I thought it would be fun to give an insight into the out-of-hours doings here 🙂

Today is a Monday and The Art House is closed, but of course we don’t always get a day off if there are bits to do! Today Zigz came in about nineish to let the builder, Chris, in to start tiling the new loo.

In the meantime Bik & I were in Eastleigh doing a percussion session with the DICE (Drop-in Centre Eastleigh) group. This is part of The Art House outreach as well as one of the ways we full-timers earn the money we need to pay rent (all of the hours we put in here at The Art House itself are, at present, unpaid). What a fun was to earn a living though! I spent two hours with a permanent silly grin on my face as we played percussion, recorders, didge and glochenspiel, sang a Beatles medley, banged out half the soundtrack of ‘My Fair Lady’ and mucked about pretending to be a thunderstorm!

In the meantime, Zigz had started experimenting with hot cross buns – her own particular version, vegan of course, with smiley faces on them (dubbed Hot ‘Mellow’ Buns!).

They are yummy of a little more like rock cakes – I don’t mind, I like rock cakes!

This weekend was just awesome…… Sunday’s Burlesque performances were just so great and we had a visit from Mark ‘Rocky’ who runs The Lodge in Portsmouth – a very similar venue and one of my personal inspirations when setting up The Art House. It was good to show him the place and we hope to do some work with The Lodge on the Portsmouth/Southampton ‘City of Culture’ bid. Sod the Pompey/Sarfamton divide.

In between being very busy there is always time to chat to the many interesting people who come in here, we’re so lucky to attract an entirely better class of customer than most places 🙂
It’s very inspiring to chat to Rocky as he’s been running the Lodge now for 10 years and he still has most of his hair, as well as remaining inspired to bring culture to Portsmouth!

This afternoon poor Bik is downstairs having to cut up three hundred (his estimate) cardboard spacers for the floor tiles, Zigz is in experimenting and baking mode (yay) and I’m putting the finishing touches on the new Volunteer Induction booklet.

The glamour!