every twenty-eight years

I realised some time ago that it's impossible to capture every moment. As recommended in the Way of the Dancing Bag it's best to not try and hold onto everything. The first time that an aeroplane almost flew in front of the moon this evening I was preparing to just watch it when I suddenly changed my mind and scrabbled for my camera; I was never going to get focussed and set the exposure in time so just settled for watching. A few minutes later a little bit further down the road it looked as if it was going to happen again. This time I was pre-focussed and set but the aircraft descended a little too swiftly and missed. After that I stopped trying. There will be other aeroplanes and other moons. It was the sort of evening when you can just ignore all the aeroplanes and just concentrate on the stars and the moon kicking everything else out of mind.

There was this moon too. Almost a perfect moon-situation; hopefully someone else went past a little bit later when there was a construction worker reaching plaintively upwards from the ladder. Hopefully someone else went past the sleeping van-driver on King's Stables Road this morning and remembered to bump up their ISO and widen their aperture. Hopefully someone else with a better tele lens noticed the woman with the binoculars in the second-floor flat watching the drunks on the bench opposite on the way to the hill this evening. Hopefully someone in one of the cars screaming up the hill looked out of the window to their left and saw the moon over the forth. Hopefully someone else saw the unicycling student almost fall on his face in the middle of Montague Street.