barely connected lines of thought crashing into the mind like water let loose from a dam. This is how most of us usually are: a never-ending commentary, whose ubiquity means that I don't notice it and simply mistake it for 'me' -- but which, when it comes in the form of this sudden rush, is revealed as something which is less 'me' than being done to me. Our appreciation of beauty takes place in a similar way, as part of this commentary -- in the form of unnoticed mini-judgments and the activation of barely recognised preferences, even when we're engaged in something as supposedly open as gazing at the night sky. Our verbalisations quickly give us away: if it's two American teenagers lying on the bonnet of a car (according to the surrogate American childhood that Hollywood has given me) it might be something along the lines of 'we're all so small and insignificant'; if there's room on the bonnet for Astronomer Royal Martin Rees , it might be a series of thoughts on distance, matter, chemistry, or underfunded astrophysics; a still more copious bonnet might yield any number of women and men offering poetic, mythic, or technological thoughts, or else finding themselves at the mercy of a range of anxieties and aspirations. Tim Minchin My point is not that all these musings about the heavens are somehow equally 'true', in the strong subjectivist sense that Minchin's protagonist, Storm, is perhaps championing; just that we can't escape some kind of