After much stress over the last few weeks, on Friday, I finally had a new fridge freezer installed. After four months of waiting for the Lettings Agents to get that sorted.
And finances have returned to normal (if you can call still having a considerable overdraft and struggling to afford all the random curve balls life keeps throwing at me on a zero hours contract normal).
So I’ve added £36 a-n membership to my ever-growing overdraft, because everything is mostly organised for our first LAN Onlincolnshire Social Media and Digital Workshops, so obvs. I need Public Liability Insurance. I totally forgot to renew membership anyway, as I’m in the process of trying to minimise outgoings by switching dual fuel provider, and I had thought I’d stopped a Direct Debit that went out anyway, leaving me overdrawn on my “good” bank account – the one that I keep in credit to offset my constant reliance on an overdraft.
So I had to waste time ringing up the bank to ask why that had gone out when I’d cancelled it, and they kindly offered £50 to help out – which was just over half the amount that went out. Then some other money went in – some money I’ve been waiting for all month.
I know, it’s boring, but these workshops will hopefully pay off my overdraft, along with funding applications I’m still working on – which I can’t afford not to be successful with now.
Between organising this, and Bikeability Instructing all week at my son’s old school, I went for a post grad open day over the weekend, and it seems I’ve applied to do a masters. Not in fine art, though, it’ll be to follow the more commercial arm of my illustration practice. I can’t guarantee that being an artist will ever pay itself off, so I’m taking the most economically viable option. I do, however, hope to continue to use the knowledge gained to feed into any fine art projects I may pursue, along with the LAN, as I will always be a joint honours grad, and that will always inform my work. I’ve watched too many fine art post grads fade into working at Tescos to risk that outcome. If things start to change for the better, I’ll be able to continue with fine art projects, but with the terrorist threat of Universal Credit and no guarantee of having the time to do anything, we’ll see.
The Ayscoughfee proposal has taken a back step of late, however, I need to finalise the budget and gloss over it, along with a funding application for the LAN between doing the workshops.
