Who said meetings are a chore?

It was four o'clock before I went to bed this morning - something else I can't remember the last time I did it. Thinking about it, it was probably when I ran the business and was up painting furniture half the night for some miserable, ungrateful customer in London. Last night was different though; I went to a meeting with friends in St Just, right down at the tip of Cornwall near Land's End. I reckon this sort of meeting should go down as a blue-print for meetings everywhere. In fact I think I might refuse to go to another one that doesn't have goats' cheese tart on the agenda...

We were supposed to be discussing a publication we're trying to put together for the Wheal Art Weekend we were part of in August. When we arrived Steven was busy cooking and the red wine and chat started to flow immediately. We were given a tour of his fantastic ramshackle house that's a warren of dark rooms (it was dark outside) and furniture that immediately take you back in time before the days of tv, when people would actually sit and talk to each other. You soon realised that this hasn't changed here and that you'd be doing a lot of talking around Steven's generous kitchen table; we started with gossip, of course! We continued over dinner - Steven's delicious goats' cheese tart, but he refused to let us have Alison's apple pie until we had a look at the publication!

Steven had been working really hard on a layout, though he modestly denied it. He layed out all the pages on the table and we began to digest that too. It was looking like a fantastic work in it's own right, with an essay by Megan Wakefield that hasn't been published yet, and a cd video of the event by Jacquie Orly. It was really coming together, but nearly ten o'clock by now and Sara decided she'd had enough of Steven's imbargo on the apple pie and we packed Alison off to the Co-op to get us some ice-cream to go with it. Naturally, over more food, we lost the thread of what we were supposed to be doing and started chatting and gossiping again: very satisfying! It wasn't until we heard an antiquated clock chiming eleven, or was it twelve?, that we decided we'd better get back to the matter in hand, providing Steven supplied us with coffee and chocolates of course... Past my normal bedtime (I know I'm sad, thank you) I would need the caffeine to keep me going over the next four hours.

I don't know what happened next, but time seemed to disappear without us noticing at all and the pages of the publication took shape on Steven's computer in front of us. Around four am we realised that the colour was draining from our faces and that sleep was finally getting the better of us. We crashed on Steven's floor, and meandered back home in the more sociable hours of Saturday morning.

The plan is to have the publication ready before Christmas and distribute it at a party to formally close the event - I can't wait for that one! In the mean time, I've got another artist's meeting to go to in a bar in Redruth on Monday night...