Hobbies Festival

I meant to post this reminder a couple of days ago, but this has been one of those weeks - very busy, and with some unexpected horrible news.

Anyway, the reminder first...this weekend is the annual Royal Victoria Country Park Hobbies Festival. It’s a great day (or two!) out with lots of hobbies and crafts being demonstrated and opportunity for you to have a go at many of them too. I will be demonstrating jewellery making and will also be exhibiting my jewellery, so come along if you fancy seeing my work, including many of the jewellery workshop projects, in real life. More details can be found here on their website and the Festival starts at 11am each day. I was there setting up this afternoon and it was looking busy already with childrens activities including crazy golf and small fair ground-type rides being set up and other demonstrators getting organised. If you're in the area and haven't been to the Park before it's well worth a visit - B loves the miniature railway there - well, he loves all trains!

As usual at the craft shows that I do, if you spend £30 or more on jewellery on my stall and mention my blog I’ll give you 10% off. Remember, too, that by putting the code ‘daisy’ into the relevant box at checkout on my website that you get 10% off your first jewellery order of £30 or more. Well, I have to be fair to those who live to far away to come to a show, don’t I? Please feel free to pass the offers onto friends and family.

Okay, non-jewellery news now...

The unexpected horrible news happened yesterday. One of our neighbours died very suddenly. Wednesday afternoon he was getting the caravan ready to go on holiday with his wife first thing on Thursday morning. He and I did the usual British thing of joking about the British summer weather, and he said it looked like he would be taking the bad weather away with them according to the weather reports. Thursday morning he collapsed and died of an aneurysm. I saw his son and daughter trying to put the caravan away after I came back from taking B to his childminder (Thursday is my work day) so went out to give them a hand and asked if everything was okay, and they told me what had happened. We must have missed the ambulance coming up the road when we were getting B up, but no one else in the road knew that he had died, not even those who had come out to offer help when they saw the ambulance. I offered to let people know as we're a fairly close-knit street (as streets go these days!). We've only got 30 houses in a cul-de-sac, so most people know each other, pop round for coffee, stand in the street chatting, take in parcels for each other, that kind of thing. We're lucky in that. There were two general reactions from everyone - complete disbelief as he was one of those people who was never ever ill, who you assumed would live until he was 90 (he was mid 60s at most), and most people said "but I only spoke to him/waved hello yesterday afternoon". I found that second bit really heartening. His family are keeping busy, and I suppose all that we as neighbours can do is keep an eye on his wife (his children are grown up but live in the area), and try and make sure that she knows that we're there for her while trying not to intrude at the same time. Life is really sh*t sometimes. Sorry, I'm not being my usual cheerfully blogging self at the moment, but hey, it's my blog and I made the decision from the start to not make this just about my business. If you read to the end - thanks for putting up with it!