“Look – the morning star!”

The Morning Star – a comfortable, quiet and unpretentious pub. Not the sort of place you would want to spend all night in. But definitely the sort of pub to slip into in the early evening when you just want a quiet drink and to be left alone.

The Morning Star is a name for the planet Venus, brightest celestial object after the Sun and the Moon. Because of its position in relation to the Sun and the Earth the planet Venus can also, confusingly, appear as the Evening Star. C. S. Lewis described a visit to Venus in his 1943 novel Perelandra.

The Morning Star is the title of a Marxist daily newspaper, formerly affiliated to the Communist Party of Great Britain. Due to the incessant factional in-fighting that characterises extreme left-wing politics this affiliation has in recent years been denounced and repudiated (with latterly even the denouncers being denounced in yet more accusations of class betrayal). The newspaper still carries on however, with editorials routinely attacking what it calls the “ruling classes”.

The Morning Star newspaper used to have offices in Farringdon Road. If you catch the Metropolitan Line from Kings Cross to Liverpool Street the “Underground” train actually runs in a deep cutting open to the sky for a short distance. When I was a child I travelled this route (en route to Norwich) and remember the tube train stopping at Farringdon and someone in the carriage pointing upwards and saying excitedly: “Look – the morning star!” I looked upwards (along with several others in the carriage) to where the grey cloudy sky could be seen high above. There was no sign of any stars. It was only as the train moved away that I noticed the red lettering that said “Morning Star” affixed to a building that backed onto the cutting.