I wasn't sure where to put this, but tonight I went to a talk by the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield. He was excellent. He started off talking about his dreams of being an astronaut as a boy, with pictures of him as a young child playing spaceships. He took us briefly through his career, which is far more impressive than I’d realised. But he had a dream of getting into space, worked out how he could achieve it, then went for it. He gave us a brief history of space travel, showed us a series of photos that demonstrated the earth is tiny. He talked about space, black holes, galaxies, what we can see through telescopes and looking back in time. But there were a couple of themes that ran through his talk. The first was don’t be afraid to follow your dreams. If there’s something you want to do, don’t put it off - try and work out how you can achieve it and go for it. The other theme was about how we are a single humanity on one tiny planet and looking down from space makes you realise that people are the same the world over - it’s so much better if we can all work together to look after our planet and each other. He took quite a few questions from the audience which threw up all sorts of little titbits. One I liked was ‘the opposite of terror is competence’ and it was about practice and preparation, meaning when things go wrong you are able to deal with them without panicking. It was just a really good talk with several positive messages, and although it was mostly adults in the audience, it was entertaining and very accessible to older kids (if they are interested in space and astronauts!). He even played his guitar. I just wanted to post because I only found out about it by accident. There are tickets left for his remaining UK shows and if you can get to one I’d recommend it.