Friends are so important No 2.

Sorry, everyone. I decided to change the image to this one which I prefer.

This afternoon, my dear friend Annie has been to visit, very briefly. She wanted me to help her import all the pictures from her Nikon D100 into her iBook computer. But she also wanted to put a photo onto her Facebook profile too. So I grabbed a few shots of her outside our cabin in the garden and she chose this one (now changed, after much dilly-dallying), which is now on Facebook.

I met Annie when I first came to visit Stroud in 1975 and we have been friends ever since. She lives near Newport in Cardiganshire, (the birthplace of that Bara Brith, I featured recently) and is in Stroud to see her son, grandson and great-grandson! She is a wondrous artist, specialising in pastel paintings of horses. She takes photos of horses and then from prints she makes her own pastel paintings. A couple of years ago, she won three awards for her paintings at the Society of Equestrian Artists. I wish I could show you her work as it is so brilliantly colourful and evocative. She brought us a present of a bamboo cutting from her garden, and three blue hyacinths she had planted and which are all ready for their winter display around Christmas.

The rest of the day was quite busy too. Wheew! The weekend is nigh!