Madam, One of the most romantic encounters of my career came when I first noticed a sea nymph cum lizard as he crawled out of a river in South America, and I have been thinking of him lately as I wondered whether to attend any of a multitude of inviting churches to try to educate their 'creationists'.
This chap had two short front legs, no hind legs. and a fishy-looking lizard's tail! He had lungs as well as permanent external gills; and his eyes were bulbous like a frog's and laughing at me from the top of his head. I have never seen one of his brethren looking back downhill into the river, though they shared their patch with alligators.
In the United States they would have called him a 'mud eel' though, in fact, we were fairly close to the Lost of World of Arthur Conan Doyle where pterodactyls used to fly. His real name was Siren Lacertma after the ladies who used to entice sailors onto the rocks.
I have often thought we should have a public holiday to celebrate the first of his enterprising kind —the first of us with the gall to crawl up the beach perhaps 400 million years ago.
K Horne, Gorsley