Babet and stifatho

Today seemed to be dominated by the two items in my heading. A storm and a slow-cooked stew. I've been enlightened already by blipper Marchmont about the origin of the storm's name; I've just looked for myself and found this: Storm Babet, is actually named in honour of a woman who visited the Dutch KMNI's head office and entered her name into the lot. She stated that her reason for doing so was because she was born during a storm. Whatever its name, this storm has claimed three Scottish lives already, though as you can see from my high tide view of the East Bay we really got off pretty lightly this time: there were some trees down, blocking roads out of town, but it barely rained all day and the sea, though tumultuous, wasn't as high as I've seen it in the past. 

That view was taken from the pavement in front of Dunoon Leisure Centre, aka The Baths - Di and I have decided that as we've both developed sore hips we're going to have to vary our exercise routine; she's been swimming for a couple of weeks and today I joined her in the afternoon. I used to go three mornings a week and do 32 lengths before breakfast, but it's been several years since I stopped because I hated wearing a bathing cap (the red hair didn't like the chlorine) so today I contented myself with twelve lengths of crawl. 

And the stifatho? We had friends round for dinner this evening - I said I'd cook something comforting for them after they'd had a day of painting their new house, so I made the Greek slow cooked beef stew with hundreds of tiny onions (a nightmare to peel!) and lots of red wine; I followed it with baked figs in honey and lemon, with yogurt poured on top. We talked and talked and laughed a lot and they tripped off down our new path without needing the hand rail because they're younger than us ...

And the result of all this, and the subsequent tidying, and the feeling that I could walk a couple of miles now after all that beef - the result is that it's now just after 2am and I'm drooping just a bit over the keyboard. The wind is still swirling outside, and the river looks very dark...