Today has been a delight. David and I have been thinking for a long time that you can’t get more ‘west’ in Surrey than the Hampshire border, you can’t get more ‘north’ in Hampshire than the Berkshire border and you can’t get more ‘south’ in Berkshire than the Surrey border.

These three counties join one another about a mile from our home.

Ray Pettit has a gallery that he calls ‘Around West Surrey’ so it seemed a logical step for us that he might think a pic taken at the border would be a good wheeze.

I contacted him and asked if he’d be up for a ‘three counties’ pic and he thought it a grand plan. After one or two false starts, today was chosen as ‘the day’.

It was not the best of days for conditions, still very cold here in Blighty and generally dull but the reverse was true of our meeting. Ray is every bit as lovely ‘in the flesh’ as he is in the ether and right from the first moment we met the conversations flowed. There were no awkward moments at all. So a cold, dull day in terms of weather was made warm and lively by our meeting.

So, here is the man, pointing at the sign for Surrey, while standing just over the border in Berkshire! However, I didn’t realise he is actually from Hackney and at least notionally is a Spurs fan. Now how about that!

It’s funny, we agreed that PBASE had given us a head start with our friendship – we knew enough about each other in advance to be able to side-step those early difficulties and just get on with a good old chat.

We took our photos, much to the bemusement of the traffic on the Meadows roundabout and then headed back to our house so Ray could meet Rosie and Archie over lunch. The dogs quickly sussed out that they had a new person to ask to play and ask they did, very forcibly so we all ended up in the woods watching the two of them charging around like mad things while we….chatted some more!

The day flew by so quickly it was 7pm before we knew it and Ray was late for his evening out – it still didn’t stop a further ten minutes chin-wagging before he finally got on his way to see his friend. What a good day and what a cool dude Ray is.