Winter jasmine

This morning, we did  our main Christmas food shopping. This afternoon,we visited old friends, H and R, who live locally and exchanged presents.  Over  tea and mince pies we reminisced about places we had visited on holiday many years ago.  H went to Kiev in 1984, and, coincidentally, R and I were in a group which visited Soviet Central  Asia, about the same time. A year later, Martin and I visited the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. We've all been to Cuba in the late 1990s, and they went to Albania in 1988. How all these places must have changed since we visited them! We agreed we all felt very fortunate to have been afforded such amazing opportunities.

This is our winter jasmine ( Jasminum nudiflorum) which is just coming  into flower.