Last night after midnight, as every night, I went outside to look at the sky. I like to gaze at the vastness of space and to see the stars and the moon before I sleep. It always brings a feeling of expansion that is very welcome after sitting and writing for so many hours at the laptop. When I lived in Andalucia every night was clear and there was little light pollution except for a faint glow above Granada in the distance, behind the Sierra Nevada. If there were clouds then they would often have extraordinary shapes, or be large and dramatic, but usually they left enough free patches of sky to see the stars shining brightly between them.

I wandered to the middle of the garden and suddenly heard a noise over by the hedge