They’ve sent a probe to Pluto. I hope that makes you happy. The last planet (?) of our solar system is about to be revealed, in all its distant glory.

They’ve argued for years whether Pluto should be admitted to that rather exclusive club, the ‘planets of our solar system’ because its not really that big and its so fucking far away it makes Scotland look just round the corner. Its also in an asteroid belt and was thought to be maybe just a big one o’them, rather than a proper planet. But it has moons, its 1500 miles wide and to be honest, it deserves to be a planet. On merit alone. It is so far from the Sun that it takes 248 (of our ‘Earth’) years to orbit our star. So people on Pluto never ask each other how old they are. Its always less than 1.

Yet how remarkable that we can send a vessel almost 4 billion miles away, just to ‘check out’ Pluto. Its taken 9 years to get there. The vessel, New Horizons, has never used Twitter, Instagram or even called an Uber (“your driver is just 3.6 light years away, in a blue Prius”). When it left, Google was barely functioning. Mobile phones back then claimed ‘No G’. Much as mine still does half the bleedin’ time. Manchester City were just another impoverished, lowly, useless football team 9 years ago, Bournemouth were in Division 4, Serena was winning grand slams, Greece was economically viable or rather its Euro driven excesses hadn’t been fully discovered and £49million bought you a lot more than Raheem Stirling.

The best bit is that the probe, drifting through the vacuum of space at an incredible speed (no gravity; no friction) was pointed at Saturn. Whose gravitational pull had a ‘slingshot’ effect which propelled the craft into the right direction at a faster speed, knocking 3 years off the arrival time. Unfortunately the baggage handlers on Pluto are on strike this week…

Can’t wait for the photos. I love a scientific achievement. I hate an overpriced arrogant shit-head footballer. And I’m still pondering Greece. They voted an emphatic NO!!!! to austerity. Cheered like they’d won the celebrity bake-off when they won. And now are forced to accept much more severe austerity than they originally voted to reject. And that’s in the home of democracy.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx