Sunday variety

An uncomfortable half hour drive from La Cala to Benalmadena for the first service of the day, as it always takes me several hours to get un-stiffened and pain free, but once I was on my feet leading worship I was fine. Then, back to Los Boliches for the second Eucharist. There was quite a wind blowing, and it moaned noisily during the service. I chatted with people over a drink for a good while afterwards, and before going back to La Cala for lunch, I skyped Clare.

I was very pleased with the second portion of what I'd cooked and eaten yesterday, as the flavour seemed to have improved overnight. It was a stew of chick peas and chorizo with onions, carrots and parsnips and the transforming magic of half a lemon and lots of garlic, spiced up with some pimenton, turmeric and ground coriander. It went well with some blanched Swiss Chard leaves, and an inexpensive bottle of Rioja.

I had supper with Peter and Linda, followed by a session looking at Peter's astronomy and avian photos. He has a telescope which he hooks up to his Canon DSLR. He explained how he takes twenty second videos of an object, then runs a program which gives him each frame separately as a TIFF file, then another program which processes these into a single image, thereby reducing the signal to noise ratio and producing a clearer image. I was particularly taken with his photos of Jupiter and features on the moon's surface.

Just as I was about to go to bed I had a call from Ashley who told me that on a radio servicing visit to one of our more prominant and troublesome client establishments he had been verbally aggressed and bullied by the proprietor in front of several of his own staff members, who were left bewildered by his menacing outburst. His own hired hands are unlikley to testify against him and that makes this encounter entirely deniable. What to do? Well, next time a service visit is needed, Ashley can ask for a police escort, on the grounds that he fears this man's aggression. The only thing is, will the police deal with such a request seriously? Sad to say, their record is far from consistent.