The Year In Music: 21st March (because of leaps, a day late)

Équinoxe, Part 2, Jean Michel Jarre (1978)

The leap year moving the calendar foxed me. Yesterday morning at six minutes past three, the Earth's axis and its orbit lined up, both hemispheres getting an equal amount of sunlight. Until yesterday afternoon, the scientific dunce in me thought the Spring equinox always happened on the twenty-first day of March. Damn that lack of attention in my intermediate-level physics GCSE.

Maybe the grey, smothering clouds helped further deaden my brain cells given I missed all the news stories yesterday. I have learned my lesson now. So indulge me.

I first came across Jean Michel-Jarre, or rather the music of Jean-Michel Jarre as a child thanks to Oxygene Pt. 4 being used, I was sure for so many years, as a theme tune on TV. The face of Miriam Stoppard would pop into my head when I heard those synthesisers wail forlornly but majestically, and I didn’t know why. The magical nature of the internet informed me a few years ago that it played over the opening credits of an ITV programme, Where There’s Life, which ran in an early evening slot throughout the 1980s. (My mother liked to read about and watch programmes about health, perhaps, I’ve always wondered, because she lost a husband very young.)