(By Bik)

As you may know by now, my Dad has an uninvited guest growing on his pancreas which was spotted fairly early, fortunately.  You may have read about it when we put out our call for Patrons at the start of the summer.

He is undergoing a pounding by some petty potent chemotherapy that isn’t commonly used for this in the UK, especially for an 83 year old. The result of his half-way scan is that it appears to be under arrest (well it’s the same size and when he started, which is a good thing!) I thought the photo, attached, would be appropriate .. we found his old policeman’s helmet in a cupboard!

It’s pretty tough going for someone so active as he, as the drug is known to cause increasing fatigue. So Dad’s had to give up one of his three beloved organic allotment plots that he’s tended for 40 years and maybe another soon. Hopefully he’ll hang on to the one with the apple tree and fruit bushes.

I’d never thought about donated blood being used to help people on chemo until he was offered two units recently to help him get some energy back. This transfusion will hopefully help get him through the summer and his second round of treatments at QA. I’m so eternally grateful to the stranger/s who went out of there way one day to give blood to someone they didn’t know. A pure and selfless act. (You can join the blood donor register here:http://www.blood.co.uk/)

During all of this, The Art House has also been receiving a transfusion, this time of money, in the form of monthly donations of between £5 and £50 from around 130 of you.. some people we know very well and some, relative strangers, people who have told us they would like to visit more often if they could, but can’t, but like that we’re here anyway and want us to stay that way and to continue being a business that makes choices with our hearts first, and the balance sheet second.

Click here if you are interested in become a Patron

This summer we would normally be running a funded project to help people less fortunate access the arts, and the funding would close our annual £7k ‘hole’ that we always seem to have after the summer downturn. But my Dad has taken priority this year which is why we have turned to our friends and asked for help; and you have responded amazingly.. but we still need more. The donations so far have helped us out of some scrapes already, but there are some pretty hefty bills looming, so if you think you can find a spare £1.25 a week to help us out, you have no idea how much of a relief that would be right now.

You can find out a little more about why we need funding, and a link to get you set up, here:

If you are interested in more background to the reasons why our costs are considerably higher than most businesses of a similar nature, we have written about this here

Don’t worry if you can’t afford to commit to making donations right now. There are lots of other ways you can help (maybe you could write a TripAdvisorreview, consider volunteering, share our events on your timeline or just come and visit sometime.)