Canberra! City of unexpected thrills and delights!

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One morning last week, idly driving (with no particular place to go, and lonely as a cloud) around the shores of windswept Lake Burley Griffin, I pulled into a lakeside car park at the imaginatively signposted Yarralumla Beach.

To call Yarralumla's mean little artificially-installed strip of sand beside an artificial lake a "beach" stretches the notion of what a beach is but perhaps touchingly expresses landlocked Canberrans' wistful hankerings for the true seaside.

But I digress. Driving and parking on that morning I was in just the kind of melancholy mood (for we are living in melancholy, Trump-poisoning, Hanson-nagging times) that often enveloped sensitive, tormented Wordsworth on his long walks beside the windswept lakes of his Lake District.

But of course on the most famous of those long walks Wordsworth was lifted out of his miserabilism when "all at once" (his words) he saw "a host of golden daffodils". His masterpiece poem Daffodils, aka I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, describes the unexpected delight the spectacle of the breeze-jostled dancing daffodils gave him.

And lo, on this Canberra morning I was treated to an identical Wordsworthian lifting of my spirits, when, looking out through my car's windscreen at the wide panorama of the grey and gale-tossed lake, I saw daring men swathed in rubber costumes hurtling to and fro across the waters beneath the colourful kites of their kitefoiling boards.

I had never seen kitefoilers kitefoiling before (you can learn all about this relatively new sport online at The Comprehensive Guide to Kitefoiling) and was captivated by the whooshing, skimming, death-defying, sometimes-becoming-airborne spectacle of it.

The ferocious gale was making conditions ultra-ideal and exhilarating for........

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