A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest & Pray

I woke up feeling quite contorted today as my back was giving me gyp again but I still had to drag myself out of bed just as my eyes were opening as I knew it was bin day (nobody else in our household can ever seems to remember to put the bins out even though it's the same bl**dy day every week!) and that the bin men were due to arrive early. It was only when I moved the bin to put it at the bottom of our driveway that I came across a little dead mouse - we had heard one scrabbling about in our kitchen cupboard over the last few days but had not caught sight of it let alone been able to capture it. I still wanted to get out for our morning run to see if it would help to unfurl my back so I covered it up as best as I could as a short term measure.
Once we got back from our run I did carefully pick up the poor little mite and buried it next to our apple tree in the back garden, said a little prayer -  I'm not even slightly religious but I still felt I should give it a dignified send off - and then put a large stone on top of it to mark its resting place and, if I'm honest, to stop the neighbourhood cats digging it up again.
We then decided on a quick trip over to Rochester to see the Mars installation at Rochester Cathedral. Initially it didn't feel quite as spectacular as as the previous planet based installation of the Moon (which is maybe reflected by these not being the best images I have ever taken) that we had seen previously at the same venue but we were viewing it in daylight and not at night when it is perhaps shown off to its best advantage.
The installation measures 7 metres in diameter and features detailed imagery from Nasa's Mars reconnaissance orbital data of the martian surface at an approximate scale of 1:1 million - with each centimetre representing 10 km of the planet's surface and allowing the viewer to study all its valleys, craters and volcanos. It fuses this imagery with internal lighting and a sound composition from the award winning Ivor Novello composer Dan Jones, which whilst contemplating the beauty of Mars and wonder at the science is also intended to highlight injustice and the effects of war - with the soundtrack incorporating the sound of distant bombing and marching soldiers.
We did have to put some work in but ended up getting slowly caught up in its mesmerising presence and felt a strange sense of calm and being at rest as we sat on a couple of the chairs (with the added benefit that I completely forgot about my bad back), which you can see in my extra, as they were enveloped by the red glow from the installation. 
Of course it's not also every day that you overcome a bad back, bury a mouse in your back garden and then have the surreal experience of seeing a planet floating inside a cathedral!