In your briefing today:

📣 The Scottish Government has stopped publishing figures on how often “core” civil servants are working from the office, rather than from home, after just four months of its hybrid working policy.

The policy is a bone of some contention: staff want more freedom to work from home, while public pressure is growing over vast, expensive and largely empty government buildings. (The Herald has the exclusive)

📣 Donald Trump has confirmed details of yesterday’s story about his switch, in a catering truck, from Air Force One to a backup military aircraft last month, as he left the Nato conference in Turkey. “I go by Secret Service and the military. They wanted me to go in a different flight, different plane,” Trump told reporters. “I just have to do what they say.” (BBC)

📣 We’ll have a spectacular solar eclipse in the early evening across Scotland: it’ll start just after 6pm. Whatever you do, don’t look directly at the sun - even wearing sunglasses. Only special eclipse glasses allow you to sneak a peek safely, and they are sold out. Some special viewing events might have spares, however. (Independent)

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📣 First Minister John Swinney is calling for a rethink on the UK government’s block on plans for Ming Yang, the Chinese wind turbine manufacturer, to open a £1.5 billion factory in the Highlands. Ming Yang has also approached the UK government requesting a review of the previous decision. (The Scotsman has the exclusive)

📣 Scientists are urging ministers to block the two North Sea oil and gas developments currently under review, in an effort to avoid the worst consequences of global warming. (The Times)

📣 Lord Brackdale was paid more than £700,000 before he quit as chair of the Sheku Bayoh inquiry. (Mail has the exclusive)

📣 Firefighters have been tackling a big fire overnight in Dalgety Bay (Courier)

📣 Happy GERS day, to those who celebrate: the Scottish Government will release its expenditure and revenue report for the year, showing what sort of deficit Scotland would run were it independent. Economists - and columnists - will get stuck in. (Fraser of Allander Institute)

📣 There’s an extreme heat warning across a big chunk of central and southern England today, with the record for the number of days over 30C now broken. (BBC)

📣 Police chiefs in England and Wales are warning plans to release thousands of offenders early could risk public safety and damage confidence in the criminal justice system. (Times)

📣 A suggestion by Andy Burnham that middle-class areas take more migrants is going down poorly. (Mail)

📣 The toll from that big earthquake in Colombia is now at least 181, with more than 2,500 people missing and a race against time to find survivors. It’s a steep test for the country’s new government. (AP)

⚽️ Rangers striker Youssef Chermiti will be out for months - probably the season - after suffering a serious knee injury at the weekend. (Daily Record)

⚽️ Here’s a Scottish transfer to quicken the pulse - and it doesn’t involve any of our clubs. Former Rangers forward Robbie Ure has moved from Sweden to Seville of Spain in a £7.6 million deal. (Times)

🕶️ The practicalities

🗣️ At 6.08 pm today the moon will take its first bite out of the sun. By 7.05 pm, around 91% of the sun’s light will be gone from Edinburgh and Glasgow’s skies: the deepest partial eclipse Britain has seen since 1999.

Few of us will see anything quite like it again. The next eclipse of this scale won’t be seen until 3 September 2081, and we haven’t got a total eclipse due until 2133.

This time around, the totality passes to our west - over Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain. That also means the more south-westerly you are in the UK, the greater the eclipse. According to the Royal Observatory Greenwich, Cornwall will see a 95% eclipse, while London will see 90% obscured. They’ll be live streaming the event tonight, although you may just choose to go outside.

If you do, of course, don’t, whatever you do, stare at the sun, or reading tomorrow’s Early Line is going to be a struggle. Solar eclipse glasses are now difficult to get hold of, but if you’ve already got a pair, make sure they have safety certification ‘ISO 12312-2' or ‘ISO 12312-2:2015’ printed somewhere on them, per the observatory’s guidance. They also warn old specs might not offer protection any more. There’s also help on making your own pinhole projector with, yes, a colander.

👹 The legends

🗣️ It’ll be a dramatic, humbling moment: these are events which have captured human imaginations - and sparked all sorts of fears, and rituals - for millennia.

In Norse mythology, the anonymous poems of The Prose Edda - part of which is quoted above - don’t make explicit reference to eclipses, but the wolf Sköll pursues the sun-goddess Sól while his brother Hati chases the moon, and at Ragnarök they catch them. Watching from below, tradition would demand people bang drums or pots and pans during an eclipse to scare away the wolves.

Elsewhere, the connections and sourcing are clearer (The Exploratorium has a guide to eclipse stories and legend from around the world). In Hindu tradition, the demon Rahu is beheaded by Vishnu after drinking the elixir of immortality; his severed head still swallows the sun, which escapes because he has no throat.

Sky At Night notes the Pomo of California called it “sun got bit by a bear”.

And in North America, the Choctaw people used to say eclipses were caused by a little black squirrel that was trying to devour the sun. According to historian HB Cushman, “Women shouted and shrieked, children banged pots, men fired off rifles until the squirrel was frightened away. This myth rests upon a creature that is small but ravenous.”

And, of course, the rituals always worked. The sun always came back. Every generation received confirmation that their collective action had averted catastrophe. Wags may suggest that, in the modern day, we see the same ritualistic entrenchment of false beliefs all the time in government offices and corporate boardrooms.

More seriously, it’s worth noting just how similar the legend was between these scattered, unconnected cultures: the sun being eaten by ravenous monsters. Different civilisations arrived at the same answers for what was going on, entirely independently.

As for Scotland? Our responses appeared to be a little less dramatic. We didn’t invent heavenly beasts; we named the dates and got rather gloomy about the implications.

The 1433 total eclipse in North East Scotland is remembered as the Black Hour (it was said to have lasted four minutes, right enough), 1598 as Black Saturday, and 1652 - 2 minutes 47 seconds of totality over Edinburgh - as “Mirk Monday”.

As Sean Batty notes, Mirk Monday (and another total eclipse just two years later in northern Scotland) did not lift spirits. In fact, people were left terrified: they were maybe a little highly strung already. “King Charles I had been executed just three years earlier, and Oliver Cromwell had invaded Scotland with his army two years after that,” he notes.

During the eclipse itself, “Birds were said to have ‘plummeted’ from the sky to roost, while people working in the fields reportedly ran for shelter. To some, the darkness was so ominous that it seemed the Day of Judgement – or the apocalypse itself had arrived.

“Predictions circulated that it would bring about pestilence, disease, invasions, the fall of countries and earthquakes.”

These days, of course, we don’t need eclipses to predict pestilence, disease and invasions. We just read the news. 😉

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