DRIVING out in the dark around Gainford on Monday evening, the supermoon looked far from super. Layers of dense cloud were brightly backlit in the sky over Darlington, but they parted only briefly to reveal a very bleary moon.

Tuesday and Wednesday were much better, the huge orb creamily big and beautiful in the eastern sky.

Monday, though, was the moment when the moon was at its closest. This, I was pleased to learn, was its “perigee”, and the moment when it is furthest away is its apogee.

The perigee meant that it was 221,525 miles from Earth, compared to its average distance of 238,855 miles. It was this closeness that made it look 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than usual. The last time it was this close was on January 26, 1948; the next time will be November 25. 2034.

I was struggling to understand how close the perigee was until I picked up my car from its annual service on Monday. The Mondeo is 11 years old, and as I drove out to Gainford, the mileometer turned past 119,500 miles, so at my current rate of travel, sometime in February 2025 I will be able to say that I have driven the car to the moon – although the rust over the rear arch will probably get it first.

In astronomical terms, Monday’s event was a perigee-syzygy, but thankfully for headline-writers, in 1979, astrologer Richard Nolle coined the term “supermoon” to describe any full moon that is noticeably closer – he was trying to make the link between supermoons and natural disasters like earthquakes, but it doesn’t exist.

Usually there is a supermoon once a year, but we are in the middle of a run of three supermoons, with the third being noticeable in December.

There are lots of other types of moons. For example, the September full moon is known as the “harvest moon”, because by illuminating the fields in an evening, it gives farmers extra hours to work. Similarly, the October full moon is known as the “hunters’ moon”.

The most famous is a “blue moon”, which is an additional moon. It is either the fourth full moon in a three-month season, or a 13th full moon in a 12-month year. Either way, it only occurs about once every three years.

No one seems to know why a blue moon is so called. The Oxford English Dictionary says the term only became popular after it was included in the Trivial Pursuit game in 1986, although Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote their song Blue Moon in 1934 – it is this song that the Manchester City fans have been singing since the 1990s.

And then, of course, there is “honeymoon”, again which no one really understands. It is first recorded in 1546, and is probably a cynical acknowledgement that love is at its sweetest for just a month after marriage. The French have an identical expression, lune de miel, although the Germans are less gooey-eyed: their flitterwochen, or tinsel-week, suggests love only glitters for seven days.

Which leads on to Lord Byron, who in 1815 married Annabella Milbanke at Seaham Hall. He would have preferred to have been in bed with his own half-sister but his debts were such that he was compelled to take the hand of the County Durham heiress. They honeymooned at Halnaby Hall, near Croft-on-Tees, which was such a sickly-sweet affair that Byron termed it a “treaclemoon”.