Reach your hand for the crescent moon

Reach your hand for the crescent moon, take hold of it by the hollow.
If it sits in the palm of your left, then the moon will be fuller tomorrow.
I’ve bored enough people in Ireland over the years with that Cowboy Junkie’s lyric whenever I’ve spotted a half-moon. But it doesn’t quite work down here. Like most things, it’s the other way round. In Singapore, it appears to be the top half of the moon that goes missing when the moon is on the wane. That’s just one of the funky things that happens when you’re dancing around the equator.

22 minutes out of Singapore, heading south by south east, that’s precisely what we were doing. We reached 33,000 feet and flightpath, the on-screen map that keeps you amused while waiting for the movies and the tasteless food was showing that we were right over the equator. Although given the size of the plane on these maps in proportion to everything else, we were also over Indonesia, Malaysia and several islands inhabited only by man-eating tribesmen and Japanese soldiers who forgot to surrender in 1945.

I was on the flight back to Melbourne and the moon kept me company most of the way. I glanced out the left hand window and there it was, a wispy orange galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. For a moment, I thought it was the sun, but as it was close to midnight and half of it was missing, I quickly realised that it was in fact the most beautiful moon I’d ever seen.

Huge and throbbing, it danced among the clouds like Ginger Rogers beneath a chorus line of twinkling stars. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by the moon. I’ve seen more than 15,000 of them after all. But like butter chicken and Guinness, you can never get enough of it. Except in Singapore of course. There was a stall near our office that sold butter chicken, rice and nan bread for $5 (about 2.5 euro). Due to my unfortunate combination of laziness and in adventure, I rarely made it past this stall in 3 weeks. By the time I left Singapore, I had enough butter and cream in my arteries to earn a cardiologist a new Porsche.

Guinness, alas, lived up to its reputation of worsening the further you get from St James Gate. One sip in Singapore’s foremost kitsch and formulated Irish pub was enough for me.

That pub however, did give me my biggest chuckle of the trip. An Irish guy was talking to a local at the bar about their favorite horror movies. “Did you see Saw” said the local. “I did”, said the Irishman “and I saw Saw two too”. I guess you had to be there.

On the trip back I realised that I must get out to movies more, because you can’t depend of in-flight entertainment for your cinematic stimulation. Even these days, when business class offers 81 interactive choices, the curse of the lowest common denominator still strikes home. If you’ve seen one Will Farrell movie, you’ve seen approximately one too many. And the summer block buster action movies lose some of their luster when projected onto a six inch screen. It makes me realise how crazy the world has become when people think that the height of technical advancement is the ability to watch movies on a mobile phone.

The Arts section did at least give me the opportunity to massage my self-inflated ego. I dipped into “Betty Blue” for a few minutes until I remembered the Peep Show’s assessment of it as “film about sex and suicide that made an entire generation of teenage boys fancy mentally deranged girls”. Thankfully the flight back was only six and half hours, a mere hop, skip and jump in this part of the world. So a ludicrously implausible Anthony Hopkins vehicle got me through the night.

I got back to Melbourne and put my jacket on for the first time in three weeks. Heat is all very well, but there’s a certain pleasure in raising your collar to the unexpected bite of an early morning chill. The taxi drove through deserted Sunday morning streets with only the litter from revelers on Saturday night for company. The driver talked about footy and how Carlton were “tanking it” (Aussie for deliberately throwing games). He played Arabic music and spoke with a middle eastern Aussie accent that involved saying mate at the end of every sentence. More worryingly he appeared to have been awake as long as I had, as he swerved all over the road like a drunken sailor.

It was late and I was tired, so I said nothing except some nonsense about the weather. We turned the corner onto St Kilda Esplanade. The sea bobbed like a giddy child watched over by a motherly moon. I looked up and noticed that its left hand side was missing, so the moon was on the wane. But it was there, like it has always been there. One constant in a sea of change. And as a cloud passed across its tip, it seemed to wink and say “Welcome Home”.

At 5am, I can get whimsical like that. But a twelve hour sleep sorted me out and I’m back to being as bitter and cynical as ever.