Camilla

I went to see Camilla at lunchtime, as she had offered me lunch to accompany our chat about the project she is co-ordinating. As the chair of the Stroud Preservation Trust she oversaw the exhibition we had last year of our 30th Anniversary, and in doing so she realised that Stroud needed to acknowledge the enormous importance of all the various local activists who have also 'changed Stroud' in that time. The Preservation Trust was central to the start of a revitalised town where community action achieved so much, and it has continued to this day and onwards I expect.

She raised funds to produce a book to tell the story of that local action by so many people and the groups they built. The stories have been recorded in interviews and now are being gathered and are ready for the final assembly into a book. I was one of those interviewed for my tiny contribution at a very late stage of this story. Now Camilla wants me to take portraits of all those interviewed so the book can also include small pictures of them, as well as the researchers, graphic designer and editors.

So I have a lot of work to do to contact all of the subjects to arrange for me to meet them. I hope that some of them will allow me to use their images as blips in due course over the next few weeks, since we have a rather close deadline. As I was about to leave I asked Camila if I could take a photo of her wonderful hand made iron garden fence, which they commissioned some years ago and which I have always admired. So putting on a pair of her garden clogs to go into the back garden, I took a few pictures of the red painted fence and when I turned round to find Camilla behind me I couldn't resist snapping a portrait of her to start the ball rolling. I hope I can improve on this with the next ones, but I liked the moment and the cheerfulness in her countenance. If the picture disappears it will be because Camilla doesn't like it, as she has gone away for a couple of days and she hasn't yet replied to my request to blip her. But since I have blipped her before, I feel confident she won't mind.