Once in a blue moon

In the city I rarely saw the moon or thought to look for it. Electric lights dazzled the nightscape there: flashy neon strobes, gaudy multicoloured bulbs, sodium vapour lamps: synthetic light shining through smog and smoke.

But here, where the sky is an uninterrupted expanse of endless space, you can't help noticing the moon in its many moods and manifestations.

Two nights ago it was a quite extraordinary golden-yellow crescent suspended like the enigmatic smile of some ghostly Cheshire cat. Close by was Venus, the brightest and biggest star in the sky. Together they made everything else in that inky sky pale in comparison.

And yet, despite its magic, there is, I always feel, something a little theatrical about the moon, something that makes the night itself feel uncomfortably like a film set. Perhaps it's because the moon itself in its different phases offers up a different persona every time.

Sometimes the crescent is a sliver of the palest silver, shy and virginal, appearing late in the evening and fading away early.

Sometimes it's a big round passionate yellow moon.

Other times it's only a bland white object in the sky, trying to bask in another's light and failing miserably.

On cloudy nights it will appear in a halo of burnished light. Or, as the clouds are carried along in the wind, seem as if it is riding on the impending storm like a ship on choppy waves.

There are times when it's not the moon but the moonlight that is absolutely mesmerizing. On nights when the power fails, that is when you notice best the silver light filtering through the trees like something almost live. On a particularly dark night everything will be bathed in this dazzling silver light. And you can understand then why in fairy tales fantastic creatures emerge to dance in this light. Or why it is said that the moon brings out the madness in those who have the tendency, for even perfectly sane people are affected strangely by it.

But once in a blue moon one sees a sight that is truly unforgettable. I was on the beach one evening when it happened. The sun was about to set into the sea in the west. And then I saw, bouncing up from the casuarinas trees lining the beach in the east, a full glorious huge yellow moon. For a moment the moon and the sun, on opposite sides of the earth, stared at each other, eyeball to eyeball. And then the sun sank, as if defeated. And the moon, which after all only reflects the light of the sun, had its solo triumphant moment of glory.