Off on a Comet

"Ka-bam!" went Comet McNaught as it appeared majestically in the southern skies over the Atlantic.

"Oooo...! went the assembled throng on Kloof Nek.

"Ecki, ecki, ecki!" went Comet McNaught as it bounced up and down waving its tail.

Okay, not all of that happened, but that was gist of it. The most splendid comet in forty years had arrived, and was quite unexpectedly brilliant. J-Man, being a bit of an amateur astronomer, was in heaven, dropping authoritative-sounding comments about degrees of arc, Kuiper Belts, Oort Clouds, aphelions and Solar winds. Occasionally he would cast an annoyed glance at someone further up the road who had brought an even bigger telescope, but fortunately such was the magnificence of the comet, that the scopes were largely unnecessary.

We gazed in wonder as the horizon darkened and the full glory of the tail started to emerge. A car drove by and a woman stuck her head out to ask what we were all looking at. When told, she said: "Oh, I thought it was something important," and drove off. Another girl confided that she thought it was something that was going to hit the earth, but then saw everyone was smiling and so realised it was safe. In a slightly scary demonstration of terra-centricity, I heard someone mention that it was at about the same height in the sky as "that other star", thereby blanketly elevating McNaught (comet) and Venus (planet) to stellar status.

Two evenings later we were back, and now there were hundreds of people lining the top of Camps Bay Drive. The atmosphere was borderline festive. This time J-Man had the biggest telescope, and so by the unwritten laws of amateur astronomy, he was the Alpha Astronomer, and all the regular folk gravitated toward him to admire his scope and ask questions that ranged from vaguely intelligent through charmingly naive to massively ignorant. I lost count of the number of times he explained what a comet actually was, that it wasn't as big as the moon, that it wasn't going to hit us, etc., etc. By the end of the evening, his girlfriend, Col, had become an expert too, and was able to handle the Frequently Asked Questions while J-Man fussed over the optics and looked important.

Col and I thought to make some money next week up on Kloof Nek reading tarot cards, selling comet-crystals and interpreting auras. As a grande finale we may even feature a Celebrity Astrologer Deathmatch. J-Man will wear a lab-coat and bow-tie and give short presentations to anyone who's shelled out R250 for one of our comet-hats. Yasmo, or someone similarly disreputable-looking, would be hired to walk around with an "End is Nigh" sign to add credence to the whole thing.

It's a little sad to me how generally uninformed people are of things beyond our atmosphere. We live in two dimensions, never looking up. When we give any thought to the time and space beyond, it is to trivialise it with astrology or alien abductions or bad sci-fi. If life was discovered on Titan or Europa or Enceladus, how many people would know or even care what or where those completely fascinating objects are?

"Ni!" went Comet McNaught, and swung off hyperbolically into the night.

A Mesozoic Night's Dream

Suddenly everyone seems to be talking about Iguanodons. Apparently they are the new Velociraptors, and anyone who's anyone in Milan, New York, London, Paris and Tokyo is all, like, Iguanodon this and Iguanodon that.

I caught up with Issey Miyake hanging out at the Austrian Fashion Week back in September, and his words were, as always, prescient:

"All I'm seeing is recycled Pre-Raphaelite and Napoleonic velvets, angora and Mongolian fur".

That much was obvious, but I could sense from the distant look in his cultured eyes that he was holding back, and so ordered him another Gin & French.

Mr Miyake likes to wax on, but he is invariably cagey, and so we whiled away many minutes chatting idly about the heaviness of Norwegian wool and how today's man could better express his latent sensuality through low-relief brocades and the "silhouette" palettes emerging from Russia and South America. All this loosened him up to the point where he leant over to me and said:

"With all the focus on Romantic, Imperial and Baroque themes over the past few years, I can't help but think that we have all been overlooking something - and I think that something might well be the Early Cretaceous Period."

I was stunned. Of Course! I mean, Jesus Christ, that would be, what, 46 or so million years of completely unexploited material. All those chalk deposits and high sea levels, the smooth temperature gradients, burgeoning angiosperms and insects, and of course the start of the end for the great Mesozoic Era. If you thought the 80s was pretty cool with all that Metal and Britpop, then you should have seen the Mesozoic. Our current Cenozoic Era has been very drab by comparison.

From the jaunty set of his Saffron Fedora, I knew at once that he had singled out the noble Iguanodon for special consideration. And why not? It was after all the first dinosaur fossil discovered. It had spiky, upturned thumbs that it used for defence, foraging and generally agreeing enthusiastically with everything. Of course masterful artistic talent is necessary to render this magnificent herbivore in its full Cretacean splendour, and one of the best examples comes from Ashley (2nd grade), whose Iguanodon has a bold Fauvist daring so sadly uncommon in illustrated science in our conservative times:



Note the sultry Laurasian sun and the verdant grasses upon which the Iguanodon (bottom-right) nimbly treads as he forages blithely about. In fact, she was inspired to write a poem about it:

Iguanadon (sic)

Iguanadon (sic)
Do you eat grass all the time?
How many teeth do you have?
I have a lot of flat teeth!!
I don't eat grass all the time.
How sharp are your thumbs?
They are very, very sharp!!

The powerful rhetoric and cutting denouement bewilder and overwhelm. Such precocity. I showed it to Issey over a rabbit and Belgian endive salad with pomegranate confit at lunch some days later as his entourage travelled through the Alps. By the immaculate presentation of his cuticles I could tell that he was impressed. "Immediate. Timeless. Remarkable."

Then he stood, and the bise noire seemed to rise up, as if its ominous chill was presaging a dark winter collection. "Alabaster," he said, "Faux ivories, topaz, garnets and Balkan weaves."

Allowing the barest of smiles to break beneath his manicured moustache, he raised both thumbs, and said: "At dawn on the fifth day, look to the East."

And like that he was gone.