Kindness of Strangers

It's been a long few weeks. Getting everything together for Still Life was really freakin busy. Good fun, without doubt. But a LOT of work. A lot of long hours, late-nights, working all weekends... But in the whole process I also had my faith in humanity restored.

Sometimes people really are just excellent. I came up with the hair-brained idea and then suddenly people were offering all these amazing things to make it happen. All the artists donated their work. All the galleries waived their fees and donated their commissions. We had two amazing framers offer to frame the precious pieces - for love and glory. Because they love the station and what it stands for, and even though they don't have a lot of money, they were donating the physical goods which cost them money, not to mention their time. And even though we didn't have a lot of lead-time, the word seems to be spread. People turned up, had fun, spent money!

And somehow at the end of it we still had beer left-over. Unheard of! The bar staff were sure we'd run out within the first hour. I mean, it was a Friday night, a show full of artists and the beer was both Coopers and FREE. Crazy.

And so the wash-up was that it was a huge success. The whole process towards the end felt a little bit like 200 cigarettes - I was fretting that no-one would come but instead it turned out to be the party of the week.