Right, I've got through the sign-up doo-dahs and have two fingers poised over me keyboard like Torvile and Dean waiting for the Bolero to start. I've got me a 'blog (apparently "everybody's doing it"). Maybe this should start with some sort of mission statement along with lofty aspirations, but then maybe that's a bit wanky...
Anyway, it's New Year and a time for new starts! (Unless you're Saddam Hussein or one of the thousands of people who elected to pop their cork during the always-popular festive period.) It's a time of resolutions, fireworks and celebrations. Therefore it's only fitting that the first post is about similar celebratory type things which have resulted in the name of this 'blog.
Six years ago on Millennium Eve, disappointed with the British efforts to commemorate the year 2000, me and my mate Ben hatched plans for more spectacular festivities, centering around blasting the Queen Mother (God rest her soul) sunwards from a specially-made cannon at the top of Greenwich Hill.
We did identify some problems. The velocity needed to escape the earth's gravitational pull is 11km a second (some eight times faster than the average bullet) and her majesty would have needed to achieve this speed at the very minimum (or should that be minima'am?) to reach the beginnings of space. Also, extra thrust would be necessary given the undoubted drag from her flowing dress and particularly unaerodynamic frame.
Obviously, by using a cannon, the effect of the massive and immediate acceleration on the withered body of royal centenarian would be too destructive and she would have disintegrated into jam without even making it out of the barrel, with gin-saturated fragments spraying into the cold December night.
If (and it's a big 'if') the logistics of our suggestion had been overcome however, and the plan approved, she'd now be seven years into her journey. I don't pretend to be a mathematician - far from it. If you want a real mathematician, have a shufty at Dan's blog at http://www.osirra.com/. He doesn't have to pretend, and the things he can do with concatenated Excel formulas will make you weep. However, my back-of-fag-packet calculations however, go as follows:
We can assume that, on reaching the inky blackness of space, her velocity would have continued at its arrival rate given the absence of friction or gravity. Providing she wasn't deflected by satellites or suffered collisions with any passing asteroids which may have altered her course (or worse, snagged her dress), it's possible to plot her journey. The distance from Greenwich, South-East London, to the sun is roughly 149,000,000 miles. Thus we can calculate that she would have completed her mission after exactly 156.77 days, ultimately arriving at her 15-million-degrees-centigrade destination on the 4th of June (coincidentally enough - my birthday!) at around 6:25pm, not quite in time for the evening news.
Her journey would have been magnificent, and possibly filmable with one of those little cameras that skydivers fix onto their heads, with the images beamed back down to earth to awestruck spectators. Resplendent in a powder-blue dress and peacock feather hat, she'd stand as a testament to the enduring British spirit, steadfastly grimacing against the solar winds until triumphantly ploughing headlong into our nearest star.
Of course, many more calculations would have been necessary. If the trajectory of the cannon wasn't precisely calibrated, she may have overshot and would ultimately dissolve into nothing more than harmless space dust. Except maybe for her teeth - a mouthful of pearly-browns remaining as miniature toothy asteroids forever. There's something quite poetic about a mouthful of royal manky molars slingshotting around the sun and into the black abyss of eternal nothingness. Rule Britannia...
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