Old haunts

I was resolved that today shouldn't begin at 11am - that's how I've felt recently, with one thing and another, despite my sitting up in bed drinking tea well before sunrise. It worked: I was at my desk at 10am, ready to tackle writing a sermon for this Sunday. It's a strange thing, this non-professional sermonising: I know the relevant bible passages from frequent hearing and my own reading, I had an idea of where they were leading me (it helps if you can discern the thread running though the three passages, even if you pick on only one to talk about) - but then I did some further reading and delving and suddenly I had way too much material and an untidy sermon with too many strands. I shall leave it thus on the desktop and return to it (but mustn't forget!) when I've let it settle down a bit.

Having once again eaten some birthday cake with my elevenses, I thought a quick canter to the Health Store would perhaps assist my body to use it up (no - I didn't think I could buy health per se, whatever the name of the shop). Himself needed the good chickpeas we get there, having none with which to make a dahl, and we're running out of linseeds and brazil nuts ... So I bashed along the road as I as used to when I was running late to meet the infant who is now almost 50 from school, across the road from the shop, and arrived back home well out of puff.

After a sort of lunch (I wasn't hungry, but settled for a single, scrambled egg with some parmesan grated over) I felt driven to go and put away the Epiphany figures that were still in their little house under the altar in church. First, however, we went for a walk round the Bishop's Glen, at whose mouth the church stands on its hill.The photo shows the former lower reservoir, still and quiet under the late afternoon sky with a man and his dog just visible to the right on the shore and a clutch of ducks closer to the camera. We've been walking there ever since we arrived in Dunoon - it's only 10 minutes up the road from our house to the entrance to the glen - and holds so many memories. One I was recalling was a time I went picking brambles with the infant Neil in his Maclaren buggy; the best and most succulent were on the side of the dam holding back the upper reservoir, now long gone and returned to its natural state, and I thought of how Neil might sit there stranded and undiscovered for hours if I were to fall in to the water and drown ...

Cheery stuff. Much better cheer back home, the Magi and their one surviving camel back in their bubble-wrap-filled box, when we found our second son's birthday present in the porch - a splendid, organic Malt with magically fragrant floral notes. (Can you tell we sampled it?) We had another splendid dinner, made it to Online Compline, and subsided in the usual heap till bedtime, roused only by a lovely birthday phone call from Himself's Best Man, who always remembers such things.

I have to shop in the morning ...