When men landed on the moon in 1969, my Mum was in Irish college in Connemara. The only TV near them belonged to a woman who owned a local shop, and she wouldn’t let them watch the moon landing because she thought it was the world’s greatest act of codology. No man could go to the moon, said she, and being a respected authority on deep space travel, the last word would rest with Bean an tSiopa. The goggle box remained switched off, and so, Mum missed the moon landing.

Dad never mentioned it, so I can only assume it had little impact on him at the time. He would have been 16 years old, probably up to no good, and so otherwise engaged.

I mention my parents and the moon landing because all the furore about the 40th anniversary passed me by, largely because they aren’t around any more to share their stories. Both of them are now up there somewhere among the heavenly bodies themselves.

I also mention them because going to see Moon, (a.k.a. that film by David Bowie’s son who sensibly changed his name) was unexpectedly emotional. Sometimes a film stirs unusually deep-rooted emotions, and Moon, bizarrely is only the second film in ten years to affect me in that way.

Sam Rockwell’s character, a solitary lunar miner, has the rug pulled out from under him, experiencing a deep, deep sense of sudden loss far away from home. Twice, I’ve had the same. I was on a different continent when my parents passed away in 2004 and 2008 respectively, and the combination of that loss and dislocation from home of that magnitude is indescribably unsettling. Granted, I wasn’t on the moon, but the journeys home from Australia and the Caribbean felt long enough.

So there you are, a film about a man mining Helium3 on the moon in a fictitious future that made me think about my parents’ deaths. Funny who you find yourself identifying with.

Moon, incidentally, is a stunning piece of work. It’s a very human sci-fi, none of your glossy phasers-and-lycra Star Trek crap, propped up with wallet-flaming special effects. A more intelligent investment was made in the script and the time spent thinking it up. The grime, context and emotion all seem very plausible and the production is beautiful. Sam Rockwell is a real find, providing a two-for-the-price-of-one performance that I can’t say more about without spoiling things. Matt Berry of IT Crowd fame is in there in a cameo, and Kevin Spacey provides the voice for Gerty, a robot that does a good job of not becoming HAL from 2001. However, the film has a Kubrickian cleanliness, and the lone caretaker going slowly mad (think: Jack Nicholson in The Shining), combined with the retro-futuristic stylings that owe plenty to 2001: A Space Odyssey have opened Jones up to criticism for being more than a tad derivative.

Folly. He’s simply one of a tiny minority in the last 15 years who has managed to do sci-fi well without blowing the bank on CGI and big names. $5million for a first-class ticket to the Moon and back? That, my friends, is money well spent.

African Pygmy Hedgehog

Originally uploaded by meantux

If you’ve ever been the only black / white / hispanic / asian person in a room full of opposites, you’ll know what its like to be stared at. It’s happened to me several times: at a carnival in Antigua, at a nightclub in Tanzania, and in a market up on Mt Kilimanjaro. People can’t help staring

But imagine growing up in rural Africa and looking like a photo-negative of every one around you – your parents, brothers and sisters. That’s the life of an African albino.

I meant to blawg this a while back, but there’s a great post about an albino sanctuary here. Sanctuary may seem a zoo-like term to use, but it is used in its original sense, somewhere safe from harm rather than a handy corral for people with binoculars. To be an albino in rural Africa is to risk being hacked to death by people who believe your body parts are useful only as lucky charms, or as a commodity to sell as such. Thousands are killed every year, for the same reason people hunt rhinos for their horn, or sharks for their fins.

We met an albino girl walking to market that day on Kili, back in 2001. While everyone else pointed, laughed, giggled and scowled at the strange sight of three western whities walking to a rural market (me carrying a stone weight of bananas on my head), the albino girl ran up to Blanche, one of our trio, and hugged her, just for being white. For many of the people in that particularly remote area, white people were an oddity of the nearby towns, something that  passed by at speed in a Land Cruiser.  I had kids run shrieking on remote forest paths because they thought I was a ghost, quite different from the ‘mzungu!’ cries of street kids in the cities and towns where white-skinned tourists are the norm.

The albino girl stared at Blanche with a broad smile and caressed her face before walking on. Just to see someone like her seemed to have made her day. Blanche was weirded out by the whole scene, unsurprisingly. She was from Belgium, and her sense of humour had been removed at birth, as is Flemish custom.