Broken Parkdale clock is right not just twice but four times a day – and that would be the day of a normal solar eclipse!
They are not very normal, not at all.
And they are being used at a time in human history to scare people!
The only problem is, they are just making a huge mess of things.
One of Britain’s most famous clocks has never been correct in over 170 years.
Now we are all being asked to believe that a solar eclipse will be a harbinger of something more sinister.
The city’s iconic clock tower has never stopped at precisely two o’clock or one o’clock before.
But today, as we celebrate the end of the longest eclipse in the southern hemisphere, the time in the park is being set as if there is a major threat of something more sinister to the solar system.
The park, situated in the heart of Greenwich in south London, has been at the centre of political attention because time-keepers at a different time, the mid-19th century Great Meteor, had been seen to pause for more than a minute and a half.
The Met Office, the national body responsible for watching the movements of the sun and moon, says there cannot be a chance of this happening again, as the accuracy of the astronomical clock at Greenwich is “extremely unlikely to be affected by an eclipse”.
But a former senior astronomer at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) in Southampton, Steve Jones, who spent 27 years as a member of staff at NOC in the 1980s, claims it could still happen.
If you are still with me, let me add this: a solar eclipse is not a harbinger of anything. Even better, you are not being asked to believe in an eclipse.
No, it is a natural phenomenon that occurs once every year and has a completely predictable and repeatable pattern.
If you are not a believer, then you are not going to understand it, and the alarm bells of your gut will be going off and then the alarm bells of science will stop and I hope you will stop looking at it and not even thinking about it.
The sun is the star you need to find. The sun is the star you need to find.
There are no miracles, no
