The Hallelujah Moon

 My guess is Stephen Cheatley took this. It's Blackpool, last night. I saw the crescent myself over Shepherd's Bush roundabout, as I'd finally let myself out for a walk, and I'd been looking out for it because I'd just learnt that it signaled Eid. That's not why the crescent moon's the symbol of Islam though - strictly speaking there actually is no "symbol" for Islam. The founder of the New Crescent Society, Imad Ahmed, gives a beautiful account of his coordination of nationwide sightings of this moon in the episode of Ships, Sea and the Stars below, for which I provide a reading of one of the happier moments in Ernest Shackeltons' life. Beyond its Judeo-Christian roots I'd always known next to nothing about Islam, other than a conversation I'd had in Berlin where I was corrected on an assumption made that Muslims also believed that God was Love: "I don't believe that. I believe God is Time." And according to Ahmed, the Arabic word for crescent moon, hilal, comes from a Semitic root meaning 'to scream out for joy', the same root in fact as hallelujah.

 Still on the subject of outlines, last week's episode featured this map of British shipping routes from 1937. I found it extraordinary to suddenly look upon the land as negative space...

 And the episode's packed with wonderful instances of making the invisble visible. There's a lot about shipping containers to, and the history of Greenwich, so obviously I was reminded quite a bit of The Boy who Climbed Out of His Face, and I'm reading some Conrad in this one (Heart of Darkness was one of the inspirations for the show, besides The Water Babies) and a poem called "Cargoes", which appears to have been something of a set text, but was new to me.