As you know I am not of the driving persuasion, preferring my trusty old velocipede White Surrey for the school run. but my good lady wife is constantly fretting should a warning light appear on the car's dashboard. 'What's that? What's that?' she screams (as if I have an answer). Spare a thought, then, for John Glenn, who noticed a similar light on his dashboard on 20 February 1962. The only problem was that he was circling the earth at the time in his Friendship-7 capsule and couldn't get through to the AA (or AAA as he would doubtless call it). The flashing light meant that his heat shield was loose and the craft could have disintegrated as it hurtled back into the earth's atmosphere.
Luckily for Glenn all it actually meant was that Friendship 7 was due for its annual service, so no harm done.
Phew!
In other news ...
The French philosopher Voltaire was born on this day in 1694. He upset a lot of Englishmen in his book, Candide in which he explains the execution of Admiral John Byng by saying that the English shoot an admiral every now and again to encourage the others. He saw himself as a campaigner against injustice and a champion of freedom. Everybody else saw him as a slimy cynic. But then, if you're a chap christened Francois Marie Arouet, you've got every right to be cynical.
