It is hard to explain, this business of following total solar eclipses, of boarding planes and trains to go to where they are. People look at you curiously. What ever is the fascination with this phenomena that causes some of us to do quite a bit more than pause, set down the bread knife and look up?

I remember always wanting to see a total eclipse. Perhaps there is something about the image of the eclipse in photographs, an obscured sovereignty, so disturbed, thwarted, by a far lesser thing. The symmetry of the relatively tiny moon just perfectly covering the sun . . .who designed this anyway?

In 1992, I went to Mazaltan, Mexico, for an eclipse that would be visible from Mexico to Hawaii. A friend and I commandeered a taxi to drive us to the top of a mountain outside of town. From our vantage point, on a rock overlooking the ocean, we looked at a grey sky. There would be no corona experience here.

What was surprising, however, was the nature of the experience. Even though there were clouds, we saw the wall of darkness move swiftly across the ocean. Birds stopped mid-song. The temperature dropped, and because the clouds just grew darker, it felt like we were about to experience the biggest thunderstorm ever. Then it was over.

But one can get hooked. Just the taste of an eclipse can be addictive.

Last year I tried to convince friends that we should head to Mongolia for a crisp, clear winter eclipse. Their hesitation turned to absolute refusal when an otherwise chirpy astronomy primer offered helpful suggestions on how to keep the film inside your camera from freezing, the shutter mechanism from locking, and your nose hair from crystallising.

August in Europe was much more appealing. An analysis of weather predictions showed that Turkey and Romania offered the best cloud-free viewing. "Uh . . .what about the Kurds along the way?" asked one American friend. "Aren't they having a few problems there now?" The repeated news reports about the occasional car bomb in Istanbul did little to allay concerns. In the spring, the growing conflict in the Balkans eliminated Romania as an option. We settled on France. If, as Woody Allen has suggested, success in life is the ability to go to Plan B, France seemed to offer the best options for hedonistic consolation if the weather was bad.

We rented a car in Paris, set the alarm clocks for 5.30 a.m., chilled the champagne overnight, stuffed smelly cheeses and es pates and tarts into a sack and made plans to head to Beauvais. From there, 40 miles north-west of Paris, we would spend several hours staying lost, it was decided. We would be unconcerned with maps, and focus on chasing patches of clear sky.

The morning was not cheerful. The sky presented an impenetrable cloud cover - 8 a.m. . . . 9 a.m. . . . 10 a.m. . .

We drove through villages and beside wheatfields, someone in the car bellowing at any given moment that we should go towards the light on some distant horizon. Just after 10 a.m. we settled on a dirt road on a slight hill between a magnificent cornfield and a freshly cut wheatfield near Vezilly. The sky featured teeny inches of blue that only Mary Poppins would have expected to turn into something else. But this was a Mary Poppins group, and they cheerfully laid out the picnic fixings. I sat in the back seat, read the International Herald Tribune, endured slurs about people with gloomy Russian temperaments, and was secretly pleased that at least we were alone here, with no crowds.

One of our party, a woman from California who once had an intimate and academically documented experience with a poltergeist in her teenage years, was voted to have the best contacts with the powers that be, and so was called upon to do her best to arrange the clouds.

About half-an-hour before the eclipse began, even Trotsky here had to admit the skies were blue, with only a harmless cumulus cloud or two hanging around. And thus it began, the first nibble taken from the sun visible through our welder's glass. As an eclipse progresses, it becomes more impossible to describe. It is not like dawn or dusk, because those transitions occur at the horizon. This transition into darkness happens overhead. It creates shadows on the faces of those around you that you have never seen before. The colours around transmute like a photographic negative; the cornfield turned silvery-bluish; the wheat field turned an iridescent amber.

At totality, your body is struggling to maintain its senses. You have never experienced this before, you have never had every one of your senses altered this rapidly, and you are overloaded. You look up and in the sudden cold there is this black circle. Can our tether to life itself be this flimsy? Could someone just throw the switch like this at will?

In 1927, during the last total eclipse in Britain, Virginia Woolf wrote: "I had very strongly the feeling as the light went out of some vast obeisance; something kneeling down and suddenly raised up when the colours came. When the sun re-emerged, it was like recovery . . . We had seen the world dead."

When it is all over, you try and resume your day as though nothing happened. But your reflexes are off, your timing is skewed. We saw four serious car accidents within the space of four hours following the eclipse.

Perhaps after seeing the world dead, as Ms Woolf said, even for a moment, it is best to do nothing at all. To be grateful for the simple obedience and generosity of nature. And then perhaps it also okay to consider the future. The next eclipse will be visible from Madagascar in June 2001. What have you planned?