The sky darkened suddenly. Stars appeared, even though it was still daytime. The birds stopped singing. And although the full effect only lasted about two minutes, the feeling lingered for a long time afterwards.
No, I'm not talking about the eclipse. I'm talking about the moment during my Friday night football game last week when I stopped a fierce, goal-bound shot, using a part of my body sometimes euphemistically described as the "groin area".
It's a few years since I last had the experience and, let me tell you, it hasn't improved much in the meantime. OK, I made up the bit about the birdsong (it was just the opposite - birds started singing); but as you probably know if you're the owner of a "groin area" and you've ever played football, the bit about the stars is more-or-less true.
Virginia Woolf was a woman, apparently, but she summed it up well when she wrote: "There was no colour. The earth was dead. That was the astonishing moment, and the next was when, as if a ball had rebounded . . . the light came back. . ." She was talking about the 1927 eclipse, incredibly, but she was still spot-on.
Like last Wednesday's event, it was a profoundly memorable - even humbling - experience, and I was so shaken by it I had to go into goal for a while (I'm still talking about the football here, in case you're confused).
But I'd still prefer not to have had it. Unlike most of my teammates, I'm not prepared to die for the cause, and if I'd seen the ball coming, I'd have arranged to be somewhere else at the time.
Eastern Europe, maybe. That way, I would have both avoided getting hit in the Netherlands (as it were) and seen the actual eclipse, unlike the poor unfortunates who went to Cornwall this week and saw nothing except mud.
But one of the reasons I wasn't in Eastern Europe is that we were in the middle of what we press people call the silly season; and a little bit of the male loyalty thing - which in greater concentrations causes players to throw themselves deliberately in front of the ball, even though the goalkeeper might stop it, and what else is he for, anyway? - compelled me to suffer alongside my colleagues back in the newsroom.
One of the most awe-inspiring things about the eclipse, for me, was the incredible cosmic coincidence involved: the fact that the moon and sun moved into line at exactly the right time to obscure the huge white space in newspapers' events diaries for the first two weeks in August; a time when, traditionally, the situation wasn't tense anywhere last night and Opposition parties weren't reacting angrily, or otherwise.
I saw cynical newsdesk people who, watching the reams of eclipse copy coming in, had near-religious experiences.
Had it not been for the lunar activity, and the probably-not-unrelated fact of Boris Yeltsin throwing Russia into turmoil (formerly known as Dagestan) yet again, early August could have been a wipe-out; with only the likes of the Department of Tourism's refusal to fund the Miss World Contest ("Minister in Heavenly Bodies Eclipse shock!") and the annual "are-heavy-schoolbags-damaging-your-child's-back? story to sell newspapers.
The moon and Boris Yeltsin (good title for a musical, that) apart, however, there was at least one good story in the past week. This was the news that the Dublin Transportation Office is encouraging parents to participate in a "walking schoolbus" scheme this autumn; a "fun" concept in which their children will be collected each morning by supervising adults (with a trolley for the killer bags) and then walked to school in a group.
Under the plan, which is being piloted in Clontarf, the kids may be given special jackets to wear when they board the "bus," or stickers, exchangeable for sweets when they get to school.
This is a nice idea in itself, but what really excites me about it is its potential as a solution to Dublin's traffic problems generally. I mean, while we're waiting for an adequate, real-life public transport system to be put in place, why can't we all just pretend, like we're asking the children to do, and take a "walking bus" to work instead?
Any group of say, five or six people - maybe total strangers who meet while waiting for three-dimensional public transport to turn up - could start their own "bus", perhaps taking it in turns to "drive"; and along the way encouraging car owners to abandon their vehicles and "jump on".
A fun element could be introduced here too. Some passengers could be handed Walkman sets when they get on board, so they can annoy the hell out of other people on the "bus". And of course, passengers alighting would have to do so from the front - regardless of how crowded it was.
The special buses would have their own lanes - in this case footpaths - although these would have to be shared with cyclists, motorbike-couriers and the odd speeding taxi, as at present.
It's an exciting concept, I think you'll agree, but it would obviously need to be piloted before the general public would come on board (as it were). My suggested guinea pigs are the staff at the Department of Public Enterprise, and it would be a nice added touch if the minister drove. How about it, Mrs O'Rourke?
The actual DTO idea, as reported, also envisages exclusion zones around school gates, to prevent car-drops. This is all very well but, frankly, it's hard to see how it can be enforced, since parents don't have to stop their cars to do this: any agile youngster could be trained to jump out while the vehicle is still moving at, say, five miles and hour (an unlikely event anyway, in rush-hour)
So what are the authorities planning to do? Give parking tickets to children unlawfully delivered? Or clamp the little buggers after school and refuse to release them until the parents show up with the fine? I'm not saying these are bad ideas, necessarily, but I think we should be told.
