STARGAZING

Clear skies tonight so I went out to the field for a little stargazing. I strapped my head torch to my baseball cap, slipped into a hoodie and headed down the lane.

I really love the stillness of the village at night: the streetlamps are on, curtains are drawn and an orange glow seeps from most windows. Out beyond the garages, where the houses stop, the mysterious world is dark and empty, a gaping chasm to be explored. It's perhaps not so mysterious though - by day, the path leads right out to the golf course - I assume it does the same thing at night, only darker.

I flicked on my head torch and headed out into the field. I could hear my trainers padding through the grass. I thought I heard bats or something so I stopped, illuminating a patch of grass about twenty feet away. Millions of tiny insects were flitting through the torch beam like snowflakes caught in the headlamps. I switched it off so that I could look up and get a view of the stars.

There are lots of things I love about stargazing. One is the realisation of how vast the Universe is and how beautiful it is that we can see these distant points of light. Another is the way in which the picture deepens the more you look.

In fact, as I stood there, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, I realised that I could make out fainter stars swimming into focus as I peered up into the heavens. The sky seemed to be teeming with light, bursting into silent song. It's a bit like a painting you look at and appreciate at first, but somehow gets deeper and richer and finer the more you look at it. Further in you go, as though the paint itself is drawing you into the artist's story. There's something rather elegant about it.

I think people are like that too - there are depths to them that you only see when you take time to look, to really look; when you listen to the complex but beautiful way that their constellation has come to be. It's one of the things I love most about friendships I guess, working out what makes my friends tick. If your friends are anything like mine, some of them are bound to be pretty unusual - but for me, that's what makes them such beautiful, quirky, faithful, funny people - the glittering imperfections and character traits you don't necessarily see at first, at least until vulnerability brings them out to sparkle against the velvet night. They're all stars in more ways than one.

On went the torch and back came the swarm of tiny insects. I scrunched across the silvery grass and made my way home for the pot of chamomile tea I'd left for myself. I do love a bit of stargazing.