Friends are so important

Sandra and I met at university and were in the same flat for a year in the early 70s. We have always kept in touch. She is a good friend to Mum too. (Mum made her wedding dress.)

Today she came on the train from Durham and we had most of the day together.

We chatted a lot, as you might imagine.

Pauline, my cousin Eric's wife, was released from hospital yesterday evening, three weeks after sustaining a nasty fracture to a femur. The ambulance to take her home did not arrive and there was no certainty that there would be one today.

The nurses offered to help her into Eric's car. That went well, but at the home end she had to get out of the car and into the house (2 steps up) and out of the porch (another step). That sounded very dodgy indeed.

She rang in the late afternoon. I was about to put a small chicken in the oven to roast. She was so excited to be home and she talked non stop. In the end, the chicken was cooked in the pressure cooker (delicious it was too)!

Tonight I was at a Zoom meeting of the Hexham Photography Group. The speaker was Lucy Ridges. She describes herself as a portrait photographer but the personal work she does is as an analogue, fine art photographer. She loves double exposures done with film, where you have not way of knowing the outcome until the film has been developed. She even collaborates with another photographer. One exposes the film for the first time and sends it to the other, who makes the second image on top of the first.

I don't see myself going that way with my photography ever any time soon, but is is fascinating to see how other people work and what inspires them.