I’m writing this on Tuesday, which means that by the time you read it, one of two things will have happened. Either you’ll have witnessed the most spectacular celestial event visible from this island since 1999, or you’ll have stood in a field on Wednesday evening staring hopefully at the clouds (with appropriate eye-wear).

For once in our lives, the cosmos favoured West Cork over everywhere else. Belfast got 93% of the sun covered. Dublin, 94%. West Cork got 97%, the deepest eclipse in the country, maximum darkness at 7.12pm, the whole show over by eight and the Perseid meteor shower thrown in later that night as a support act. The next one isn’t due until 2090, when I will be 112 and by which time I will have written 3,617 of these columns, all going well. I’d also like to note, in fairness to the moon, that it turned up for its big gig after a rough enough week. Last week, an abandoned four-tonne chunk of a SpaceX rocket slammed into it at 8,700 kilometres an hour, punching a fresh hole into the far side. The poor aul crater.

It is estimated that there are over 40,000 tracked human-made objects and more than 100 million untracked smaller fragments orbiting Earth. So if you managed to resist the temptation of staring directly at the sun, you’d want to keep half an eye on what’s overhead generally.

Guinness won’t travel

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the English Channel, divers have found up to 20 bottles of Guinness in the wreck of the Mindora, a sailing ship that went down off Dover in November 1864 on its way from London to Vancouver. The bottles have been sitting in the dark at four degrees under constant pressure for 162 years, which sounds like something Diageo’s marketing department would come up with to sell porter.

The first recovered bottle is currently being stored at low temperature in one of the divers’ garages. A 162-year-old Guinness, of enormous scientific and historical interest, sitting in a Belgian man’s garage next to the lawnmower. The divers have now teamed up with a professor of microbiology in Belgium to try to extract the yeast and rebrew the stout exactly as it tasted in 1864, a scheme they are calling Project Jurassic Beer. One of them says that if they pull it off they will ‘unlock a form of liquid time travel’. Which is a waste of time if you ask me. Sure we all know that Guinness doesn’t travel.

An elf and safety issue

Some news just in from the world of critical energy infrastructure! The Greenlink interconnector, a €500 million undersea cable carrying electricity between Wales and County Wexford, had to be rerouted during planning because its original path ran through Dobby’s grave.

That is Dobby the house elf, from Harry Potter, who died on Freshwater West beach in Pembrokeshire in the 2010 film, and whose memorial there, a pile of painted stones and, for complicated elf-related reasons, socks, attracts pilgrims from all over the world.

When the project manager mentioned the landing site on the BBC, the company was buried under hundreds of complaints.

His response was, I think, entirely reasonable: ‘He’s a fictitious character in a fictitious book, the whole thing is fictitious, what are you talking about?’ He rerouted the cable anyway. It now runs, he admits, quite close to some actual Bronze Age remains, including urns associated with actual human burials. Real dead people, disturbed, to spare a made-up elf. The ancestors will understand, presumably.

Anyway, the upshot is that a portion of our national electricity supply now arrives in Wexford via a route personally approved by Potter-heads. God knows our planning process could do with a dose of magic.

Jet can’t land in fog

The Government’s new €53 million jet had its biggest outing yet at the weekend, flying to Dubai and back as part of the operation that saw Daniel Kinahan extradited to face charges before the Special Criminal Court.

The jet, a Falcon 6X which we all paid for and will never sit in, came in €8 million over budget, replacing a Learjet that kept breaking down, and was fitted out with cream leather seating and a divan-style sofa.

Nice for some. It was also, we learned last week, ordered without the navigation system that helps it land in fog, meaning the State has acquired an aircraft that can fly 10,000 kilometres to the Gulf without refuelling but may struggle with a soft morning in Baldonnel.