Monday 8th June

I have never really been a sun-worshipper.  Oh, I like the sun, don’t get me wrong – but I am not one for really sunbathing.  Or if I do sit in the sun it is only for a few minutes at a time.  Truth is I get fidgety, or start to fall asleep, and having been literally burned once when I slept in the sun I know how dangerous that can be.  I cannot just do absolutely nothing face up to receive the healing rays of the sun.  I have been on a few holidays when all there really was to do was to sit on sun-loungers in the sun, either around the crowded hotel pool or on some narrow beach the loungers all in a row.  I get bored after even a few minutes and amble off for a swim; even the book I am reading gets put aside in the sun.

But this is the modern term – sun-worshippers.  I am more interested in societies which worshipped the sun, mostly in Ancient times or more recently the sadly conquered Aztecs and Incas and Mayans.  Of all the religious ideas which have infected mankind at least sun worship does make some sense.  Without the sun life on Earth would be impossible, in fact there wouldn’t be an Earth at all.  We would just be another ball of rock and ice travelling from nowhere to some other nowhere in the vast expanses of the Universe.  The sun gives us warmth and our orbit around it gives us the seasons and stops us hurtling into oblivion.  It makes every sense in the world to worship the fact that it is still there every morning.  And that it will ripen our crops and feed us too.  Then later we discovered coal and oil which had stored the suns energy for us to release millions of years later.  Everything we have has come from the sun, and of course it is our own stupid actions in recklessly burning that coal and oil which are threatening to destroy the thin blanket of atmosphere which protects us from too much of the heat of the sun.

And even with all one’s knowledge (gleaned largely from watching many episodes of Horizon) it still amazes me the heat which you can feel standing in the sun.  They say it will be many millions of years before the sun burns itself out, which seems illogical as it is composed completely of gas which is burning and one would have thought it might burn out a lot sooner.  Maybe we should all pray that it won’t.