Instant Nostalgia

I'm reading a beautiful book by a chap called Mark Knowler. It is called Classic Brooke Bond Picture Card Collections, and reproduces twelve complete Brooke Bond picture card albums with every card in place. For me, it opened up a magic doorway to 1956, when I was nine years old and frantically trying to collect the Out Into Space series before they stopped issuing the cards (one in every packet of tea).  I never did get them all, but I had the half-filled album for years, with the cards messily glued in with rubber solution. Now, this book gives me a chance to see them all again. They are just as beautiful as I remembered them. And how interesting to see Mars depicted with 'canals', features that were seen, and mapped, by hundreds of widely separated astronomers - even though they never existed at all! There's a message there for the climate change boys.