MOON LANDINGS

Since the other day, when I was thinking about the phases of the moon, I've been looking up at its silvery glow most nights. While the South of England is marooned between enormous fields of floodwater, the little bright disk beyond the night remains pleasantly beaming.

Professor Brian Cox thinks that mankind's greatest achievement was the lunar landing of July 1969. Tough to disagree. Within just seven decades of humanity mastering powered flight, Neil Armstrong was bouncing across the surface of the moon, snapping pictures of Buzz Aldrin and pocketing moonrock for scientific research. For me, it was the defining moment of the 20th Century, perhaps even of the Millenium.

Not that I was there. I was born nine years later and grew up in the 1980s with both a fascination for those grainy pictures, and no real understanding of how they changed the world. I drew pictures of space rockets, shuttles and astronauts - I wore cardboard spacesuits and bounded gravity-free from the sofa like all eight-year olds. To me though, it could never be quite as astonishing as it must have been to the children of the 60s.

The Intrepids had been married for less than a year. Apparently, my Dad stayed up and listened to the broadcast on radio. No change there then: he's always staying up for eclipses and aurora-sightings and the like. He loves a bit of astronomy, almost as much as he loves a bit of sci-fi.

"Of course, you know there's more computing power in a mobile phone than there was in the Apollo 11 mission," he said last night, gazing through the conservatory roof. I pointed out that there was probably around 2kb with a backup of 32kb. Mum changed the subject.

You can see the Sea of Tranquility without a telescope. It's quite incredible to look up at this ancient sleeping rock and think of the day we put a man there using less processing power than a digital calculator.