Do you hear me, Major Tom, there’s a Major Tim out there too?

Up there tread-milling through space, headphones clamped to his head … who’d have thought, Major Tom becomes Major Tim, not lost in space, like him, not lost in wonder, like him, but in the marathon down here, virtually running around the pavements and bridges of London.

Good for him.

Maybe one day we’ll have spacecraft powered by treadmills so we can run to Mars, or a host of tiny silver spaceships shaped like airstream cycle-helmets, and we’ll pedal out to the Milky Way. Just a thought… though Leonardo Da Vinci probably thought of it first.

And here we are in the sharp cold of April with breath puffed out white and frosty, as it would if we were all already lost in space.