It is Wednesday 12 August, and I am off to Ben and Janine’s to watch the eclipse. They have a flat in Alicante and the original plan was to go there, but circumstances conspired in such a way that I, instead, went to their flat in Kemptown. It is on the 16th floor, so really near the sun in the first place.
We were having some trouble getting the correct viewing glasses. Because Brighton is full of useless hippies and so lacks the entrepreneurial spirit, no one seemed to be selling them. And because living in Brighton has turned me into a useless hippie, I didn’t think to order any. Janine, who is not a useless hippie, had ordered some a few days earlier but was told by Amazon that they wouldn’t arrive until Thursday, which is early for the next eclipse, but no good for our purposes in 2026. Ben went down to Robert Dyas to see if they had any, and was told that they’d be getting them in on Friday, which is even worse. One doubts the ability of this country to organise the basest piss-up in the largest brewery.
The original plan was to go down to the beach and watch it from there. It’s possible to see the beach from their flat, and by 6pm people were congregating; some enterprising sun-worshippers had even constructed a pyre upon which to make a human sacrifice, so that the sun would reappear. We wondered how we were going to watch this.
“Have you got a colander?” I ask.
“What for? Do you put it on your head?”
“No, no, you point it at the sun and put a piece of paper behind it.”
Ben looks suspicious but I show him the details on my phone.
“Look – it’s the BBC. It has to be right.”
Janine produces one with lots of small holes. The holes seem to be smaller than normal ones, and I wonder if they’re the right size. Ben goes to get some beers and when he gets back he mentions that he ran into a couple of friends.
“They didn’t have the proper glasses either. They said, ‘But sunglasses are OK, yeah?’ So I had to put them right on that.”
“I wonder what would have happened if you hadn’t bumped into them,” says Janine.
“God knows,” says Ben. “I think there’s a bloke on the beach selling dodgy glasses, but I really wouldn’t trust them.” Ben goes into a reverie as he imagines how, in an ideal world, someone selling fake eclipse glasses on Brighton Beach should be punished.
The time approaches. We debate whether we are going to go down to the beach or watch it from here. In the end we decide to stay. The view from every window is obscured by blue netting, as it has been for the past year and will probably be for some years to come, but we decide that this will constitute an extra filter for the sunlight and so might actually be useful for once. I also do not relish the thought of walking around town with a colander and a piece of paper. Brighton is a tolerant city, but it has its limits.
We can’t see the sun from their flat, so have to go into the corridor outside, which is stiflingly hot. Neighbours pass and see us trying to find the right way to position the colander so we can see the transit. According to the news, it has started already, but all the colander produces is an array of perfect tiny circles on the piece of paper, which I had put down on a damp surface and was now a bit crinkly.
“Try the colander the other way round,” I say. “Look! Much better!” And it does look like we can see it now, each circle looking as though a tiny bite has been taken out of it, if you squint. We turn the colander around again, and the perfect little circles reappear. We are now meant to be at the point of maximum solar obscurity.
“Behold the majestic dance of the cosmos,” I say.
“Let’s go back inside,” says Ben.
“Ooh, it’s much darker in here now,” says Janine, and she’s right. Ben and I open another beer, and we all go into the corridor again.
“It should be, what, 90 per cent coverage by now?” says Ben. I try using the wall instead of the piece of paper but it is a little lumpy so it’s hard to tell if that makes it any better.
“Andy Burnham could have sorted this out, you know,” says Ben, who has been despairing of pretty much every prime minister since Thatcher, although he thinks Gordon Brown got a rough deal. “Given everyone a free pair of glasses. I mean, they’re just paper with a bit of plastic in them. And it’s not as if he didn’t have any notice.”
“In 1999 they handed them out free with newspapers,” I say. “But no one reads the papers any more.” From the beach, 16 storeys below, I catch the faint sound of screams, and the tang of charred human flesh.
“Anyone hungry?” asks Janine. “I’ve got some veggie burgers.”
[Further reading: The battle for Mallorca]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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