About 60 years ago, when my family lived in Halfway Bush, my father took me to the Taieri Aerodrome to see a plane. I guess I was 3 or 4 years old, and the plane was a Douglas DC 3. I can remember standing on the tarmac with Dad, goodness knows why we were allowed to be there, and looking up at its vastness and grandeur. By today's standards the old Dakota is fairly crude and fairly small but to the 1955 iteration of me it was huge and modern and wonderful. The nose towered high above me and the great engines, with their three bladed propellers, were vast and powerful. I went home suitably awestruck.A few days later I was alone in the back yard of our house when a plane flew over. I recognised it as the same DC 3 that I had so recently stood underneath, only now it was very, very small. In a flash of insight I realised it was small because it was a long way away, and the thought entered my little head that for it to be that tiny it must be a very long way away indeed. And I...