A Day in the life of..... Lunchtime Concert Day

9.30am Arrive (admittedly slightly late) to find the fire-alarms being tested, cafe beginning to fill up.. the gardeners using leaf blowers which are sending clouds of dust and leaves under the door and into the foyer. In amongst this, the piano tuner is attempting to coax the piano to performance fitness. Not ideal!

9.45 A couple of hours of mayhem, with phones, noise, classes, printing programs and flyers, checking numbers for tickets and lunches.... and all the time attempting to catch up with emails and suchlike before the first of the public arrive for the lunchtime concert food!

11.30am - Piano tuner done! We start to usher early arrivals upstairs to admire the exhibition by Phoenix Textiles.

12 noon - Lunchtime Concert arrivals
As we are a small team and many of us have volunteered/worked here for many years.. we tend to get know many of our visitors personally and can cater for their own particular needs. For example one lovely elderly man who has come to lunchtime concerts for donkey's years, he called late this morning on the off-chance that we could fit him in for lunch and the concert, anxious to make me fully aware of his 96 years and his difficulty in moving about (we have a special chair for him and a parking space but that is already taken).

All has been going relatively smoothly, give or take a slight lack of change for the bar, until our elderly friend arrives and promptly reverses into the flower bed. Screams from our Front of House Team alerting the entire neighbourhood to the problem and scaring a couple of kids along the way. The solution, - park the car for him, while he is taken inside and presented with a lovely hot chicken pie! After parking his car and checking he is alright, peace has been restored.

12.30pm
Next up a conversation about our Community Garden Project we're trying to get off the ground, literally. We're in the planning stages and it's taken about 2 years to get as far as we have, which is pretty much nowhere. The problem is that neither EBC or Surrey CC are entirely sure who owns the land that we want to turn into a garden..... so stuck at the first hurdle really.

1pm - Donna arrives and spends the next half hour sorting out the keys in her keyboard which she had taken apart yesterday to clean it. We had a security scare last week on her computer and had to call the fraud department... I don't think this is what they meant when they said clean out the computer but never mind!

Flute music floats up the stairs and we have a lovely hour of peace!

2pm - Concert finishes, happy people flood out, I bring our elderly friend's car round so he can weave his way home and we settle into our usual work pattern.

3.30pm start setting up for the children's art class with the wonderful Imogen Andrews. These are our smallest children and they really love their Wednesdays!

4pm meeting about setting up an accessible film/dance/music club with older children with Autism in mind. We have fixed on a date to try a film showing - now to find some funding so we can offer it for free..

And so the end of another day at Riverhouse... apart from Mama Vox ladies choir who will meet later on this evening....