I meant to write last time - that this is the time of year when the "murmering" starlings gather over the place that is now my home town - Brighton, England. This picture captures one of those perfect moments which I have witnessed a number of times. And like all stories it appears like atrace elsewhere - I once wrote this into a novel: Michael and Jess cast a last glance back at the pier. The flames were now dropping into the sea and it was like a fireworks display gone wrong. A flock of fifty thousand starlings flash-mobbed the Pavilion and then swooped over the sea, like a chiffon shroud waiting to fall on the West Pier. It was a sight Michael had seen often and had never understood how or why it happened. Like so much of life, the strangeness of it was beginning to outweigh his knowledge of it. Far to the south, where the Brighton lights had stopped leaking into the sky, they could see the stars winking at them.‘Did you know,’ said Michael to Jess, ‘the light from some of those stars actually left the star millions of years ago; all that travelling just to get to our sky.’
Jess stared up at them, ‘so really, they could be dead, then.’
‘Sorry?’
‘The stars, they could be dead for all we know. In fact the sky might not look anything like it does, not really.’
Michael smiled at her, he knew about this but wanted to hear it from Jess and probed, just as he would do with his students. ‘You’ll have to explain that one to me.’
‘Come on Michael, you’re supposed to be the brainbox. If the light from a star takes a million years to get to us, then it stands to reason that if it died say five-hundred years ago we still wouldn’t know about it until the year dot.’
Michael just smiled again.
‘By which time you’ll be too old to care.’
‘Not only me,’ he piped back.
‘Sure it will be. I’m young and everyone knows we live forever.’
The young live forever - aye well - that was then and still the starlings continue with their murmering - flash-mobbing the pier - time for this too. The great thing about pop music is the way it continues to re-invent itself and to find new ways of telling the story - in this case, love... here's power to their elbow
