IT is said that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. This morning (Friday, March 20, 2015) will put a third certainty to the test: it is inevitably cloudy when there is a solar eclipse.

At 9.34am, we will experience our first eclipse since August 11, 1999. I remember excitedly climbing up Monkend Hills, overlooking the Tees on the outskirts of Darlington, armed with a pin and a couple of pieces of card, only to find a dirty bank of grey cloud stretching from the Pennines to the Clevelands, blotting out the sun and rendering my pinhole camera pointless.

Even so, at the appointed hour, the light became curiously wan, the fields took on a dusk-like luminosity and an evening-like chill fell on our hands and faces. Even the birds became subdued.

But it was still a big disappointment.

It was ever thus. The previous total eclipse visible in the North-East had been on June 29, 1927, when the 32-mile wide “band of totality” stretched from Hawes to Saltburn. Richmond was bag slap in the middle of it, and a yellow and black AA sign on a house end on the road out to Reeth still celebrates that celestial alignment.

The LNER organised what is believed to be the largest-ever movement of people by rail in this country, its special excursions carrying three million spectators to the band of totality to witness the 23-seconds of darkness at 6.20am. Trains ran all night into mainline Darlington and Northallerton with people being advised to alight at Croft Spa to catch a motorbus into the Dales.

The LNER shunted every spare buffet car into sidings along the Tees Valley and opened them as the 1920s equivalent of burgervans. Every pub in the Dales offered all-night eclipse breakfasts at “prices that cannot be eclipsed”.

The moon began moving in front of the sun at 5.27am. In Hartlepool there were 200,000 watchers. In Richmond, there were 35,000. Leyburn and Bedale were crowded with 20,000 each. All Bishop Auckland gathered at Leg’s Cross, near Bolam, and 10,000 Darlingtonians decamped to the Monkend Hills at Stapleton.

And they saw nothing.

"The sun appeared to have had a bad attack of stage fright at the last moment," said The Northern Echo.

Clouds rolled across the sky in Richmond, and "a faint gasp of chagrin broke the spell. Disappointed people flocked to the Racecourse exits for the most part in tense silence, eager to get away".

Even so, they noticed a dew drop as the temperature tumbled. A cow being milked in Nunthorpe went inexplicably dry for the 23 seconds of totality, and in Stapleton, hens rushed to roost, only to pop out of their coop again “looking confused” when daylight re-appeared.

And in Hartlepool "a man was so affected by the eerie darkness that he broke down and burst into tears".

The Northern Echo was philosophical about the eclipse being eclipsed by cloud cover. It said: "We had nobly entered upon a great adventure and, like the angler returning from a fishing expedition with an empty creel, we can say that the enjoyment of the experience did not depend upon the direct returns. If the eclipse has made philosophers of us, it will have done more for us than we asked of it!"

So at 9.34am today, when 90 per cent of the sun will be obscured, I expect to be looking at a skyful of clouds. As philosophers say, a pessimist is never disappointed.