Sandra Chapman: Will Stephen Nolan visit the Cosmic Cliffs in outer space one day?

There was not a lot to lift my mood until I discovered the very place I would like to retreat to for a bit of rest and respite.

I could fill a bag with my favourite biscuits, take my remaining cat for company, not forgetting of course to take my mobile and binoculars for sight-seeing.

A very nice Orange band had serenaded me at my gate on the Twelfth morning – well, they were on the way to the bus which would take them to the field – they could serenade me before I go.

So there was nothing to hold me back from taking off for what I suspect could be the holiday of a lifetime. Except the location isn’t even on this earth.

No, it’s in outer space and the picture I saw was in a newspaper.

The place has been nicknamed the Cosmic Cliffs and the author Sarah Knapton, writing in the Daily Telegraph, describes them as ‘about 40 trillion miles high sitting 7,600 light years from Earth in the Carina Nebula – a mysterious star-forming area in the Milky Way’.

The image was taken by the ‘world’s most advanced observatory about one million miles from Earth’. Not a location you can catch a 139 Ulster bus to I’m afraid.

Scientists, it seems, are baffled by its ‘hundreds of previously hidden stars, undiscovered background galaxies and ghost-like protrusions coming from a dust cloud’.

Structure-like things can be seen but no-one knows what they are.

And yes there is believed to be water and oxygen in outer galaxies.

Suddenly I see my future summers in a different light.

I could leave this rubbish wind and torrential downpours on earth and head up to yon blue wonder where there just might be human-type forms generations ahead of us assisting in the creation of new life forms.

Will the best paid journalist in Northern Ireland – Stephen Nolan – be one of the few able to afford to go there to start a political programme guaranteed to wipe the stardust off every creature he interviews?

Those far-off creatures might not be too impressed with life as we know it on earth.

This phenomenon in space, captured by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, has been described as the start of a new era viewing what’s up there: Bill Nelson, NASA administrator says they will look back to 13.5 billion years ago, only a few hundred million years after the beginning.

So surely here’s a great opportunity to gather up all those barking politicians at Westminster, and fly them to outer space where they might do some good.

I would like them to leave the foreign secretary Liz Truss behind since she’s anti caving-into-the-EU and has ‘pledged’ to rip up the Northern Ireland Protocol. I’m sure she and Boris could run the UK together and restore peace.

Ms Truss is said to develop a halo around her head when she’s in the sun. Maybe that’s a sign to keep her at home.

This new discovery of our past reminds me we should all be careful what we leave behind when we get to that place in the cosmos in future.

Various generations could be weighing us up and thinking we didn’t do enough to improve life on earth when we were on it.

Will there be elections held to see who and what will be let in to the Cosmos Cliffs?

Bill Nelson, the Nasa administrator, describes it as ‘the threshold we are crossing’, the start of a new era viewing the universe’.

So I’ve decided to give up sailing and save up enough to get a seat in whatever vehicle is setting out to visit this Alpine Mountain Range lookalike.