Eeep, this side of things always gets me more than a little bit nervous. Our 2025 season design for the year-long publicity postcard campaign is finished and now submitted to the printer/distributer. I am always checking and triple checking everything to make sure that we have the right dates and times and titles and information... it is a bit stressful, but I guess, in the end, if there are mistakes... they can be worked around and in the disaster case, a new postcard can be done... it only costs money, and isn't necessarily the end of the world... or the ensemble!

... but it will be a pain in the arse!

An experiment that we are trying to run this year is a short half hour children's concert in the period before the main ensemble concert. We have had some young children come to our concerts, but the attention span can vary from child to child... some are great, and others lose concentration and when this happens it can start to annoy our other audience members. Sigh... in the ideal world, we prefer that our concerts are able to be more loose and informal... but we don't get to decide that for everyone, and so we are trying out an experiment where there is the loose and informal children's concert where they can sing and dance or do whatever...

... and it is more of an educational sort of thing as well.

However, it means that we are trying to shunt it into a small space of time between our seating rehearsal and the actual concert... and we will also need time to retouch the harpsichord tuning, and get the main audience in... and the kids out. The timing is pretty hideously tight, and it might end up being a bit stressful for the harpsichord retouching if we can't get the children's crowd out in time. But we are going to give it a go... we have the go ahead from the venue, and the musicians seem to be on board (they also get a little bit more money...).

At the moment, we have scheduled it for two of our four concerts, and we'll see how that goes. We can move pretty quickly to do it for all the concerts if it works! And we have had some demand for it already... so that is sort of promising? But in the end, we aren't doing it for the ticket sales... we have the prices below breakeven for that concert. It is more about providing a future outreach/education service for the community, and hopefully that will be appreciated and build up a longer term interest in what we do... when these kids grow up in ten or so years!

Handy Crypto Tools

Ledger Nano S/X: Keep your crypto safe and offline with the leading hardware wallet provider. Not your keys, not your crypto!
Coinbase Wallet: Multi chain wallet with lots of opportunities to Learn and Earn!
Binance: My first choice of centralised exchange, featuring a wide variety of crypto and savings products.
WooX: The centralised version of WooFi. Stake WOO for fee-free trades and free withdrawals! This link also gives you back 25% of the commission.
GMX.io: Decentralised perpetual futures trading on Arbitrum!
Coinbase: If you need a regulated and safe environment to trade, this is the first exchange for most newcomers!
Crypto.com: Mixed feelings, but they have the BEST looking VISA debit card in existence! Seriously, it is beautiful!
CoinList: Access to early investor and crowdsale of vetted and reserached projects.
Cointracking: Automated or manual tracking of crypto for accounting and taxation reports.
KuCoin: I still use this exchange to take part in the Spotlight and Burning Drop launches.
MEXC: Accepts HIVE, and trades in most poopcoins! Join the casino!
ByBit: Leverage and spot trading, next Binance?
OkX: Again, another Binance contender?