But I'll be surprised if the Cornish don't seize upon it as another pretext for celebrating the end of the world

But I'll be surprised if the Cornish don't seize upon it as another pretext for celebrating the end of the world. I lived in Cornwall for a number of years and we were always celebrating the end of the world. Why not? Wake up in a strange place the next morning with streamers in your hair and chicken giblets in your pockets only to discover that the world hasn't ended after all -well, you can always find a way of coming to terms with that.The most committed planetary end-of-the-worlder I ever met in Cornwall wasn't himself Cornish He was from Walthamstow Big Tony. A huge, bearded shmaltzball of a man - a cross between Father Christmas, Falstaff, Chas and Dave, and Oliver Reed - who ran a Waltham Forest street market in the winter and drove down to Cornwall in a van loaded with cheap sunglasses the moment the sun so much as winked from behind a cloud He was how we knew the sun was coming We measured the seasons by him.

He was our harbinger of light.I met him while I was in the employ of my wife, systematically lowering the standard of her craft shop. All very nice, the stoneware teapots and the hand-blown wine goblets at forty smackers a throw, but where were the bunce lines: the Chinese paperweights, the slate paintings, the plaster of Paris pixies? I'd grown up in a market trader family I liked to see the gear moving out. So when Big Tony blew into the village with a vanload of sort-of-Raybans and a collection of glitzy carousels to display them on, I couldn't say no to him I took the vanload.My wife sent every last pair back And the carousels. The fact that you could mark up sunglasses by anything up to a thousand per cent didn't cut any ice with her She wasn't in it for the money But then neither was Big Tony. They were both in it for the sun.He loved whatever you could see the sun through Champagne, chablis, tequila sunrises He loved whatever you could smell the sea on also Oysters, lobsters, caviar.

He would come for a night and stay for a week, drinking the village dry, eating seafood faster than the fishermen could catch it. Hearing his vanload of crappy sunglasses rattling from as far away as Bude, wives would hide their husbands under the beds Do I have that the wrong way round? No. Lover of women though he was - because you can see the sun through women too, if you know which way to hold them - he loved laughing with men even more There was an atmosphere of Dionysiac knees-up about him. The trouble was, every other man's knees buckled long before his.

After a week of Big Tony the village looked as though it had been hit by famine and plague. And a mysterious outbreak of male migraine.He gave it all up himself, in the end, to become an artist Since when I haven't seen him. But I'm banking on running into him on Bodmin Moor when the sun goes black. Solar eclipses are dangerous things - someone has to be out there selling protective glasses.