Stars

Photo: The Telegraph

Last night, following a show at the Sunderland Empire, Ed Grace and I watched the skies, determined to see some evidence of the Perseid meteor shower; whilst furtively polluting our view with the bright lights of our smartphones, nonchalantly trying to find out what the Perseid meteor shower actually is.

It was a pretty rewarding hour. We saw seven or so shooting stars slice through the North Eastern night sky: sometimes as clean as a laser beam; occasionally tired and haphazard, like a cigarette tip or a dying firework.

We had just finished our 241st show, which means that we have precisely 100 left. As I succumb to the relentless, accumulative exhaustion and occasionally hysterical mania of touring, I take quite a bit of solace from the words of Christopher Boone:

"When you look at the sky at night you know you are looking at stars, which are hundreds and thousands of light years away from you. And some of the stars don't exist any more because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead - or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs. And that makes you seem very small; and if you have difficult things in your life, it is nice to think they are what is called negligible - which means they are so small you don't have to take them into account when you are calculating something."