Goodbye to my studio assistant
Duchess just appeared outside my window one day and has spent the past 2 years hanging out with me in the studio. It turns out she belongs to a small girl called Chloe who has since moved house and left Duchess behind with Grandma, along with 2 bumptious new additions “Mick” and “Keith”, who don’t really want her around. She very much enriched my life and I think we both enjoyed the peace and quiet of studio life. Despite the urging of certain friends and family, I didn’t think it fair to steal somebody else’s cat. Even though I miss her very much.
Goodbye to Loughborough
My garden studio has been big enough for me to work in, but nothing like big enough for teaching groups so I’ve spent the last 2 years trying to find affordable premises to teach from. Charnwood Arts have been more than generous and very flexible with their Next Level Cafe, but this is a multi use space and I’ve been trying to find somewhere that I could set up in the same way as the old Pottery Cottage on Loughborough University campus. A chance meeting with our old friend Charlie Allen led us down to Margate in Kent and we very quickly fell in love with the town, put our house on the market and prepared to change our lives. It took all summer for the house sale to come through and after our last summer of love in our home in the Shires we packed 2 enormous lorries full of our posessions and headed southeast. We both moved to Loughborough as students a long time ago in the last century and have been so happy “growing up” there, it was very hard saying goodbye to friends but finally moving on felt like the right thing to do.