Summer intensity and its extreme busy-ness

Summer intensity and its extreme busy-ness

Is it just me, or has the quality of time been super-intense lately? 😀

August in Europe is an intense time. It is hot, perhaps the hottest time of the year, and for me personally, extreme heat is torturous. Anything above 30º and I start to not cope so well. I know I know I know some people adore the heat – it makes them come alive, they thrive in the hotness of the summer. Me, not so much. I have skin that cannot deal with sun – I am covered in freckles and moles and all kinds of weird things that just seem to multiply in the sun. Also, my skin feels like it’s literally burning in the hot summer sun – I feel like I am sizzling after about 15 minutes, and then it goes an alarming shade of red. So vampire-me is in the shade, under a gigantic hat, slathered in 50+ SPF sunblock, while all the gorgeous Spanish ladies with their beautiful, flawless olive skin are soaking up the sun in bikinis and little strappy dresses.

Also, it is dry in this part of the world. Last summer not one drop of rain fell for about four months. We had temperatures of into the 40ºs. The sun was scorching everything that grows to cinders. Wild fires broke out and raged for days. This year we’ve been so lucky in Galicia – we’ve had some good rains that soaked the earth. But in Madrid and surrounds, and also in Bordeaux, France, the fires were out of control for weeks so much animal and plant life was lost. Super-intense times.

Furthermore, it is holiday time! Kids are off school for just about three months and most people have a good few weeks or an entire month holiday at work. For me, as a South African, this is totally nuts. In South Africa, the long summer holidays in December are never more than five weeks for school kids, and for the adults you are super lucky if you can get two weeks off in the entire year. So it blows my mind that families go on holiday for a whole month. Businesses switch off all their machines and close their doors – see you in a month. Restaurants are simply closed with a cheerful note stuck on the door to inform that they are on holiday – cheers! Forget about getting anything from a small business – come back after August. Again, as a South African, this breaks my brain because South Africans keep the doors open, no matter what. It is unheard of to just lock the doors and go on holiday. Like a person that values quality of life over work. Wow, what a concept 😁 But what this means in practicality, is that it gets very busy in the places close to holiday spots. Beaches burst at the seams with back-to-back umbrellas and people soaking up the sun and beach vibes. Finding a place to park the car becomes an exercise in extreme-level patience, inventiveness, maneuvering in teeny-tiny spaces and loving your fellow man no matter what craziness he might be perpetrating in his car at the current moment. There are traffic jams in towns and villages that are normally quiet as a spring meadow. Queues in the supermarket. Queues to buy a drink. Queues at the restaurants that are open. And remember, it is sweaty-hot and supersunny – so everything feels just a little more intense.

And then we had the total solar eclipse in the north of Spain. Another super-intense event, smack-bang in the middle of all the already-happening busy-ness and high-voltage vibes. We were lucky enough to be just about on the doorstep of the totality of this 2026 eclipse – we only had to drive a bit further north to get ourselves into the path of full totality. A viewing party was arranged well in advance as family was coming from the UK with their entourage of friends, plus friends of ours were coming from Lisbon, and all together we would travel or meet up in Ferrol – a town in that top left corner of Spain.

We found a little cliff with only a few other people, far away from the thronging crowds on the beach and got comfortable. This wasn’t the first total eclipse I’ve seen – I saw one on the Indonesian island Sulawesi in 2016 – an even more chaotic and intense experience – so much so that I don’t even remember too much of it, it was such a drama to get to the viewing place and it was over so quickly. This one was far more peaceful and enjoyable – once we had found our spot. It was amazing to me that even when the sun was more than thee-quarters eclipsed, even when there was just the tiniest sliver of sun left, as seen through the viewing glasses, to the naked eye the sun looked like it was shining in full force. The light was really strange, though – the quality of it was something completely strange. Still warm in colour, but with a strange coolness… muted but still highly contrasty in quality… hard to explain!

When the sun disappeared behind the moon, there was the eeriest silence, it was really quite something. The waves in the Atlantic ocean that had been relatively quiet during the lead up, sounded crashingy loud. Nobody, nothing made a sound. It was still relatively light but the quality of the light was sooooo strange, as we were lit by the strands of energy we could see radiating from the sun through our eclipse viewers. Time stood still… it felt like we were outside of time, outside of normal reality… like the world was holding its breath… And then the sun peaked out on the other side and an enormous cheer went up from thousands of people – with what I think was a little sense of relief that the sun came back, despite of course knowing that it would 😀

It’s hard to not think about how an eclipse like this must have appeared to our ancestors that had no scientific explanation for what was happening. They would have sensed that something very strange was happening because of the quality of the light. The sun would still have appeared to be shining as per normal, it was getting darker and stranger, though… And then suddenly it’s gone and there is just a black hole in the sky, surrounded by wisps of light… And the eerie quiet… A sense of dread, perhaps even fear…

I dated a guy, long ago, that was an eclipse chaser – he might still be, for all I know 😀 He traveled every year to where an eclipse was happening to go view it. There was a whole tribe of them, old friends traveling from far and wide, to come meet up in this strange light. He had a tally of the minutes and seconds he had spent under this black eye in the sky. I have to wonder if the chaotic side of his personality was subdued or fed by the strange energies of all the eclipses he had had viewed.

In any event, there is another eclipse in Spain next year, also in August – this time in the very south. This eclipse will brush the south of Spain and Morocco all the way along the northern coast of Africa, over Egypt and into the Middle East. The time of totality will be around 6 minutes – insanely long. This is because the moon, in its orbit around the earth, will be as close as it can be to earth – making it relatively bigger in the sky. The earth, in its orbit around the sun, will be the furthest away from the sun as it can be – making the sun relatively smaller in the sky. And so, with the sun smaller and the moon bigger, we will have a superlong eclipse time.

For next year’s eclipse, I am planning very far ahead to do my best to minimise the chaos of travel. Doing my best to avoid traffic jams and queues. Let’s hope the weather plays along with some nice cool temperatures and no clouds high in the sky.