Well there’s another thing ticked off my bucket list. A meal of Muttonbird – fresh from the southern sea and sprinkled with salt and seasoned with garlic. And the taste? Sort of sea-watery. Oily. Crispy. Not bad. Probably the same thing, though in reverse, experienced by a seagull eating its first hot chip. Birders call these creatures short-tailed shearwaters, and wax eloquent about their flying capacities during migration. And the old naval boys from England used to call them flying sheep.

What I’m glad for, most of all, is that the bird didn’t taste like that ubiquitous and universal chicken. (Why is it, that many things taste like chicken? Is it our brains looking for something familiar? Or is it the intrusion of KFC into the foodchain!) Thankfully the muttonbird genuinely didn’t taste anything like chicken, but tasted like something from the sea. Something of the flavour of what it had been gliding over, and breathing in, and feeding from.

I hope that I taste like something that I invest my life in. Not like chicken, but something of Christ. Spurgeon once complimented John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress) with this choice comment: “Prick him anywhere – his blood is Bibline, the very essence of the Bible flows from him.” In that same vein, I hope that I taste more muttonbird than chicken. Full of the seawater of grace, and seasoned with the flavours of heaven, and something like what I’ve spent my life breathing in and feeding from.