A Postcard A Day - Friday 20 February 2026 - Friday Smiles

 Hello lovely peeps, Today is Friday, when I look back on the past week and remember the smiles and the good things.

Top of my list (for this blog at least) is the arrival of a postcard in my letterbox. Today I will show you a postcard from Japan:

It is sent to me by Kanae from Tokyo. I googled whether this name was female or male and it's mostly female, (but a famous Vtuber (male) is also called Kanae). Anyway, he/she explains that the drawing is a ukijo-e by Yoshitoshi Tsukioka. It depicts a well known geisha of the time and the famous landscape of Tokyo. 

The artist is called 'the last of the ukijoe artists'.

Wikipedia writes:

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi ( 30 April 1839 – 9 June 1892) was a Japanese printmaker.

Yoshitoshi has widely been recognized as the last great master of the ukiyo-e genre of woodblock printing and painting. He is also regarded as one of the form's greatest innovators. His career spanned two eras – the last years of Edo period Japan, and the first years of modern Japan following the Meiji Restoration. 

Like many Japanese, Yoshitoshi was interested in new things from the rest of the world, but over time he became increasingly concerned with the loss of many aspects of traditional Japanese culture, among them traditional woodblock printing. In a Japan that was turning away from its own past, he almost singlehandedly managed to push the traditional Japanese woodblock print to a new level, before it effectively died with him.

His life was summed up by John Stevenson:

Yoshitoshi's courage, vision and force of character gave ukiyo-e another generation of life, and illuminated it with one last burst of glory.

— John Stevenson, Yoshitoshi's One Hundred Aspects of the Moon,

The stamp is not spectacular, but pretty:

Sorry I didn't quite get it in focus.

What has been happening here in our village in southern Spain? Well, we had Intercambio (our English/Spanish conversation group) on Saturday. 

We always have fun, and afterwards we often go for a drink. This time we went to a different bar as most were fully booked because it was St Valentines Day. It hasn't filtered through here to a great extent (no cards etc) but couples do tend to go out that night.

I managed to also finish my jigsaw puzzle in the week:

From Monday onwards the weather was a lot better. No more gales and rain and cold.

I feel a lot better now that the sun has come out. I get quite depressed when there are long periods of greyness.

I still go to Pilates twice a week. Here is our studio, photographed before all the ladies arrive. Usually we are 5 ladies and one man.

Ronnie is doing great. The bad weather doesn't affect him. He still wants to go out onto the patio and have a sniff around, but when it rains, he sits under one of the chairs. 

Below is Ronnie sitting on the back of the settee. In the background you can see a bag of pellets ready to be put into the stove. Next to it is a special vacuum cleaner for ashes, which I use before I turn on the pellet burner.

Of course I will put some funnies at the end for you to have a smile about.

Have a lovely weekend,

Lisca