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That afternoon I arrived back in Flagstaff, but this time on the trike rather than strapped to a stretcher in a helicopter. It’s a lovely city that has the feel of a frontier town combined with a ski resort, mainly because that’s pretty much what it is. At nearly seven thousand feet above sea level, it’s a popular area for winter sports – the Arizona Snowbowl is just fifteen miles north of the city and the 12,633-foot Humphrey’s Peak is even closer.

That evening, I rode up to the top of a mountain on the edge of Flagstaff. From the top, the city looked like a wee village and it was hard to believe it has a population of more than 65,000 people. In particular, it seemed very dimly lit. But there’s a reason for that.

Since 1894, when Percival Lowell, an astronomer from Massachusetts, chose Flagstaff as the location for his observatory because of its high elevation, the city has been a world centre for stargazing. In the 1930s they discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory, which really put the place on the celestial map. People came from all over the world, and they still do to this day. When I was visiting there was a flood of anoraks in the city. There are now several other observatories, in addition to the Lowell, including a military one and a university one. To aid the astronomers, the local authorities passed laws to minimise light pollution and allow the boffins a really clear view of the night sky. Special low-intensity sodium street lights helped to make Flagstaff the world’s first ‘dark sky’ city. And it’s one of the few places in America where you’re not assaulted by neon signs on every block. I think this is all a rather good thing. For an amateur stargazer like me, it was almost as good as being in the far north of Scotland – where there’s no artificial light at all.

I think there’s something fundamental to our existence about looking at the stars, wondering what they are and what it all means. Back in the Dark Ages, they thought the black part of the sky was solid and the stars were wee holes that let through rain and the light of heaven. I’ve spent a lot of time looking heavenwards and wondering what it’s all about, but I’ve never understood how the constellations got their names. Take the Great Bear – if you take away the drawing of the bear, it’s just a cluster of stars that look nothing like a bear. So, as a schoolboy, I named them myself and compiled my own drawings of the night sky, creating constellations that suited my designs. I had the Great Bicycle and Uncle Harry’s Ear. Have a go yourself. I can guarantee it always works.

Then, when I’d finished devising my map of the stars, I moved on to the planets, which led to my own grand unified theory of the universe – the Cup of Tea Theory.

If you look at the sun and the planets – like Mars, Venus and Jupiter – they resemble a basic atomic structure – with a nucleus and electrons spinning around it. In a way, they’re almost exactly the same thing. So, I thought we’d made a big mistake over the years thinking we were the big shots in the universe. We aren’t huge. In fact, we’re teeny weeny – the smallest things imaginable – but we’re parts of something huge, like atoms are parts of something relatively huge, like this page, or a T-shirt, or a little finger. We’re all made of atoms, and the whole cosmos is like an atomic structure, so we’re all part of something enormous. Our planet is like a tiny bit of gravel flying around in this gigantic thing called space that’s far too big for us even to see, let alone understand, in the same way that a trout has no idea that we exist. So what is out there that we don’t know about? What is so huge that we are unable to realise we are only a wee part of it? In the end, I came to the conclusion that we are swimming around in an unimaginably enormous cup of tea. That’s why I loved being in Flagstaff, Arizona – it let me gaze into the heavens and think about my Cup of Tea Theory.

Standing on that hillside above the town on that very dark night, I pronounced my theory to the camera. I hope to have legions of