When I was ten years old, we did a project on Space at school. It was basic stuff – learning the names and order of the planets, about comets and black holes and shooting stars and the sun and what have you. I was fascinated. I remember poring over all the books I could find with information on the subject, and I don’t remember being as interested in any other project we did in primary school. The only part of the project that I didn’t like was the concept of meteorites.
It’s evident, with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, that I suffered from an overly active and occasionally somewhat macabre imagination as a pre-teen. As I crossed the road, I would visualize the parked cars suddenly revving up and charging at me. I would constantly worry about the end of the world arriving in the near future and what I could do to stop it.
I live fairly close to an international airport, and as such there are often airplanes flying over the house. Having lived in this house most of my life, I don’t usually register the sound of an airplane, except late at night when I’m trying to sleep. Everything is quiet, except from the occasional snore from certain family members, and in such circumstances the normally barely noticable airplane drone turns into a fiery roar tearing up the sky.
After that project on Space, I would lie awake every night convinced that this time, the noise I could hear really was that of a meteorite, only relaxing once the plane touched down and I could accept that I was safe. This fear was to be replaced a few years later by the assumption that the noise I heard was that of a doomed flight taken over by terrorists, headed towards a nearby petrochemical plant which would blow us up into oblivion.
Having been out of Scotland for essentially all of 2008, I had more or less forgotten everything that I had just written, until yesterday. I had just woken up, and was happily dozing in bed when I heard this noise. An airplane, I thought, casually shrugging off my old demons.
The noise grew louder. I turned over.
The noise grew louder still. I heard the old notes of panic start to sound in my mind.
Louder still. If I hadn’t already been awake, the noise (now more of a milk-curdling howl) would have woken me up. Convinced that this was now the end, I ripped open my curtains to catch a glimpse of whatever object was going to end me. A meteorite? A plane? A fiery ball from the depths of hell itself?
It turned out to be the council’s new ride-on lawn mower trundling past my window. Thanks guys!
