Sweden has a man in space. Christer Fuglesang became the first Swedish Astronaut with the successful launch of the Discovery on the 10th of December.The Nasa Video Archive has some small clips of Discoverys current mission.
He is however not the first spacer from Sweden, there are plenty of them. The spacer population is probably totally unaware of your men up in space. It is not so easy to identify a spacer you have to start talking to one, but that means you could get caught up in a surreal conversation and as people take things so seriously here one could end up believing what is being said and subsequently go mad and become a spacer too. Which could be part of the reason that nobody talks to each other here except to exchange factually accurate details like when the next bus is coming to the second or what the temperature was that morning to 2 decimal places. It appears to be a national fascination with temperature every body has a thermometer in the window and everybody checks the temperature regularly, people get freaked out when I don’t know what the temperature is or get suspicious when I invent an answer thats not in line with the ambient temperature for the time of year, they all know that too.
This doesn’t happen in Ireland. Nobody gives a flying toss what the temperature was in the morning or what time the next bus is due. I suppose the fascination in Ireland is just with the weather in general, and the weather is usually shite. As they say in Larne “if you can’t see the Antrim hills it’s raining, if you can it’s going to rain”. They say other things in Larne like keep your head as low as a Larne Catholic but thats another days blogging. The spacers in Ireland are different also they usually collect in bunches around Cork bus Station or Busaras in Dublin and they look mad so you have a fair chance of recognising them, and you can fend off requests for fags and a few bob, with the I don’t smoke or sorry no change routine even though you’ve just purchased 20 B&H and have a wad of cash in the sky rocket. Also you can disregard whatever is being said with the same ease that a Sunday sermon is forgotten. Does this mean the Irish are economical with the truth? No, the truth is a variable and it varies depending on who you are talking to. “Did you see so and so’s new baby?- wasn’t the child only gorgeous?” five minutes later ” jaysus so and so’s baby was as ugly as a blind cobblers thumb” The trick is to know what the right thing is to say and to whom you should say it. And that’s the Gods honest truth.
The boys up above are doing a space walk, the boys and girls at Busaras are doing a spacer walk. We all have our call in life.
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