do you remember 2026?

It was one of those things that I knew I would probably be missing. For a start, I was slow on the uptake. A friend sent me a skit on Instagram of a comic asking who had done the PR for the 2026 eclipse; in 1999, he pointed out, it was all we had spoken of for weeks. Somewhere between memory and nostalgia I can conjure the headlines. We were on holiday, I think. The sky turned the colour of dishwater. It was a time when people were worried about the Millennium Bug. Maybe the sky was falling in, after all.

I talk with the builders about it; they say they’ll watch through a beer bottle. It can’t really damage your eyes, can it? I say I think it probably can. The BBC have wheeled out some poor bloke who looked at it through a welders’ mask in 1999 and has never been the same again. I think ahead a few hours; the eclipse will unfold between the hours that have become replaced with the words “tea”, “bath time”, “milk” and “stories”. The back of our house is a building site. Even if I’m not physically attached to a child, I can’t imagine dragging mine out of the house only to tell them not to look at the sun, only the whole reason we’re out there is to look at the sun.

I read up on pin-hole cameras, look at a cardboard box lying on the stairs for 12 seconds. I read social media updates from people who are on high up cliffs and open moors, who will be camping out, who aren’t having to do bedtime. A pang of jealousy. I read sections of Virginia Woolf’s diary from when she travelled north to watch the 1927 eclipse. “We had fallen. It was extinct. There was no colour. The earth was dead.” It hasn’t rained properly in months. The fields and parks are all the same scorched yellow. The horse chestnut leaves are orange and fallen. It is hard not to feel this was horribly prescient.