"An ambassador is an honest man who is sent to lie abroad for his country." The famous pun was that of Henry Wotton who was in later life a friend of Izaak Walton who, in addition to being a great fisherman, was also a writer of biography and wrote Wotton's Life. Walton links Tottenham and Great Amwell, where he is buried in the churchyard since he fished the Lea in both parishes, but my excuse for writing about ambassadors is the communique I received today from James Dauris (Th 78) who has just presented his Credentials to the President of Peru and is our Ambassador in Lima. There are some splendid pictures on the Embassy website of the occasion. Of Lima he writes:
Lima stands beside the Pacific Ocean and from my office up on the 23rd floor of one of the tallest buildings along the coast I can look down to the breakers rolling onto the beach at the foot of the cliffs below. There are almost always surfers out enjoying the waves. From high up they look like seals in their black wetsuits– although we’re comfortably inside the Tropics here, the water is too cold to stay in for long without protection. The updrafts off the cliffs draw paragliders every afternoon. For the first few days it was slightly disconcerting to have people flying past my office window, some of them almost close enough to reach out to, but I’m now more used to seeing locals and tourists floating by.
Flying people: he tells not a word of a lie!
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