It has been an astonishingly busy week since the exhibition closed last Sunday night.

One of the best outcomes of coming 'out from under my stone' and mounting the exhibition is that I have been asked if I would re-mount it at Johnstown Castle during the Wexford Opera Festival in late October, early November.
This I have now agreed to do, or rather, having had it pointed out to me that the Wexford Opera Festival attracts on of the best demographics (what an awful expression) of any event held in Ireland, I jumped at the opportunity and grabbed it with both hands.

So, when returning the items of Irish vernacular furniture kindly lent to me by Johnstown Agricultural Museum, I discussed the details with Matt Wheeler, the recently appointed curator / manager of the museum, and we came to an excellent agreement that I will not only re-mount the exhibition - which will be added to and improved - but I will also give an illustrated talk one lunchtime.

I regard this as a great recession-busting opportunity and, with the experience gained from the Kilkenny outing, I intend that it will be significantly more commercially focused without, I hope, losing the softer narrative of my involvement with Irish furniture of the past forty years.

But, as I said, it has been a very busy week.

Not only did the exhibition have to be taken down, the re-mounting in Wexford negotiated but Terry Bannon - the master of graphics - had urgent need of a counter for an extraordinarily irregular and complex alcove: this had to be measured, made and delivered within a finite time-frame. - But it was brilliant to be able to begin to reciprocate for Terry's defining efforts for me.

And then Nicola Brown, one of my co-exhibitors at Grennan Mill, launched her book on felting yesterday afternoon and we went to a charming lunch at her equally charming farmhouse at Kyle just under the Blackstairs that have had so much mention here this past year.

And today we were out again at another afternoon get-together of the the great, the good and the local artistic community (whatever that means).

So, I have truly been out from 'under my stone' for the past three weeks and I have enjoyed every moment of it.
As a consequence, I have met people that I haven't met for years; I have met many new people - whom I could (and should) have met had I not been living 'under my stone' and many others who knew who I was but had not met me because of my habitual habitat.

But I'm out now and I intend to stay out - stones are heavy after all......