I've never been to a rocket launch -- there have been few enough in my lifetime -- but I seem to remember that at NASA's main Houston site, you spectate from across a bay.

This is not Houston, I realise. For one thing, it's snowing. The beach where I sit on a piano bench -- at a baby grand piano, reasonably enough -- is covered by a goodly amount of snowfall. The other reason would be that the rocket, which I can see from my perch, is at least a kilometre out to sea, on a large floating fortress. The sun has sunk below the horizon and a bright, cold moon picks out the waves that break against its sides.

The piano starts playing by itself: a plaintive melody in sixths. On reflection, it's actually playing "Diving Station" by the Boards of Canada. This makes for a pleasant sound against the shushing waves, and everything is quite chilled for a few minutes. I lapse into admiring the moonlight on the rocket's curves, and the gleaming gyroscopes which skate up and down some of the bass strings on the piano, whirring insistently.

Then the rocket launches.

The floating fortress and the waves between it and the shore are silently engulfed in a spreading field of fiery gas. In the moonlight it looks quite unreal. As the rocket crawls hungrily into the night sky, seeming to move far too slowly for its mass, the flames actually reach the shoreline before me as they finally dissipate.

Of course, the rocket does finally disappear into the starry heavens above, and the fortress becomes visible through the smoke and steam that now hangs above the bay in thick gouts. It diffuses moonlight across the coastline, and since the piano has now closed its lid and locked its keyboard, the eerie light makes it far easier to stand up and walk homewards.