Did you see the eclipse??? Wow!!! Amazing!!!

But of course, you didn’t ‘see’ it, or you’d be at Moorfields with patches on your eyes hoping to restore your destroyed retinas. Unless you’re in the tiny minority of people who actually had ‘eclipse glasses’, accredited with the exact British Standards number! Obviously, if you’re an exploitative nob from Romania making cheapo rip-off glasses, it’s much easier to just write a number on the specs than to actually produce them properly. But I’m no cynic. And because we’re clever, we ordered our eclipse glasses in advance.

They’re arriving today. Ok, yesterday would have been slightly better, but we’re so ready for the next one. We’ll keep them in the special ‘eclipse glasses drawer’ we had installed 20 years ago, just in case. Yeah, they’ll be completely forgotten about by tomorrow. But if I’m still around in 2080; I’m ready for the next (almost) total eclipse.

Someone told me a neat trick. View it through a CD. Yup, get a cd and hold it up, seemingly opaque, but enough gets through to get a fab little ‘sun-with-a-bite-out’. Mel ‘made’ a pinhole camera, which we had to take out to dinner with us when we met some friends. (At the Hummus Bar!!! I fucking love the Hummus Bar, even without a pinhole camera.) But its usefulness at eclipse viewing was… limited.

So half way through the eclipse I went and took a shower. Cold one. We only do cold ones currently. And by the time I was dressed the front of the house was getting dark. And still, the best place to ‘view the eclipse’ was on the Sky channel who were showing it; BIG and safe. I know it’s not like sitting at Stonehenge invoking the devil or chanting ‘ohmmmm’, but it was functional.

Did it, as all the pundits on tv asserted, ‘make me feel man’s insignificance in the grand scheme of the universe’? Was it ‘totally humbling’? Did I ‘connect with the people hundreds, thousands even, of years ago, who would have watched the same thing?’.

No, not really. I’m not big on humility, as you’ll have gathered. Humiliation? That’s part of my life. But it’s an eclipse. Unlike our historical forebears, we don’t think it’s ‘the sign of the Antichrist’, nor the ‘end of the world’, we get it. It’s basic physics.

Yet… and yet… there is something truly magical about an eclipse. Oh, and it’s free. Though I bought tickets online for 50 quid each, just in case.

Happy Astronomy

A xxxx