My father, born 1935, often waxed lyrical about the marvels of aeronautical flight. On such occasions we were given to giggling, my sister and I. It is a well-worn source of amusement, which has not detracted my father one iota from the wonder of it all.
The funniest thing is that he is right; it is a marvellous phenomenon, and was more marvellous before people started to talk about carbon footprints, tighter security, and such. My father also had the uncanny knack of correctly naming the model and type of almost all motor vehicles ever manufactured up until about the mid-Seventies. The automobile is also a wonderful invention.
I have lately realised that I make similar remarks about the wonders of the Internet. Incredible advances in the generative power of search engines with resultant high-speed bursts of TMI (too much information) constantly astound and delight me. I say this, yet I seldom even turn the volume up on my speakers!
My barefeet and dust childhood in a technological backwater could be credited with my perpetual sense of amazement. But perhaps I just never lost the feeling of the moment when my father pointed to the Southern night sky in July 1969 and told his five year-old daughter that Apollo 11 was flying back from the moon to earth. It was like a big aeroplane, you see.
Allison
Note: the word or phrase in bold appeared in my previous blog.
That elusive pair of jeans 
How exciting to actually remember the moon landing! I must have been a very self-obsessed child (clearly nothing changes) because I remember none of the major events before the 1979 General Election – by which time I was 11 and really ought to have known better than think the election of Margaret Thatcher was a good thing. Of course it could just have been that neither of my parents paid any attention to “newsworthy” events and thus didn’t point such things out to me.
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It was, although my chief memory now is one unrecorded here for want of adequate description: holding my father’s hand while gazing at the night sky and, curiously, the smell of wax polish on the parquet flooring in the dining room when we listened to the lift-off broadcast.
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I think you just described it – some things only need the lightest of brushstrokes to picture clearly!
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