Madame Mae

I'm old enough to remember the English eccentric/astronomer, Sir Patrick Moore, who I'd always assumed to be homosexual. Touring his autobiography, not long before he died, he'd revealed (as he was getting lifetime injuries, flying for the RAF) he had lost his sweetheart in the Blitz. The idea of love expired in his mind, with her own death — under the bombs of the Luftwaffe — and that of the future together, which they had planned. It was not that, as so many like me had assumed, he was a "confirmed" bachelor. Moore had chosen the path of embracing an aching loss in his heart instead. No one compared, or ever could compare with the love that World War 2 had killed, and robbed from him. Which his subsequent life never wanted to besmirch with the tawdry, or dishonour. This meant he had likely been celibate for seven decades up to his death. The wheelchair seen here, even as Moore eventually fronted the longest continual programme on British television, in "The Sky at Night," I think it was called: being not unrelated to the irrepressible, workaholic, and energetic nature for which Sir Patrick became famous. As basically the last publicly-noted monocle wearer in Britain, shrapnel, caught near the spine, while he flew Spitfires, would for the rest of his days creep closer to his spinal cord gradually paralysing him, the doctors had said. Discovering the fact of this gentleman's dead love — which I almost felt to be an horrific intrusion, to learn of; as Moore plainly sought with this brief chapter, to settle a lifetime's worth of speculation on — was the day that I stopped judging, any public figure on their chastity. Because, what idea could anyone else truly have as to why.