Eclipse

There was a solar eclipse in these parts last Friday morning. Some of us nipped out of work to stand shivering under bleak grey skies waiting for something extraordinary to happen. And then the clouds thinned obligingly at the appropriate time to yield a glimpse of the momentous event.

As momentous events go, it was perhaps a bit of an anticlimax. As the sun was not completely obscured, but only a half-hearted ninety-something per cent, we were unfortunately not plunged into opaque blackness, which would have cheered us all up enormously, and to tell the truth it was difficult to tell whether it was actually any darker than previously. Eclipses ought to be dramatic: a minor earth tremor, perhaps, or the odd plague or two would not go amiss. In ancient days, they were omens of cataclysmic events: the birth of kings or the demise of empires. Nowadays they are an excuse for bunking off work for ten minutes.