One mother, horrified by her three-year-old’s determination to see it all, actually covered him with her body.The lager-swilling lads and their girls were so far gone through alcohol and excitement that they were all staring right into the now savage white light as a single soaring explosion burst out of the corona to produce the famous diamond ring effect. Children screamed and whooped, held tightly by frantic parents who were attempting to hide their young eyes. It lasted just seconds, but it was unforgettable.By now the seething crowd was uncontrollable. I saw the disc now perfectly formed, and it seemed for a moment that the Sun had actually disappeared. Then I saw the flickering pulses of green and yellow and red, the much-vaunted Baily’s Beads, caused by shafts of light slicing through the valleys and craters on the Moon’s surface. I stared straight at it before putting on my black plastic goggles.

The speed of events and the flickering changes in the phenomenon were bewildering. Afterwards, many of us in that vast crowd on the headland compared notes and agreed roughly what we saw. But none seemed to see everything.I did what I had been told by a hundred pundits not to do. Then the light over the sea changed from dark grey to a brilliant light green and 20,000 people began to roar with a single voice as the entire sky seemed to open and the great dark disc of the dying Sun, with a single, thin slice of blazing white light on its edge, glared down on us.The next few minutes cannot be described in exact terms. People first noticed that the hundreds of gulls who had been wheeling and squealing over the rocks below had suddenly gone silent and still.

The old Cornish preacher repeated the Lord’s Prayer, and when he had finished, looked up and brought roars of laughter by saying: “C’mon, you old bugger, let’s see you.”At exactly seven minutes past 11, the final, stunning sequence in this Cornish day of miracles began. To our amazement he began saying the Lord’s Prayer, ending by asking if we could see the Sun. And it was the young mother who looked up and saw it first.To our east, and across the bay, the Sun – half eaten by the shadow of the Moon – suddenly appeared in a great hole in the cloud, turning the dark edges into a brilliant blue.It was the beginning of 15 minutes in which the Sun played a kind of fantastic strip-tease act, vanishing for minutes among the clouds, and then reappearing. Next to them, a Cornish lay preacher, a man in his nineties, told them to hush. Hardly anybody on Headland Point knew where the Sun was or where they were supposed to be looking.A bunch of young men, stripped to the waist and into their third crate of Foster’s, were upsetting a young mother holding a child in her arms, as they made obscene remarks to the hidden Sun. Portable radios told us that the cloud blanket was thickening, and – worse – that there was bright sunshine elsewhere in Britain We felt like guests who had come to the wrong party. A large squall was moving in from the west, bringing sudden freezing downpours when I joined the trek on to Headland Point, a 200ft hill that juts out into the sea from the holiday town of Newquay and gives a huge panorama of beaches stretching for miles along the coast in both directions.Every foot of sand seemed to be packed, and out on the flat, calm sea scores of surfers and body-boarders were waiting to come in with the approaching darkness But the mood was bad.