The Leaping Light for Your Delight

The first verse of Auden's (brought up in B'ham) poem was inscribed on a bench above The Needles:

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

My kitchen team had the middle of the day off today, and we went to the opposite end of the Island to see The Needles (so called because of the shape of one of the chalk stacks, which collapsed in a storm in 1764 - you can see the gap where it used to be). The weather was perfect, the sea was stupendous, the sea flowers stunning - a break that kept us going the rest of the week.