Pastafarians staring intently at the sun

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. (Or what is supposed to be a village green, but due to the drought it is more like a village brown, a sad patch of dry grass.) We were the only ones armed with pasta strainers and a slotted spoon, all the others were equipped with disposable eclipse glasses which they’d been wise enough to buy when you could still buy them.

It somehow reminded me of the biblical parable of the Ten Virgins waiting with their lamps for a delayed bridegroom. Five have the foresight to bring extra oil for the lamps, while five foolish ones run out of oil and have to go search for more and arrive too late to enter the wedding feast. We were the three foolish ones, fortunately not barred from the feast of the total eclipse, but not nearly as prepared as we should have been for such a major event. And we certainly felt foolish as we tried to watch the eclipse reflected through the many holes of our kitchen colanders – while we in turn were watched by our bemused fellow watchers.

If the total eclipse could be described as a massive spectator event, we provided the halftime entertainment, like Madonna and company at the recent finals of the Fifa World Cup. Not quite on the same professional level, though. I felt more like a bumbling clown bringing a little comic relief to a classy circus act. Everyone was looking up to admire the high-wire dance of the sun and the moon while we fumbled around with our colanders reflecting the slow dance on a tray balanced against a tree. (Oh yes, that was another piece of kitchen equipment we brought along: the white tray to provide the background for the reflections.) Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.

But we also brought a cool bag with drinks and snacks, and we were early enough to claim the only picnic table on the village brown (to make up for our tardiness in procuring protective glasses), so we were actually having a fine time. And since we were the comic team we couldn’t help fooling around, posing for snaps with pasta strainers on our heads, carrying the slotted spoon like a spear; foolish knights fighting for the right to see the total eclipse along with everyone else.

It was only when a friend saw these pics and reminded me of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I found the perfect excuse for our silliness. This parodic religious movement originated about 20 years ago in opposition to the teaching of “intelligent design” in public schools in the US. A satirist named Bobby Henderson wrote an open letter to the Kansas State Board of Education to protest the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in science classes, demanding equal time in science classrooms for Flying Spaghetti Monsterism alongside intelligent design and evolution. The Flying Spaghetti Monster became an internet phenomenon, with adherents calling themselves Pastafarians and claiming the right to pose for official ID photos with pasta strainers on their heads.

They even have a satiric calendar of Holy Days. Did you know that the day of the total eclipse, 12 August 2026, was Vegetable Sauce Day? I didn’t either. But now I know that Saturday 15 August was Condom Day and Sunday 16 August, when I’m hoping to post this Substack, is Wave At The Surveillance Cameras Day.

(Un)fortunately we don’t have any surveillance cameras in my village, but if you pass one wherever you live, please make my day by sending me a picture of you or someone you know waving at it. This could even earn you honorary membership of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And if you miss Wave At The Surveillance Cameras Day, there is still Kiss Someone Day (Wednesday 19 August), Apologise Day (Friday 21 August) and Tarantula Teasing Day (Saturday 22 August) coming up before the end of the week.

But jokes aside, the eclipse was awe-inspiring. The late-afternoon sky acquired an ominous bruised colour, as if a massive storm was brewing, the birds and the insects grew quiet, and with the help of our colanders we could see not just one sun but dozens of shiny little suns being eclipsed until only the thinnest slivers of light remained. A truly dazzling show proudly presented by Mother Nature.

Sight of the week: Not the eclipse, which we could only see in reflected form, but the Perseid meteor shower which is always visible around this time of the year. (I sometimes forget the French name and call it the Persillade, as in the condiment of snipped parsley, to the amusement of my Frenchman.) When our children were small we turned this heavenly spectacle into a night-time adventure, taking blankets and pillows and snacks to an open space with a wide view of the sky, lying on our backs and counting shooting stars. This year we had two of our adult children with us, and although the son was too lazy to stay up until all the village lights went out half an hour after midnight, the daughter insisted on honouring the family tradition. So there we were, at one o’clock on a cloudless, moonless night, peak conditions for star gazing, spread out on a blanket next to the village pond, thrilled each time we spotted the shiny tail of a meteor writing a secret message against the pitch-black sky.

We couldn’t decipher the messages, but you don’t have to understand something like that in a rational way to feel your heart lift in indescribable joy. Simply more proof that Mother Nature remains the most impressive impresario in show business.

Sound of the week: Two days after the concert of the total eclipse and one day after the night of the shooting stars, we participated in a more down-to-earth celebration. It was our village’s Fête Votive, the annual festival with collective dining and dancing and merrymaking on the market square. We didn’t want to go dance to the beat of bad French pop music (yes, we’re snobs when it comes to pop music), we simply wanted to have a drink on the square and watch the merrymakers. And then we got caught up in the karaoke.

The karaoke was only supposed to entertain the diners until the dancing started, but it was such an unexpected hit that everybody forgot about dancing. And I can proudly state that my family did our best to help the karaoke along. Not me, I’m a coward when it comes to public singing, but our daughter and son were brave enough to open the floor. Then the father and son sang a duet, after which lots of people joined in. Therefore my sound of the week was my husband and his son singing Talking Heads’ Heaven is a place (one of only two English songs heard all evening), which has become our family’s unofficial theme song years ago. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. Indeed.

Except in our patch of heaven we had a Pastafarian experience of an almost total eclipse, a night of shooting stars, and a lot of joyous outdoor singing, all in one week. Not bad for a village where everything is supposed to stay the same forever.

Plan for the week: I’m packing winter clothes (what a pleasure!) for almost a month of book-related travel in SA. I might not be able to write on Substack as regularly as I would like to during this time, but I’ll try to post an update for paid subscribers, at least, because I don’t want anyone supporting my writing financially to feel left out. And I’ll hopefully be bringing some good news next time. Please keep your fingers crossed with me. DM

Republished from Marita van der Vyver’s Substack. Read more of her Substack pieces here.