Don't look at the Sun - you could die! - How not to watch a Solar Eclipse

I went to look at a solar eclipse today.  Although strictly speaking you're not allowed to look at a solar eclipse because you can go blind.  Anyway, because there was one today and I'm not blind, I must not have really looked at it.

I decided to go to Garforth not to look at it.  Not looking at solar eclipses is pretty memorable (I can still remember where I was when I didn't look at the last one in 1999, ie on a river bank on Teesside).  Because I don't like it much where I live, I decided I didn't want to have to remember it here, but I'm okay with Garforth, so I went there.

Is this Heaven?  - No, it's Craighouse on the Isle of Jura

I wasn't sure exactly when the eclipse was but I thought it would happen around 9.20 am so I walked around randomly either side of that time, trying to keep the sun side on, so that at worst, if I did look at it, I might only lose the sight in one eye.

I'd heard that it was going to be a 90% eclipse, so I was expecting it to go 90% dark, but I hadn't factored in the fact that the other 10% of the sun is still really bright, so it only went a bit dark.

I'm just going behind the Moon for a bit, I won't be long

I saw some schoolchildren and they were all huddled round with their backs to the sun, and they were trying to capture some light from it through pinholes onto pieces of paper.  The kids were all really excited but the teachers seemed more nervous than anything.  They were probably all looking forward to it being over in case they got sued by the parents of some child who'd burned his own eyes out.  

When the sky was at its darkest, I was in a graveyard.  I didn't plan to go there, it was just where my sideways walking led me.  The graveyard is next to Glebelands playing fields where I used to play football when I was a child.  One particular corner of the field, where I used to play regularly, is now full of graves.  I guess the churchyard got full, so they had to expand.  It's a sobering thought, to realise not just how much time has passed since I used to play there, but how many people have died since then, and how many of them are now under my old football pitch.  

I wasn't trying to do it in a voyeuristic way, but I couldn't help look at some of the names on the graves, to see if I recognised anyone.  I didn't find anyone I definitely knew, although I think a dinnerlady from my junior school might have been there, but a lot of the surnames were familiar.  These could have been the mums and dad or the brothers and sisters of people I knew but I wasn't sure.  

I've been getting ready to move house again this week.  I usually like to move around every 11 months.  It keeps me on my toes.  Because I don't want to have to move stuff that I don't use or need, I've been sorting through all my drawers and cupboards this week.  Including looking in some which boxes I don't normally look in, except for on weeks when I'm moving house.  Amongst other things I've been sorting through old photos and papers, including going through the remainder of things I acquired from my mum, when she died last year.  

It can be a jarring process looking through documents and photos which span my entire lifetime, but a real highlight of the week was having another look through my mum's holiday photos.  Many of them were taken on package holidays in the sun that she went on over the years.  If there was a competition for the worst photos ever taken, these would surely win.  They all seem to have been taken in the dark, with thumbs over the lenses, mostly of drunk people with no heads who are very, very far away and who are looking at the camera in the style of a surprised cavemen who is astounded at the novelty of the experience.  Sometimes there is just a dot of a head at the front and the rest is just ocean.  Sometimes there is only ocean.  Even the pictures of my brother's graduation that she took appeared to have been taken in a tunnel at night.  In terms of sheer badness, they are unsurpassed.

In amongst them though I did find a team photo from of a British Army football team which was taken in Seoul in Korea in 1954.  The names of the 11 players are written on the back of the photo, and they all have typical fifties army nicknames like Taffy, Smudge, Spider, Grasshopper and Ginger.  I had to look a few times but I'm pretty sure the one called Ginger is my dad.  I didn't even know till yesterday that my dad ever played football, although I knew he'd been to Korea.  I think he made mashed potato during the Korean War.  I was told recently at a family reunion that I look like him but less Ginger, so I guess I should be glad that didn't make it through the genetic selection process.  

As well as the photos, I also came across my collection of death certificates this week.  So far I've got  ones belonging to a wife, a mum and dad and two grandparents.  If I get any more I'm going to need a bigger envelope.  My two other grandparents had the good manners to die before I was even born, so thankfully that was someone else's admin burden.   

Another person who may or may not be dead is my former alcoholic step dad Terry.  When he was around the age I am now, and shortly after his own brother and dad had died, he said to me that he wasn't afraid of dying, because he knew lots of people that were already on the other side.  I used to think that he wanted to die too, but he didn't have the nerve to commit suicide in one go, so he was just trying to do it in instalments by drinking and smoking himself to death.  

Although I could already relate to what he was saying, because my dad and grandparents were already dead by then, I've got a lot more idea now, because lots of other people I know have died too.  As well as Beverley and my mum, there's Joy who I used to work with at the bank, who was so supportive when Beverley was ill, and who then ended up getting the same thing.  There's Matthew who I used to play rugby with and who I shared a room with in Italy, but who had a faulty heart.  There's also Bob who drove the backup truck to many of my crazy cycling expeditions.... And lots of others, both old and young.

So what has all this got to do with the eclipse?  I don't know, except walking around in a graveyard not looking at the sun during an eclipse is as good a time as any to start idly wondering about the meaning of life.

This is my room at the Jura Hotel

And one of the thoughts I wondered was this:  I wondered if the people we've lost are like the sun during an eclipse.  They're not really gone, they're just hiding round the back of the Moon for a bit.  Like I was when I was behind the Paps of Jura on holiday.  Unfindable by any mobile phone signal in the technological desert of the Jura Hotel, I was still existing but just out of range for a while.

And if so, like the Sun come back from its temporary excursion, will I see them again?  I hope so.  

I'm not too sure what the afterlife will be like, but if, at the end of the big while tunnel that some people get halfway down and then come back, there's a much bigger version of the Jura Hotel where all my dead friends and relatives are staying, I think that would be pretty good.  

I guess I'll find out when I get there....



Postscript - A few months after writing this, I found out that my step dad Terry is also dead. He died in 1999 aged 54.  Eventually he did manage to smoke and drink himself to death.  I wish I'd been a bit more understanding towards him when he was the age I am now.  I didn't agree with the way he handled things, but I could at least have been a bit more sympathetic.  He used to say that I was arrogant when I was 18.  He was probably right.  It's easy when you're 18 to think that you've got all the answers, but in fairness you haven't had to test those answers out against adult life yet.

International Women's Day - Bringing out my Inner Woman (or How Not to Run a 10K)

The last time I ran for 10 kilometres without stopping was 29 years ago.  It was an organised event and I ran it with my friend Fraser Maclennon-Pike somewhere in the North of Leeds.  Probably around Horsforth area where he was living at the time (he lives in Australia now).  We both ran it in our school rugby shirts which didn't work out too well for me, since the shirt should have been handed back to the school a couple of weeks before at the end of term.  By sheer coincidence on the run we ran past our Rugby Master Jim Collard's house, and he spotted me out of his window wearing the shirt and asked me for it back the following Monday.  I might have been wanting to keep it as a souvenir.

Here's me running at top speed in the Park!

At the time of that run I was nearly 18 and from memory I ran the 10K in around 47 minutes, although I no longer have the medal or certificate to prove it.

I'm now almost 47 years old, a fact which astounds me on a regular basis, because being 18 seems like it happened only a couple of weeks ago.  For some reason, this morning when I woke up, my current age seemed even more unbelievable than normal.

I've been running 5K at my local Parkrun pretty regularly since last May (I've done 26 so far), and since I started my PB has dropped by over 11 minutes from almost 36 on my first attempt to under 25 now.

Until recently I thought that 5K was probably as far as I could run in one go, but that was because I usually finish feeling like death, after trying to beat my PB every week.  Anyway, I recently discovered, that if I just slowed down a bit, I could potentially run further.

It's International Women's Day today, and some ladies I know (one in particular, Joy) are running either a Marathon or 10K today in Palma, Mallorca.  Not only that but they're being followed round and filmed on the event by some documentary makers from Channel 5.  I guess Channel 5 must be moving away from its reliance on stories about people who can't leave their house without being winched out through the windows.

Anyway, I can't be there, but I hit upon the idea of coming out in sympathy by running a 10K myself on the same day.  Because I'm not 18 anymore, I thought trying to run 10K in 47 minutes might result in my sudden death, so I thought I'd aim for about an hour.

As I've got to go to a child's birthday party at lunchtime, I thought I'd better start early and go out at 6.30 am.  I planned a route of exactly 10K which would see me finish by running along the drive to Temple Newsam House, and so I was all set.  Except I didn't have anything in for breakfast, so I didn't have any, and then I decided to ignore the route I'd planned and improvise a new one instead.

Around the time I ran my last 10K in 1986, I was studying Italian Unification as part of my History A Level.  Apart from the fact that biscuits were invented during that period in History (See Garibaldi) I only remember one thing from that time, and it was a quotation from Camillo, Count of Cavour which said that 'All plans, all projects are useless, everything depends on an accident'.  He was saying it to suggest that he wasn't unifying Italy on purpose, it was all just happening accidentally.  Well, in the spirit of that, as soon as I started running this morning, I threw my plan out the window and just started running in all directions.

I ran past all my childhood houses (well ages 3 to 22, I don't remember much before 3), including the shop where my dad died and my brother was born, I ran past my first two schools, I ran past Joyce Charlton's house (she's dead now, like my mum) where I watched the 1975 European Cup Final (Bayern Munich 2 Leeds United 0) on a colour TV.  I ran past the tennis courts I used to play on as a teenager, I ran through most of the streets of my paper round, I ran past the Working Mens' Club where the awards night used to be for the football team I played for, and past lots of other places which had childhood memories associated with them.  Then, after I'd done about 3 and a half miles of nostalgia I ran out of Garforth completely, and started following a bridleway in the direction of Cross Gates, where I had my first job, and where I almost got arrested once for being the kingpin in a strategic shoplifting operation (which was only true in a policeman's head, who added 2 and 2 and got 47).

At around the 5 mile or 8 kilometre mark I was blocked from continuing on the bridleway I was running on and diverted into an industrial estate where I got a bit lost for 10 minutes (I don't think this happens on the organised events).  This and the fact that I'd discarded my planned route and already ran around in some extra circles meant I was never going to get to Temple Newsam within 10K.  Just as I was nearing the 10K mark, I managed to stumble out of the industrial estate, and into a retail park, where amongst other things, there was a Sainsbury's and a McDonalds.

I'd planned to run my 10K within an hour, but my Garmin works in miles and I wasn't sure of the exact conversion, so I thought I'd better run at least 6.4 miles to be sure.  6.4 miles and exactly one hour's running took me to McDonald's front door, and as I hadn't had any breakfast (please note Lisa Vercelli, I didn't warm up either, all very bad form) I thought I'd better stop there.

here's what Strava had to say on the matter!

I only really wanted a coffee and some orange juice, but I thought I'd better eat some food in case I fell over later from malnutrition, so after queuing up behind a load of builder men, who didn't look like they were doing anything connected with International Womens' Day, I asked the very pleasant girl behind the counter if she had any of that rubber food that they use to decorate dining tables in Ikea, and she said that luckily they did.  So she gave me some food made of rubber (officially it was called a McMuffin), which in turn reminded me of my racist boss at TSB, who used to regularly act out the following conversation between waiter and customer at a Chinese restaurant:

Customer:  Excuse me waiter, this chicken's rubbery...
Waiter: Oh, thank you velly much...

I used to like playing with those really bouncy little rubber balls when I was younger, and I did think about slamming the McMuffin into the tiled floor to see how high it would bounce, but there was a man mopping the floor and I didn't want to upset him, so I just ate it.

After I'd eaten the rubber food, and drunk my orange juice, I then had to have my coffee to go, so that I could get to Cross Gates station in order to catch the 08:22 train back to Garforth where I'd left my car, so I tried to drink it while walking, out of one of those tops with the hole in, which was a bit burny.

So that's the story of my tribute to International Womens' Day, and in particular to the women who are running either a Marathon or a 10K in Palma today, and it's also the story of my first 10K run for 29 years.

The preparation wasn't ideal, running a flat out 25:22 5K yesterday, and then having no breakfast, and doing it solo and then disregarding the route, and then getting lost in an industrial park, and then finishing at a shop that sells rubber food instead of on the leafy drive of a stately home.

But that's what you get for being a total amateur, which is what I am!  I hope the ladies in Palma not only succeed but also do it with a bit more style!!