Windy Land's End

This photo amused me when it was taken, and continues to amuse me now. When I was at Land's End, I put my camera down on a wall and set it to take a picture of me on self-timer. Land's End is very exposed, and the wind was so strong I had to hold my hat on—it had already blown off on the walk there from Sennen Cove. As I waited, the camera blew off the wall altogether. Fortunately there was a little strip of grass around the base of the wall and the camera was unharmed. I came running up and just as I bent down to pick it up, the timer reached completion and took this photo:

Battle of the River Plate

Browsing through the DVDs in a charity shop, I came across a copy of The Battleship Potemkin. Aha, thought I; classic Eisenstein film I've never seen, let's get a copy.

The old lady at the till, only seeing the first two words of the title, says, "I was there at the Battle of the River Plate—you know about it?" "The only naval battle in South America during World War II, right?" I say, thus exhausting my knowledge of the subject. "The Graf Spee it was they fought," she said. I was about to ask her what her role in the battle was when she told me she saw it as a five-year-old from her father's roof. Probably just as well she got in before me, then!

(She then told me the film of it was on television recently; I must add this to my to-watch list now. I've already gone away and read up about it on Wikipedia.)