"Look - its a pair of breasts. No, really. It is."
My father was looking at one of the pictures on the wall in the gymnasium. Some child had attempted to construct models of the earth and moon and, inexplicably, made them both the same size (like small melons), stuck them on a bit of paper and painted them... strangely.
I steered him back to seats - doubtless the little Johnny who painted it would soon be standing behind us with his 7 foot tall rugby playing father if I let my father carry on. Half a glass of wine and he tends to get feisty.
We'd secured tickets to a lecture about the Cassini spacecraft (currently in orbit around Saturn) and the Huygens probe. The presenter, Lucie, had been one of the anchors of a BBC telecast during the descent of the probe to Titan and caused schoolboy titters amongst me and my peers when she earnestly began talking about the insertion of probe's penetratometer with bald German scientists who were clearly unused to dealing with a female who was not their mother.
I glanced around the cavernous building while Lucie recited the planets in the solar system with the children:
She: "Jupiter"
They: "Jupiter"
She: "Saturn"
They: "Saturn"
She: "Oo-run-us"
They: "Your anus"
At that moment I could have embraced every one of the snotty little darlings for striking a blow at the politically correct lobby that have spent every year since Voyager's flypast trying to change the pronounciation of 'Uranus' from the one every schoolboy has loved since Herschel ran excitedly to his wife saying "I've found a new planet!" and she responded "New planet? You're an arse. Go empty the rubbish."
It could have been worse, I guess...
