On hearing that last night’s moon was ‘the biggest for 70 years’, I naturally went out to take a look, and was sore aggrieved to discover that as far as I could see, it was the same size as always. What a let down.

I was, though, delighted to discover the moon’s phase:

‘Waxing Gibbous’ – superb! Sounds like a villain in a Holmes mystery.

(Being a word chap, I naturally went to find out what it all meant, and it turns out that ‘waxing’ simply means getting larger (as in ‘waxing and waning’), while ‘gibbous’ means “having the illuminated part greater than a semicircle and less than a circle”, though by extension, ‘gibbous’ eyes are ‘convex or protuberant’.)

So, lunarily disappointing, vocabularily rewarding.