We were sitting there, out in a French garden last Friday, listening to the sound of a midwife toad (look them up, they’re incredible).
(The noise they make is more like a scops owl, but it doesn’t show up on the Merlin bird app on my phone for the obvious reason that a toad is not a bird.)
Anyway, Mr Grigg began regaling the barbecue guests with a story about a very low aeroplane we’d watched in the sky one afternoon earlier in the week.
It went into a cloud and we had followed its trajectory, the two of us fully expecting it to come out the other side.
But it didn’t, which led me to suggest a Bermuda Triangle-type theory in which the plane used the cloud as a time and space portal to disappear into a different world.
I relayed this to the others, who were a bit non-plussed by this explanation, with one of them even humming the tune to The X-Files and another doing an impression of a cuckoo.
So I zoned out and gazed up at the night sky, which is my wont, while they discussed UFOs and other dimensions. In my own head, the theme music for Stranger Things was playing loudly, drowning out their scorn.
And that’s when I saw it, a long line of lights moving slowly towards the little full moon, which was about to appear above a tree.
I savoured the moment for a few milliseconds and then said calmly: ‘What’s that up there?’
All eyes turned to the sky. We watched this strange phenomenon for a minute or two as it traversed its night stage, seemingly on some otherwordly mission above our heads. We were transfixed.
By the time I took out my camera from my jeans pocket, the sight was dimming and so were my photography skills because I was so excited.
After the thing left our field of vision, silence ensued, followed by a feverish conversation about what we’d just witnessed.
It took me another five minutes to retrieve something from the back of my mind and to declare the thing we’d just seen was the Starlink satellite train. I’d heard about it once on the radio and had always wanted to see it, and now I had.
It’s operated by SpaceX, whose driving force is a strange man I do not like. I refuse to name him so my blog doesn’t get launched in to the outer atmosphere but just think of Batman gone bad and you’ll know who I mean.
That aside, we all rely on the internet these days, so the Starlink satellites have a job to do and, when you read up on it, you realise that there is so much in this world we do not understand.
And why am I telling you this? Because you need to know.
Also, the thing in the sky looked very like a Star Wars lightsaber moving gracefully across the universe. And as today is May the Fourth and I always put down my religion as Jedi on the census, I felt I needed to share that with you.
Have a great week.
Love, Maddie x
Maddie Grigg 