A Phoenix in the sky above the Country Park (Formerly known as The Tip). As the local representative of The Cloud Appreciation Society, I have to post such views though always with the rationalist rider that any perceived shape in the sky is just a coincidence of water vapour and wind.
Friends loaned us a DVD of The Riddle of the Sands yesterday, the title of which has always put me off in that I imagined it as some desert-based swashbuckler in the style of Rider Haggard. It turns out to be the mould from which all later early 20th century espionage novels sprung. The Thirty-Nine Steps is very similar and from ten years later. A very sparse film it is too, though I'm not sure how much of that comes from the book. I'd just about heard of Erskine Childers who wrote it but the usual Wiki scan shows him to be quite a character, his demise at the hands of the raggle-taggle administration of the early Free State after being part of the complexities involving Ireland at that time. His son eventually became the fourth Irish President and his Granddaughter Nessa is an MEP. Cracking plot though.
PS. Late and intersting information regarding the yachts from the book.
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