The Terracotta Puffer makes my year.

This is my 365th successive blip. Having been a member of Blipfoto since November 2009, but only posting occasionally, I decided on the 31st December of last year that I would try and make it through 2011 by taking a new picture each day. Hence the 365 to today. But only tomorrow will I have done the full calendar year (fingers crossed) .

I took a picture in the rain from the hill on the way back from Colintraive intending it as my special blip but it was superceded by a tweet I read at lunchtime. Tomorrow is the artist , scul?tor (the term is real - check the link) and sage George Wylie's 90th Birthday and I knew immediately I had to feature his "Terracotta Puffer" which sits in our conservatory.

I have met George many times, but at the Cowal Fest in 2005 he opened the innovative "Window Shoppers Gallery" organised by Don McNeil and Jean Bell of the Hidden Gallery at Newton near Strachur. Typically for George he didn't just cut a ribbon or make a speech he buried in a couple of municipal flowerbeds outside the Argyll Hotel some "Terracotta Puffers" as he called them,. Then having dug them up to everyone's astonishment he spoke entertainingly and eloquently about how this would be the way in which an ancient civilisation on the Clyde would mark its dead, much in the manner of the Chinese Terracotta Warriors.

It was great entertainment, laced with (as ever) real creativity and genuine questions of form, shape, substance and tradition.

Afterwards I asked to buy one of the Puffers, but it took a fairly long negotiation via friends before I got my hands on it. I still love it.

Happy Birthday , George. And thanks to everyone who looks at these pictures from time to time.