An astronomer and a gentleman

A few days ago I was saddened to hear of the passing-away of Sir Patrick Moore (aged 89), astronomer and broadcaster extraordinaire, who, among many other pursuits and accomplishments, was best known for hosting his flagship tv programme 'The Sky at Night' for a record 50 years plus. It is not my intention to list his many talents and achievements, these can easily be ascertained on the Web and elsewhere. The point of this post of mine is simply to record his passing and his significance for me.

In a way, Patrick Moore bears a similar relationship to me in my later adolescent and early adult years as did  the comic books I read in my childhood years (see 'Death of a comic book'). He represented a particular phase of my life which left its indelible mark on me. Through his programme he contributed to arousing in me a strong interest in astronomy which led me to read books on the subject and eventually, when I had the money for it, to buy a decent refractor telescope so I too could survey the heavens and identify cosmic bodies. 

Patrick Moore was perhaps the last of a dying breed of gentlemen scholars and amateur enthusiasts: eccentric but not over the top, enthusiastic but not ostentatious, passionate but not exaggerated, meticulous but not pedantic. I suppose the word that best describes him and which appears here more than once is 'enthusiastic'. And his enthusiasm was contagious to all those who had an interest in his field of expertise. He had the knack of carrying his viewer or listener along at a fast pace and of holding his attention right to the end. And by the end of his programme one always felt that one had learnt something.

With his monocle, rapid speech, single-mindedness and rather sedate manner of dressing, Patrick Moore may have looked every bit the part of the absent-minded and unkempt professor but he was certainly not absent-minded, rather very quick-witted, and his ungroomed appearance betokened a man more interested in sharing his field of expertise and his enthusiasm with his public and his followers than in preening himself! With Patrick Moore, you got what you saw and the impression I got was of a very genuine man absorbed in his subject and eager to share his knowledge with us.

The very little I have written above hardly does justice to the man but I have tried to portray the essence of the man in a few words and convey the place he held in my esteem and the part he played in my life as a teenager and a young adult. Later in life I got caught up in the maelstrom of adult life and all the responsibilities that come with it, but from time to time I would tune in to his programme late at night and somehow it was a comforting feeling knowing that he was there as always. Now that he's gone, it won't be the same without him, and I will miss the old soldier! 

Farewell, Patrick, Gentleman Scholar, may you rest in peace among the planets and stars in the heavens which were your playground since your boyhood years!

Death of a comic book

And so it is that on its 75th birthday the Dandy comic, which saw the light of day in 1937, has now passed away as a tangible palpable paper publication and has migrated to the Internet to exist only in the ether, in cyberspace, for those who are still interested in its brand of humour.

Its sister publication, the Beano, born a year later in 1938, ironically on the eve of World War II, still hangs on for dear life, having recently been granted a reprieve, whilst the Topper and the Beezer, later arrivals, also issuing from the DC Thomson stable, in 1955 and 1956 respectively, long gave up the ghost and were consigned to the comic book graveyard in the sky in 1993. I doubt that it will be long before the Beano goes the way of the Dandy. Still, unlike their two former bedfellows, they will still be available online, for now, and it remains to be seen what their eventual fate will be.


For me personally, these four humorous comics (for, despite their name, not all comic books are humorous, witness many of the American super-hero publications and others), accompanied my childhood and played an important part in entertaining me. Every week I would traipse off to my local newsagent's to collect them, but, as they did not all come out on the same day and I was impatient to have them as soon as I could, I often did not wait for all of them to be saved for me by the newsagent and would have to make more than one weekly trip before I had them all. But I did not mind and even relished the trip to the newsagent's and the anticipation that built up inside me.

These were the comic books that injected laughter and mirth into my childhood years and that preceded in my life such DC Comics as Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and The Flash, to name a few, which engrossed my early adolescent years. I would spend many a moment chuckling to myself as I read the antics of such iconic characters as Dennis the Menace, Minnie the Minx, the Bash Street Kids, Roger the Dodger, and Lord Snooty. Some of the others worth a mention were Desperate Dan, Biffo the Bear, The Three Bears, Little Plum, Ball Boy, Ivy the Terrible, and Billy Whizz. No doubt there were others which do not come to mind at the moment.

By the time the Beezer and the Topper were in financial straits and had to be merged into one between 1990 and 1993, the year of their demise, I was very much grown up (!), and I don't now even recall hearing about the merger at the time. Given my 'advanced' years, I had long ceased to read any comics and, as it was still the pre-Internet era (indeed the pre-desktop pc era), I was busying myself in my spare time reading factual books, composing poetry and trying my hand at painting. The comics of my childhood were reaching the end of the line and I was no longer part of their world, and it seems the children who were buying them were dwindling rapidly, as they defected to other publications more in tune with the changing world. They had become too innocent for the 1990s generation of children who now needed more realistic comic books to feed and fire their imagination... I guess. 

I suppose these developments and demises were to be expected and had been on the cards for some time. Very few things last very long in our modern world of constant change and renewal, where tastes and fashions come and go as swiftly as they never did before in this society of the fleeting and the transient. Now we live on a diet of instant impressions and overnight successes, and the thirst for more and bigger stimuli to keep us from getting bored consumes our lives. And yet, I can't help thinking that the simple comics of my childhood left a more lasting impression and a deeper mark in my psyche than all the wealth of clever novelties, gimmicks and innovations ever will before I too check out of this life.  

The Dandy, the Beano, the Topper and the Beezer, became my constant companions as soon as I was able to read, and together with such other pastimes as marbles, picture cards, toy soldiers, yo-yos, train sets, and stamp-collecting (philately), they filled my out-of-school hours and provided me with the stimulus and fun that I needed without all the mad intensity of today's electronic games and the vagaries of computers that seem to complicate our life today rather than simplify it in spite of all the nonsense spouted by their purveyors. And all these pastimes and hobbies were all the more important as the monochrome television of the time was still very much in its infancy and did not provide the interest, variety and stimulation which it now does with its multiplicity of channels and the huge flat-panel screens that try to mimic the big cinema screen experience.

My childhood world was one consisting of hands-on experience and I interacted directly with the tangible environment around me, not with a cyber world that can only be experienced indirectly. Was this better? I think it was for me the child but I will not press the point. In any case, it is now an academic one in this world of electronic this and electronic that which promises everything but which delivers much less. What I can say for sure is that in the grey post-war world of my tender years, these four comic books introduced a good bit of colour and laughter and amusement which made all the difference, and for that at least I am forever grateful to them and saddened at their demise or banishment to the Internet.