HARBINGER

I don't know who looked at 2020 and thought, "Hmm. You know what this year could do with... a medieval harbinger of doom!" ... but brilliant, thanks.

Yes, we have a comet. Foe of soothsayers, emperors, and tapestry-makers alike, this unpredictable plume of disaster streaks the night, as terrible and foreboding as it could be, in a year that's already had its fair share of glum tidings.

Except it's not though, is it really? It's a chunk of space-ice that's broken off from the edge of the solar system. It's spinning around the sun on its own spiralling journey into disintegration, and its elliptical path just happens to have brought it into view from here. It can no more affect the cause of men than a Martian can move a molehill.

I suppose if you believed that the sky was a backdrop on which the planets rolled around the flat world, if you thought perhaps the stars were holes in the fabric that let the light of heaven through, all in that predictable, clockwork fashion that describes the seasons, then you might be forgiven for assuming that a random 'star', falling through the night sky with a fiery tail, might be a sudden sign of great change or disruption. You might even assume that your deity of choice had given you a bit of a heads-up on all the evil coming your way, for some reason.

Perhaps the comet even did precede something terrible from time to time. There's one in the Bayeux Tapestry for example, just before William the Conqueror set sail for England in 1066! Looking back, it would have seemed ominous - especially if you believed in that kind of thing; oh and if you didn't before, you'd be much more likely to afterwards - even if it were simple coincidence. Perhaps great and terrible things happened all the time, and it just so happened that people were on the lookout for those woeful things around the time they saw the 'long-haired star'. Sometimes, after all, we do see only what we expect to see.

Well, unless we're living in Deep Impact, I'd quite like to see it too, doom-bringer or not. It's cloudy today so quite unlikely, and getting up early is not my strength at the moment, so there's every chance that Comet NEOWISE will go sailing by without me.

If I could choose it to be a bringer of anything though, then why not unexpected joy, freedom, relief and celebration for the world, in the second half of this year? I'm not sure we can take much more darkness; perhaps things could balance out?

Well. It really is just a lump of ice, tumbling through the solar system, burned into a coma by the sun. If I really want to change the world, I have a feeling I need to look a little further, a little deeper, and maybe a little closer to home, than to a stray comet.