I often stare into space. Unfortunately, not only when it’s dark and I’m out in the open, when you can get away with it more easily. I often do it in Tesco, crashing into others while not properly in control of my trolley.

For the purpose of this column, I will leave that kind of staring into space alone, and concentrate on the night skies, which this month came under scrutiny in the BBC’s attempt to get people interested in astronomy, Stargazing Live.

I tuned in, but despite attempts to sex-up the subject with celebrities like Jonathan Ross lending a hand, it wasn’t riveting.

The night sky, however, really is riveting. There are few things more pleasurable than lying on your back and looking up into starry skies. Not if you’re in bed and have just had your roof blown off by strong winds, of course, but generally speaking, it is a good experience. Good, that is, until you start to think about what you are looking at.

The immensity of space is hard to get your head around. Being mentally- deficient in the science department, just thinking about the distant stars and how far away they are makes my brain hurt.

My husband has made numerous attempts to explain to me how the light from stars takes hundreds of years to reach us, but I still can’t grasp it.

It’s like in Father Ted, when Ted is at pains to explain to Dougal – who, to those who aren’t familiar with this brilliant sitcom, isn’t the brightest spanner in the box – the difference between a toy farmyard cow he is holding, which he says, is ‘small’ and real cows, visible in a distant field which, he explains are ‘far away.’ All I took home from school, in the way of astronomy, was a saying we were taught to remember the order of planets: It know it began ‘Mary’s Violet Eyes Make Jack Sit Up...’, but I can’t recall the rest.

And I remember at primary school spending an excruciatingly-boring afternoon watching the Moon landings on a TV the size of an egg box, placed on top of a high cupboard.

Other than that, there was Patrick Moore, who spent his time waving his arms around and spouting what to me seemed like nonsense.

It is hard to understand the vastness of what is out there; the distant galaxies, the black holes, and whatever lies beyond our universe.

In terms of space exploration, we don’t seem to have moved on very much since my youth. With present technology, we know next to nothing. I thought by now we’d have visited one star at the very least. Although if everyone had my brain, the Earth would still be flat.