It says here that people in Nigeria greeted today’s total eclipse of the sun with calls of “Allah is Great.” It was a pretty exciting one, a swathe of lunar shadow stretching from Brazil to Mongolia, like a dark patch of madness on the brain of the Earth, like one of those hospital brain scans. In German the word “Schatten” does have a colloquial meaning as madness.

But that is for another day. In Germany the shadow was only small. Here in Berlin we only got a corner of it, because it was a cloudy day, and no-one looks up in this merciless town anyway. Take your eye off that man in front of you for a moment, and you never know when he’s going to start telling you about his lonely life and invite you to share his beer. No, no, no, a thing like a total eclipse of the sun is best off in Saharan Africa. First, they have the weather for it, and second, they have more religious panic. It’s just better appreciated.