Totally eclipsed

There was a solar eclipse this morning, and I probably could have seen it, but I missed it. It wasn't a full eclipse here in the UK- more like a nibble (see BBC photos), but still I just plumb forgot all about it. In fact, I sort of forgot all about the eclipse until I read Mel's blog from Greece, where they should've had a much better view.

I saw a pretty good eclipse back in the late 90s when I was living in Coventry. Again it wasn't total, but that time it was pretty close, enough to get the corona effect. We all rushed out of the office to watch the eclipse, with our 99 pence eclipse glasses meant to protect us from going blind. Well, all of us, but one office naysayer who refused to look through the cheap glasses and would only look at a reflection of the eclipse in a nearby pond.

When I got back to my desk, I got a phone call from an American journalist (I was a press officer at the time) who wanted to know how many "man-hours had been lost in the UK due to eclipse watching". My employer wasn't the Department of Trade and Industry nor was it the Bureau of Useless Information, so I was a little surprised that I got the phone call. I suggested he phone the DTI as that was more up their alley. He said he'd phoned them and they didn't know. I guess he was working his way down the list of public sector press officers, so we puzzled over it for a while and came up with a reasonable approach for calculating the lost time. Certainly almost all of the office staff went outside to see it, leaving practically only the big boss and the receptionist inside - so we just extrapolated from there. What a way to make journalism (I requested that I not be quoted on the calculation - I'm sure I appeared as "government source".)

A work colleague in another office and her husband were so excited about the eclipse that they booked an eclipse watching holiday in then-stable Zimbabwe for this very week. I've thought about them a time or two as Zimbabwe seems to stumble further into chaos. And today I wonder if they're down there and if not if they managed to get their deposit back.