Obituaries

The growth of online social media has seen the growth of the ad-hoc obituary particularly when it is related to those in the public eye: a brief posting of “Joe Bloggs RIP” followed by similarly minded comments. Occasionally, these are actually more in depth with reminiscences of the effect that those celebrities have had on the individual's life. This week has seen the death of two such people that have influenced or inspired me: Dave Brubeck and Sir Patrick Moore.

I don’t suppose that it is entirely unexpected as both men were just either side of 90 years old. In fact I watched this month’s edition of The Sky At Night this morning and felt that Sir Patrick was rather subdued – even given the poor health he has suffered in recent years. However, it is still something of a shock that someone much admired had passed away. Similarly with Dave Brubeck, given his great age his death is not unexpected but it still leaves a sense of loss.

Dave Brubeck was a stepping stone for me into the world of jazz. I often think of him as a halfway house between classical and jazz music and many of his famous works have been directly influenced from classical pieces but for me he was that first inkling that jazz music may be a land that I wanted to dabble in and his Time Out album was one of the few jazz recordings that I can remember in our house when I was a child. It’s still a record I can listen to over and over again and with the wonders of modern digital Remastering it is one that still sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday (except it has decent tunes, isn’t over-produced, over-compressed and wrecked by auto-tune). From that one starting point I have discovered a plethora of artistry the surface of which I have only just begun to scratch.

Patrick Moore was, by any standards, a rather eccentric man. I first saw him on the television in the early 1970’s when space exploration was at its most adventurous heights. The Apollo missions to the moon were the most astonishing thing that mankind had attempted (it still is) but the commentary for all things astronomical was provided by this ultimate eccentric Englishman with a glass monocle, wild hair and erratic, idiosyncratic speech patterns. However it was  Sir Patrick’s enthusiasm for his subject matter that was a huge inspiration to me. Far from making astronomy a strange and inaccessible world for boffins with billions of dollars, he showed us that anyone could do real astronomy in their back garden with a minimum of equipment – or even no equipment at all. I can recall “borrowing” my fathers binoculars and training them on the Orion nebula. What I saw left me speechless and wanting to see more and find out as much as possible about the night’s sky and the physics behind it. I think, above all, that Patrick Moore had great faith in the public’s understanding and appetite for hard science. The Sky At Night has always been an oddity on television (it is, after all, one of it’s oldest products) but it is one of it’s most welcome. I do hope the BBC will keep it going without its unique host.

In fact, there was a gem at the end of this month’s Sky At Night in that the Geminid meteor shower is due this week. I’m hoping for a clear night around the 13th and 14th and will be wrapped up warm in the garden with my eyes turned to the heavens and Time Out on my MP3 player.