Nicole Kidman stars in: 'The Astronaut Dropped'

Once upon a time there was a man, a kind and simple-hearted man, so they say. This man married a tyrannical woman, a despot, an insidious controller. She made his life a misery, almost locked him in a cage of controls, demands and emotional manipulation. The kind-hearted man and the tyrant had two children – a boy and a girl – but the man became increasingly concerned for how their lives were being shaped. As I said, he was simple and kind-hearted and he didn’t care much for how the tyrant treated him, but he loved his children with all his heart and wanted only the best for them. One day the man decided to question the tyrant, to tell her that her ways were wrong. The tyrant was furious and had a right hizzie-fit of monumental proportions.

Nobody knew that, secretly, the tyrant was also a witch. Instantly she conceived a spell that fired the kind-hearted man out of the children’s lives, sending his body flying up into the sky, and higher and higher out into the planets. Banished forever. The boy and girl stood and watched and cried. The tyrant simply gathered in her skirts around her and looked about for another kind-hearted man.

The two children schemed to find a way to bring their father back. They drew plans to build a space rocket to help them carry out a daring rescue mission. But they struggled to secure the considerable funding required for a manned mission to outer space. Hyper-drive had not been invented to allow for speedy exploration of distant worlds, and they could not get planning permission for a launch pad to be constructed in their back garden. Also, the girl was asthmatic and they worried about the lack of oxygen in space.

The boy decided to give up the plan. Instead he opted to muck around with Meccano and cover his walls with pictures of Baby Spice and the girl from Aqua. The girl, however, never quite gave up the dream.

She would look up at the night sky. There's Ursa Minor, there's Hercules, there's Andromeda, there's Bootes!

And, in this way, the family lived dysfunctionally ever after.

Anyway, this is the complete fanciful garbage that I like to tell myself about why it was that my dad left, and my brother and I never heard from him again.

It’s a nice story, although it kind of masks all the hatred and fear and frustration that I feel towards that absent man.

Want to read more? Read the whole story by clicking on the first blog called Prelude and start clicking forwards using the tabs above the title.