The Man in the Moon

The boulevards at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich are wide and calm, and we wander them like aristocrats. This is where they'll set up base after the revolution, we agree. This is where we'll be tried and executed by the new revolutionary order … 'It was all his fault', W. will cry as they raise the blade of the guillotine above us. And our heads will shoot out thirty feet over the crowds, mine grinning, mine laughing because I'd led W. all the way to death …

The Royal Observatory. This is where the first international terrorist incident took place, we learn. A young French anarchist attempted to blow up the Observatory, to blow up Greenwich Mean Time …

It reminds W. of the passage Benjamin wrote about the July revolution. 'During the evening of the first day of the struggle, simultaneously but as a result of separate initiatives, in several places people fired on the clocks in the towers of Paris'.

And in the coming revolution, where will they aim their rifles?, W. wonders. Where will they aim them, in separate initiatives and from several places? – 'At you', says W. 'They'll fire them at you'.

Ah, what would we see through the Observatory telescope, pointed to the sky? W. remembers Ferdinand's speech in the scene in Pierrot Le Fou. Since the beginning of time, the man on the moon lived alone. When he saw Leonov, the Soviet astronaut, had landed, he was happy. At long last someone to talk to! But Leonov tried as hard as he could to force the entire works of Lenin into the head of the man in the moon. So as soon as White , the American astronaut, landed there, he sought refuge with him. But he hadn't time to say hello, before White stuffed a bottle of Coca-Cola down his throat.

No wonder the man in the moon's fed up! He's leaving the American and Russians to fight their battles down below. He's getting out …! That's what Ferdinand says, W. says. And then Marianne, beautiful Marianne, asks, 'Where he's going?'. And Ferdinand says, 'Here, he's coming here …'

He's coming here. But there's no sign of the man in the moon in our Greenwich afternoon.