castor, meanwhile, is not a single star, but a star-system: it is six stars arranged in three pairs, each pair orbiting one another - three instances of true heavenly twins. A deeper truth than they knew

The full moon we are told to call 'wolf'. I don't think we have the right until we have wolves again. We can't even have beavers because they are all Tories. Give me strength! I read a description of the difference between a halo and a corona around the moon (one is refraction by ice, one is diffraction by water droplets) but I still don't know which this is

Bright enough to be visible, even within the cloud and corona/halo, is Mars. A mere 96 million kilometers away from us today - less than half its average distance, and in full sun

There is no significance to this parade, except any you might want to project on to it. I'll just remember that, on some mornings, the stars align