Called by name

I didn't know how I was going to get myself under way, as it were, today - a facet of this ageing malarkey seems to be that everything takes longer to recover from, including meerkat car journeys! However, church beckoned, and rather wonderfully as it turned out. The sermon focussed on the idea of addressing the individual as opposed to a group, and turned from that to the hymn which we were about to sing, with the refrain "I have called you by your name; you are mine." This seemed to fire everyone behind me (I sit in the front pew) with a new enthusiasm - you can hear it not only in the singing but in the purposeful unanimity of the responses when that happens - and at the end of the service there was so much real conversation going on that we were all there for about an hour after the service ended. It's great when a community like that really gels. 

After a somnolent lunch/post lunch read of the papers, we made ourselves go out - sore backs don't do well slouched in a chair. We left our car in my pal's garden and walked along the shore road through Blairmore as the sun came back out, the earlier chill seemed to dissipate, and everything looked rather lovely. We even sat on a bench in the village listening to the birdsong - there was a tree full of birds, and we were surrounded by scooshing swallows. (I think. They could have been swifts. They were so speedy it was hard to tell.) A couple of goosanders swam just offshore, and it was all rather lovely. (Extra photo of the shore road, along Loch Long)

The photo above is of the most perfect onion you could imagine. My friends brought it - and some runner beans, and a bottle of wine - when they came for drinks that hot evening that somehow seems more than a week or so ago. Tonight, because I've been away, was the first chance I'd had to cook with it. I added it, coarsely sliced, to thickly-cut potatoes with olive oil and rosemary, salt and pepper, and bunged it all into a hot oven for 40 minutes, whence they emerged golden and melting and delicious to eat with confit duck legs and organic broccoli. I would never have thought that a single, garden-grown onion could make such a difference - I wonder if I could creep in and nick another? (It's ok, Jim - only joking...)

Footnote: this seems to be my 3650th entry. How bizarre.