I don't particularly like travelling and I still find the abrupt dislocation of worlds a bit unsettling. At the moment I am sitting at home, looking out over an early spring Cotswold valley, going over the mass of accumulated paperwork before my surgery tomorrow morning. But a few days ago I was sitting with my family in the middle of the Sahara desert waiting for the total eclipse of the sun. I find it rather curious, but I suppose the sharp juxtaposition of worlds does make you step back and look at your life.
The eclipse was around midday and, not surprisingly, it was very hot. In every direction there was just flat sand, without a bush or a ripple. It was as though God had thrown down a two dimensional plain and then got bored, or some cosmic computer simulation had crashed and wiped the detail.
To accentuate this sense of the surreal, my wife and daughters were sitting under small parasols against the blistering sun looking for all the world like something out of Lewis Carroll.
We sat there sweating a little, surrounded by polite but overenthusiastic Libyan youths. Then, over a short period the light dimmed and the heat mercifully fell away.
We put on our Gloucestershire woollens and waited. Eventually we were blinking in a half light of sharp, strange shadows when the oddest thing happened. Ripple-like shadow bands swept across us, apparently above the sand. It was as though we were paddling in an invisible stream.
Then, abruptly, the desert went dark and we looked up and saw the black, flaming disk of the sun set in a purple sky. For four minutes the world was suspended in violet light.
And then it was over. The lights went up, we stumbled around looking for somewhere private to have a pee, clambered on the rusty coach and returned to our normal lives. All very odd.
Absurdly, for a few moments in the violet light, when normal time seemed suspended, I found myself thinking about a training course I had recently been on. Why was I wasting my life on this cant? Why did I sit there toeing the line when I think the stuff is woolly nonsense? Life is too short, I thought, and one day I'll be dead.
I think maybe I shouldn't go to too many eclipses if I want to keep training.