I'm not sure why I'm so fascinated with the moon. I know that it’s a lump of rock, but to me there’s still an air of mystery about it that no moonwalks will ever erase.
According to my mother, this was because man never actually landed on the moon – she reckoned it was all a set-up in a back studio in Hollywood. Years later, when I began using the Internet, I discovered she wasn't alone in this belief, apparently it's quite common.
There was a legend in my family about an ancestor who went mad through looking at the moon and thinking about time... well, they were a bit of an odd lot. He started off thinking ‘this is the same moon my father used to look at,’ moved onto, ‘this is the same moon my grandfather used to look at’ and gradually worked his way back through Francis Drake (not an ancestor, but interesting often believed to be a sorcerer by his contemporaries) to the dawn of time, by which time he was frothing at the mouth and had to be taken away.
I'm still not convinced this is a true story. I suspect it's up there with Strewel Peter and Augustus who Wouldn't Eat his Soup as a sort of Scare the Kiddies story. There were plenty of people years ago who believed that you went mad if you slept out under a full moon.
After all, the word Lunatic derives originally from the Latin for Moon.
