FRENCH LETTER: Pastafarians staring intently at the sun

An eclipse, a colander, a village fête and a sky full of shooting stars – sometimes a week of small wonders is enough to restore your faith in life. This week’s Substack is a celebration of finding joy, silliness and a little magic in the middle of everything else.

In this summer of our discontent, we desperately needed a natural phenomenon that had nothing to do with climate breakdown or politics. Enter a total eclipse of the sun, visible from Iceland to Spain, to get millions of Western Europeans wildly excited. It gave us a chance to stare at the sky in childlike wonder, wearing ridiculous dark glasses with special eclipse-protection lenses – or looking at the sun through pasta strainers and slotted spoons and cereal boxes.

In France it was the first total eclipse in almost 30 years, and the next one is expected in more than 60 years when most of us would be long gone, so understandably it was the main topic on social media and in old-fashioned news media. In the southwestern part of the country where the sun was obscured almost entirely, around 97% in my neck of the woods, the excitement reached fever pitch.

And what a spectacular pas de deux the sun and moon gave us, like a beautiful ballet after too many weeks of watching a horror show. We’re officially in our fifth heat wave, if anyone is still counting, we’re threatened with drought and severe water restrictions, and new wildfires are still springing up around us. I’ve been scanning the sky for signs of rain as anxiously (and as eternally hopeful) as I remember my farm uncles in South Africa doing decades ago.

No wonder those indispensable protective glasses were completely sold out in the days leading up to the eclipse. By the time I started searching for a pair, it was too late even to order them by mail. So we had to resort to System D, the French version of what I’ve always known as ’n boer maak ’n plan , with D standing for débrouille , for finding a way around a problem. Although nowadays it should probably be called System G, as in G for Google, because that’s how we solve most of our minor practical problems.

In this case Google showed us how to transform an ordinary cereal box into an object with which we could watch the eclipse. But it involved standing with your back to the sun and looking at a small reflection of the eclipse inside the box, and going to so much trouble for such a tiny image seemed like setting yourself up for disappointment. If you were doomed to see only a miniscule reflected sun, then wouldn’t it be better to see lots and lots of little suns? A miracle of multiplication that could be achieved with a few ordinary kitchen utensils, our friend Google assured us.

This is how it came to pass that three of us, me and the Frenchman and our eldest son, joined about a dozen other enthusiasts watching the eclipse on our village green.