It's a lovely night for a moondance…

Well, actually it’s not. It’s cold and damp in Sydney at the moment (if I’d known the Aussie weather was going to like this I could’ve saved myself the fare and stayed in Manchester). So I’m still surprised that I, the Human Dormouse, managed to drag myself from bed for the lunar eclipse.
I’m glad I did. Not just for the eclipse itself, which I saw almost up to the point of totality, to about 5.17am. Then a dispiritingly huge bank of cloud rolled in and I gave up and went back to bed. But in the hour from when I got up at at 4.15, looked at the sky and realised that there were enough breaks to make it worth it, there were some amazing views of this big eclipse. The most dramatic were, of course, in the moments before totality when the shadowed face of the moon turned the kind of deep, dark red which must have terrified the ancients.

But it was also fascinating to see how even my quiet end of Leichhardt is surprisingly busy at that time in the morning. Taxis, a lycra-clad cyclist whizzing by, bus drivers turning up for work at the depot. The first numbered bus, a 444, groaned its way out at 5.05, just after one of those chunky vehicles that carries piles of roadcones and has a big lit-up arrow on the back to cast doom into the hearts of morning commuters. The first keen dog walker came by at about 5.10. And the massive (and to me still exotic) fruit bats were wheeling around the park throughout.

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