Not to name drop or anything, but I had the good fortune to hang out with a bit of a legend this weekend.
A few luminaries live in and around my hometown. I'm not exactly sure why, perhaps it serves to balance things, in a karma kinda way.
It's not everywhere that you can bump into Rob Davies in the liquor store, looking like some kind of half-mad Santa. And like Mr. Davies, other writers, painters, musicians and acting-types can be found in the various feed-stores, co-ops, banks, shops and such. Not all the time or anything. It's just that they are there, and they're (mostly) wearing track-pants and floppy hats with the rest of us. All equally engaged in the local pastime of waiting for winter to end and the sun to return. It's a Canadian thing.
(I do realize the chances of bumping into Rob Davies are a lot less likely nowdays, what with him being dead and all. I just wanted to use that 'half-mad Santa' line and it just didn't seem to fit Margaret Atwood.)
The whole Canadark thing makes me wonder how Ray MacLean ended up here. I'm not a world traveler, but I presume that the sun rises over the British Isles most every day of the year. Why he'd choose to move somewhere that experienced glorious night for five months of the year is beyond me.
Anyway.
I was out at a friend's farm, stargazing with my good lady, my friend and his 25 inch reflector. For the uninitiated (like me) that translates into 'big-ass telescope'.
It's impressive as hell when you walk into the observatory at night. There are red-lights everywhere and the roof slides away at the push of a button. There's a computer there too, with it's monitor set to monochrome-red. It's a bit like a submarine movie, but with the ceiling exposed to the Milky Way. The whole thing looks like a huge garden shed or a small aircraft hanger, depending on how you look at it, sitting in the middle of a cattle-grazing pasture. When you live with night for so long, it's important to have a hobby. It is also important to have a sixth-sense concerning cow-paddies in the dark.
It being spring and all, we had to wait till after three in the afternoon for the best dark to set in. It was cold and it was dark. Perfect viewing conditions, but it made me miss being buried under seven cuddly cabin-cats earlier that afternoon.
Anything warm here would screw up the optics and the building was effectively roofless. Any generated heat would just go straight up anyway. That would be bad for seeing as well.
Though it was only a little after three in the afternoon, I had briefly considered bringing a flask of something to help keep us toasty. Apparently, I was informed, the consumption of spirits reduces your optical acuity. There's even a handy chart that shows how many orders of magnitude of crappy your vision gets per drink consumed.
Okay, so none of that then.
We were zipping the scope around and looking at a bunch of stuff. We looked at Jupiter and Venus and Mars. We checked out a galaxy that looked like a hat and one that looked like a black-eyed-pea.
Sometime during it all, a night-flight of geese decided that my friends' field was a good place to set down. They were coming back up from the south and were still a little freaked by the close-to-lack of daylight thing. The sound of them coming in reminded me of that old 'Enemy Gliders' game. That, and 'Lost Boys'.
For a freezing few hours, we talked, laughed and generally made sure that Venus and Mars were all right. We were getting ready to pack it up and go grab coffee back at the cabin when someone knocked at the door. I pulled it open, fully expecting to be confronted by an angry Canada goose. Not that any of them had flown into the side of the observatory or anything; I've just had this phobia ever since a group of them beat me up and stole my lunch when I was a kid.
My eyes were well adjusted the darkness by then, so I knew right away it wasn't a goose.
It was Ray, I didn't realize that Ray was Ray MacLean for another hour or so. As well as my eyes were adjusted to the dark, I could only really tell that he was from England and that he had white hair. That, and he had good taste in scotch. Ray had brought a flask.
Apparently, Ray had heard the 'drinking and observing don't mix' speech and given it a pass. He didn't mind sacrificing some visual acuity in the name of inebriation. So, I liked the guy even before I really knew who he was.
I was done observing for the day when Ray arrived, so I could afford to drink. QED.
So, sometime over the next hour or so, while looking at increasingly blurry planets and things, I notice that Ray seemed to be missing a couple of fingers.
The pinky and pointing finger on his left hand were gone, just like Ray MacLean. In fact, belly warm with scotch, I think his accent is a dead match.
Before I'd realized that this was like, y'know, the Ray Maclean we'd mostly been talking politics, music, science and British comedy. Afterward, we mostly talked about music, science, politics and British comedy. That's after he stopped chuckling. It had been a year and a half since he'd been recognized and he found it funny to be spotted by a stranger in the dark.
I asked Ray the obvious question. He chuckled again.
"Why'd I leave the band? …it wasn't fun anymore." QED.
After that, we twiddled telescope knobs, drank scotch and gabbed. All except for my good lady, who finds scotch to be a tad on the undrinkable side.
For any other fanboys out there, here are the most significant bits I remember:
Although Ray had never met any of the Python crew, he did meet Spike Milligan when Spike and Keith Moon were doing a summer replacement programme for BBC home service. Keith was for some reason wearing a complete Hitler outfit. Traditionally, Ray explained, costumes don't come across very well on radio.
About the whole album cover thing, he said that although he'd met Ringo Starr, he didn't know the other Beatles and never met the Rolling Stones. So, to think that he was on the cover of either "Their Satanic Majesties Request" or "Sgt. Pepper's" is just silly. Apparently I'd been 'just silly' for a couple of decades.
Way to kill a perfectly good myth.
Eventually, (special code for 'flask empty') Ray got around to why he'd knocked on the door in the first place.
As it was getting close to dinner time and as Ray and my friend started to speak two foreign languages at once (of DMSO and CMOS), my good lady and I said our goodbyes and made our way into the late afternoon darkness and home.
 April 4th
2006
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