Happy Christmas Eve everyone!!!

How are you? I hope you are pumped for Christmas tomorrow. Whatever you have planned I hope it's going to be cosy and delightful.

One of the things that I loved about Christmas when I was wee was the stocking presents. You had no idea what fun treat you were going to open, and sometimes the gift was something that you don't even know exists. Do you remember those trees that were made of paper, and you put them in water and they grew "blossoms" of crystals? Stuff like that. I remember really liking those.

All of this is a really long way of saying, this is a Fem Fri of stocking presents, things that I have taken photos of that didn't fit in any kind of bigger theme over the year but that I thought, that's a Fem Fri sort of thing.

Let's start with a puzzle, that's a good thing to get in a stocking. It's a picture of a happy beach lady that obviously immediately reminded me of Fem Fri when I saw it in a magazine:

What I didn't do, though, was to take a photo of the artist's name, so I don't know it. My cyrillic is not very good and let me tell you right now that performing an internet search for "russian artist woman naked line drawing" does not get you results that help in identifying an artist. So do let me know if you know who the artist is. I'm sure she was Russian, but that's famously a fairly big country.

Now how about Amy Johnson! I took a photo of this on a day trip to Herne Bay.

Amy left Croydon Airport on 5 May, 1930 in a second-hand Gipsy Moth called Jason.  Unlike today’s pilots, Amy had no radio link with the ground and no reliable information about the weather. Her maps were basic and, on some stretches of the route, she would be flying over uncharted land. […] Daringly, Amy had plotted the most direct route – simply by placing a ruler on the map. This took her over some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain and meant she had to fly the open-cockpit for at least eight hours at a time.

http://amyjohnsonartstrust.co.uk/her-life/

This is a house in Barnes where Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet, lived. She lived to be 102! It doesn't say that on the plaque:

Her great strength lay in her integrity, her complete lack of interest in getting rich - she never did - or in acquiring glory for herself. In her final years, past achievements mattered less and less to her; she looked urgently, impatiently, to the future, concerned only with what "her" ballet was going to become.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/mar/09/guardianobituaries1

Here's a harpy:

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!! 🎄🎁🥳

Alex xxx.