Charon reports: From The Moon….

I woke this morning and lost the will to live after reading in the News of The World that Peaches Geldof has many bizarre tattoos and Alistair Darling has apparently been re-furbishing his £1.2 million Edinburgh *not his main residence* home at tax payer expense… more of which later.  The question formulating in my mind as I smoked a woodbine was… ‘what to do on this rather dull Sunday morning’.  I watched the gulls and the cormorants enjoying their breakfast and had a Damascus moment.

I would make a moon landing… guided the necessary 270,000 miles by my iMac laptop – with very much more computing power than the original astronauts had when they landed on the moon 40 years ago.. or didn’t if you are an Area 51, UFO/ conspiracy theory fan/nutcase etc etc….

I am not able to reveal how I got to the moon… because I already get a fair number of emails from assorted nutcases and fruitcakes and I do not wish to encourage them.  Suffice it to say that the trip was most enjoyable and I was able to continue making posts on Twitter for much of the journey…  such are the advances in technology from the days when Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins made their historic trip. My trip was not entirely for selfish gratification.  I did a bit of science up there… or over there as we Charononauts like to say.

I landed on the moon at approximately 11.08 GMT and reported on Twitter (I was able to get a very faint signal)

Ever mindful of *Evidence*, I took particular care to kick a bit of moon dust around to ensure that the ground under my spacecraft looked as if it had actually landed on the moon, planted a couple of flags to get the shadows right and discovered the essential truth that while we do see stars from earth, there aren’t any visible from the moon at certain times.  My trip happened to coincide with one of those ‘starless sky’ times.

It would have been most inelegant not to have done some science. I carried out two brief experiments and shall be sending my findings to NASA , Scientific American, The Royal Geographical Society and Hello magazine.  The first experiment involved cracking open a bottle of Rioja.  When I finally caught the bubbles of wine that formed in the zero gravity they tasted good… I had a specially built straw for this purpose.  My second experiment proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is possible to smoke a cigarette on the moon – and it is lawful to do so as well, there being no busybodies over there to stop me.