I’ve left home.

Only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays between the hours of 10am and 3pm but it still feels very significant!

Until now I’ve been working on the driveway in my beloved Jessievan – my tiny 1969 quilted Holivan – and taking up every nook and cranny in the house with boxes, frames, buttons and other essential art paraphernalia (like emergency rum, biscuits, and film of varying degrees of cheesiness that I have on when I’m working). As every homeworker will understand, working in your house comes with mixed blessings. On the plus side you can work in your fleecy soft spotty onesie and have Netflix on in the background. On the minus side it means that work is ever present at all hours of the day, seven days a week. After nearly two years my ‘switch off’ button was definitely broken.

And then a chink of light appeared in the guise of a very talented local business woman, Shelley Norton. She has a theatre training and acting agency and is setting up ‘The Talent Shack’ in Cardiff. It’s an amazing space based in a huge industrial unit. Most of the space is taken up with fantastic rehearsal space that Shelley runs theatre training classes from. (And is available to hire, folks!) But there’s a corner of the space that now houses Jessievan (permanently) and me (three school-hour days a week). I absolutely love it.

Home is home again. Living in this particular house of monkeys is never going to peaceful but it’s sooo nice to not feel like I HAVE to work at 10pm just because a message has come through.

As the space develops I’ll post additional pictures. In the meantime here’s a snapshot of Jessie in her new indoor gaff. She was never fond of the rain so is now a very happy van.