Tom Cunliffe

One evening donkeys’ years ago my wife and I were approaching Brazil from the wilds of the Atlantic. GPS and electronics were still decades in the future and we were operating on celestial navigation. I took a five-star fix after sunset and, as usual, plotted it on a sheet of A4 which was cheaper than store-bought proformas. Rather than using the well-thumbed ocean chart, I transferred the lat-long to a virgin coastal version which reached a hundred miles or so offshore. It’s always a grand moment when the landfall chart triumphantly appears out of the drawer and I turned in knowing that we were nearly there, but still with a safe night’s run before we saw any land.

At the turn of watch, I was shaken awake with the news that the loom of a large city was lighting up the sky ahead. That