Martin's party was so much fun. Everyone made a marvellous effort to dress up in 70's style. The music and dancing was fabulous. I was one of the best dressed finalists. The slideshow I compiled for Martin and Moon was a bit. All in all, a wonderful night.
I just watched Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, the documentary about the building and launch of the James Webb Space Telescope, and was deeply moved. The passion, determination and teamwork behind it are extraordinary. People devoted decades of their lives to making something almost impossibly ambitious succeed. To me, it represents the best of humanity: our curiosity, ingenuity and ability to work together for good.
The project took shape in 1996 as a scientific successor to Hubble. Developed by NASA with the European and Canadian space agencies, Webb uses infrared light to peer through cosmic dust and see galaxies as they were billions of years ago. It really is a kind of time machine: the farther it looks into space, the further it sees into the past.
The engineering is mind-boggling. Its 6.5-metre mirror consists of 18 gold-coated segments, protected by a sunshield roughly the size of a tennis court. Everything had to fold inside a rocket, then unfold in space. There were 344 single points of failure—individual failures that could compromise or destroy the mission. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, Webb travelled to an observing position 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, beyond the reach of any available repair mission. It had to work.
And it did. When the first science images were revealed in July 2022, the shared wonder on people’s faces moved me most. One image contained thousands of galaxies in a patch of sky the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length. Almost impossible to comprehend. After decades of effort, here was something everyone could share: the sheer amazement of looking into the universe and discovering more of what we belong to.
I have just watched the incredible documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice, and it has left me loving her more than ever. First, that voice. What a voice! Such power, clarity and warmth, with the ability to move from the tenderest phrase to something that seems to fill your whole being. Her great gift was as an interpreter: she could take someone else’s song and make it utterly her own. When she sang, the emotion felt lived, as though she were finding the words for something she had felt herself.
Then there was her extraordinary musical courage. She could have stayed with the rock and country music that made her a star, but her curiosity kept taking her somewhere new. Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance on stage; the sumptuous standards she recorded with Nelson Riddle; the traditional Mexican songs of her family heritage. People in the industry warned her against some of these changes of direction, yet she trusted her love of the music, and audiences followed her. I find that deeply inspiring: the willingness to become a learner again, to risk failure, and to follow what moves you even when others cannot see the sense in it.
Knowing that she eventually lost her ability to sing makes watching her performances almost unbearably poignant. Her illness was initially diagnosed as Parkinson’s and later identified as progressive supranuclear palsy. To lose something so central to your life, and such a profound source of pleasure, is hard to imagine. What moves me in the documentary is the matter-of-fact courage with which she speaks about it, and the humour and intelligence that remain so unmistakably hers. I came away grateful for all the music she has given us, and full of admiration for the woman herself.
I love this photo of Table Mountain taken by Jo a few years ago. Table Mountain is so close to my heart and this captures it so beautifully.
