At risk of heading towards the dreaded Moebius, let me start to explain what I was trying to say.

Of course, it *was* pretty late in the night in Australia, and I had partaken of the odd glass of fine Australian red, so my critical faculties were somewhat suspended and I was in full lateral association mode.

Anyway, as you all might now by now I had the misfortune to lose my wife a year ago. (no, not carelessly misplaced while touring the supermarket, but tragically lost to a sudden illness). This leaves me with a house full of children who are fast becoming teenagers, as modern children do.

As a consequence, I don't get the house to myself until quite late at night, whereupon I sometimes get stuck surfing until the wee small hours, but since I work flexitime I can always sleep in, except that I *do* have to get the kids to school, but I can always go back to bed again, which is why I didn't mind staying up so late. (Oh, I see I've already said that, but this is a rambling discourse, so repetition is permitted in moderation).

So, to return to the issue about shaving, and comets, and the military. Phil had posted about upcoming missions to coments and had flippantly commented that by 2008 that the clean and innocent young Adonis whom we know as Justin might have finally reached the point of needing to scrape his chin on a regular basis. Now I felt that this was perhaps an unkind comment about Justin, especially with his recently expressed opinion to embark on a detour in his erstwhile career path and enlist in the military.

And with this in mind, I recalled a comment at our dinner table earlier in the evening, where my 17 year old son Rob was lecturing my 12 year old son Will about cleanliness. (The advantage of a big family is that once you've taught the first couple of them what to do and say, the information gets passed on down the line, and providing the "Chinese Whisper" syndrome doesn't set in too hard, the younger ones get automatically grilled in the fair graces)

Anyway, Rob laid into Will about clean fingernails at the dinner table (sorry folks, I should have put a Parental Warning on this - coarse topics - do not eat while reading - may offend ). And as well as fingernails, a hair wash was added to list of "to-be-done-as-soon-as-your-feet-touch-the-floor-again", and Rob added as the final cutting rejoinder - "Oh, and you need a shave"

Now Will is, as mentioned merely 12 and only just turned 12 at that, but nonetheless the delights and torments of puberty are afflicting him. He is big for his age and well advanced in many ways.

So it struck me as a cruel irony that Justin was finding himself in the military before he might be able to have a decent shave, while I had available the counterexample - of a lad who would be well into shaving before he hit senior school.

And applying my best in lateral thinking, it occurred to me that the only fair solution was to send my son to a military academy so that he might receive a balance of instruction about what to do with razor-sharp objects, other than scraping his chin.

And I really can't see how to bring it back to the topic of comets, or anything space related, other than to reflect on how far (or not far) we have progressed in space endeavours since I myself started scraping my own chin.

But as you will see from the Family Album, it is now many years since I did that, and still we are stuck in LEO, except for our robotic ambassadors to Mars, the comets, and elsewhere...

<Moebius mode off>

Phew!