Black poodle

I have just finished painting this black poodle. Very tricky to paint. If you paint it too black, then you do not see any details and if you paint too many highlights then it would have looked grey instead of black. So it is a fine balance between the two. It is a commission work, so I hope the lady is going to be pleased with her dog's portrait.

Sunday

I'm not a writer nor pretend to be one, sometimes it is simply nice to record something you have lived like let's say...yesterday. Peter and I really didn't wish to travel too many miles we just wanted to go for a Sunday lunch somewhere near, that wouldn't involve a long journey. Where could we go? was the question. I had seen, as we often travel through a picturesque road, a really sweet looking white pub with a chimney stack, puffing blue smoke, so I ventured to suggest maybe going there for lunch, not knowing whether this was a risk worth taking or not, but we stopped there anyway. Once inside, the pub was really charming with wooden beams on the ceilings, velvet red covers on the dark mahoganny carved seats; very inviting we thought and we were right. The name of the pub was the Aleppo Merchant. Intrigued, I enquired about the name of the pub to the bar-man since Aleppo, is not by any stretch of the imagination in the U.K. so why this seemingly exotic name ? He told us that a very wealthy Welshman beyond the dreams of avarice from Llangollen had stopped there over night and he had made his wealth in Aleppo... the second oldest city in the world, located in Syria. He told us this merchant had made his fortune in the silk route selling sheep wool, and that Aleppo was not far away from the Mediterranean sea. It was really, very relaxing to hear this interesting tale as we had our drinks over lunch.

Heir Hunters Fourth Series

We have had the news that the BBC beat all the T.V. ratings for this time of day and so they have commissioned the Fifth series of Heir Hunters. Filming will start in the late Spring. The fourth series ends Friday 12th February with Hector's story. Last Saturday when I went to a new hair-salon, the hair dresser asked me if that was Mr. Birchwood from ' The Heir Hunter ' show. I said: "Yes"
Then the stylist said that Hector was his favourite from that show. I replied: " I'm Hector's mother at which point he said: " You are kidding me, right ? " I said: " Nope, I'm really Hector's mother" I have seen the last story which will be shown Friday week and he comes out better than the other episodes. At this rate... I can probably have a raise on my salary to sort out all the mountains of fan mail that will come here. Heh,heh.