Last week, on 12 August, there was a partial eclipse of the sun. Battleaxe and Philosopher went to view it on the West Hill in Hastings. We even had eclipse glasses. It was interesting, but not as good as the 1999 total eclipse, even though, back then, the weather and the equipment was not nearly as good. On Sunday, we did a car boot sale at Icklesham – no photos I’m afraid, but we made £170. Very good. Meanwhile, we still have had no rain. the garden is looking utterly dreadful. Here is a picture.
Those crocosmias should surround the Buddha sculpture with beautiful green leaves and orange blooms. But they are all dead. I hope they come back again next year. Some of our plants have died altogether. It is forecast to get cooler and rainier, but I can see no signs of that yet. Battleaxe has not much enjoyed the heatwaves – no energy to do much, no energy to write – and it gets very hot up here in the study.
There have been wildfires all over the place – we actually got a Government Alert to our phones about not lighting fires. Apparently loads of people objected to that – said it was an infringement of their privacy and unnecessary. Fools. I bet they are the same people that vote Reform. But what about women facing a threat of domestic violence? I dunno.
So, off to the West Hill. Here are some pictures. It was an incredibly hot and sunny evening – the sun was very bright and very strong.
The eclipse glasses actually worked pretty well, but these photos were taken using a phone camera lens cover that was provided with the glasses. It was pretty useless. Loads of folk were looking though colanders – didn’t look to be much use.
I’ve found the photos from 1999. Photographed from outside our office in Edgbaston, Birmingham.. Here I am with some of the team from Central Consultancy. You can see we only had fairly primitive pieces of paper to look through. It was also quite cloudy. Look at Battleaxe’s blond hair. I tell you, having that bleached at the hairdressers was agony. My head would be on fire. God knows why I did it. Most of the time the hair was short enough to stick straight up, like Annie Lennox.
However, my very favourite eclipse photos were from neither of these big events, but from a little publicised less significant partial solar eclipse in March 2025. We knew nothing about it, and were on a walk in Boscastle, Cornwall, when we suddenly noticed the eclipse reflected in a still pool in the river Valency. We marvelled at the sight for a few minutes, then a woman came walking along with a friendly dog. We told her about what we could see, but she barely had a chance to look before her dog delightedly jumped into the pool and scattered the image into ripples! Here is the Battleaxe post about it.
This is a short post – have got a lot going on. Boot Sale? Wow. It was like a swarm of locusts… We did have some good stuff though. Having the beginnings of a house clear-out, and we have many, many desirable vintage and antique objects. The locusts descended almost as soon as we got there – at 7.30am heaven help us, and by 9.3o our stall was almost picked clean! Loads of people we knew stopped by to say hello, and we had to constantly apologise for what they must have thought was the extreme paucity of our offering. It was quite embarrasing! We left shortly after 12 noon, much surprised by our success – and satisfied. We’ll do another one…
