Tuesday, January 26, 2021
On a very cold walk (just below freezing) round the usual haunts, I heard the eerie, wavering call ("tremolo" I think) of a distant great northern diver. Some shags were showing breeding tufts, and a male merganser was also looking quite dressy.
Back home, I was reading a list of people who have died in Scotland from Covid on the BBC News website - with a photo of each one and a paragraph or two about their lives and families - when I saw that one man had a daughter called Senga; an unusual name, but it isn't the first time I've heard it. When we moved here, we met one of our neighbours who was introduced to us as Senga - and I must have looked as though I'd seen a ghost. Because that wasn't the first time I'd heard the name, either.
Long ago, in our Buckinghamshire village, there was a girl called Senga. I always understood that when her parents were trying to decide what to call her, they looked at the name Agnes and then realised that if you reversed the letters, they made a prettier name. And as, over the years, I didn't encounter it again until we came here, I assumed it was unique.
The name seems to have been in favour for a while in Scotland - and the girl in our village had a Scottish mother, so that's probably the connection.
