Hello Everybody,

Beautiful -sunny -warm –Scotland -Glasgow Fair. These are not normally words used in the same sentence! But it’s true. We’ve been enjoying a lovely summer of sunshine and smiles here. There’s still a while to go before people turn their attention to indoor activities in clubs and classes, and others return revitalised from holiday to their creative activities, but we’re still here! You can rely on clydevalley.net.

However, not completely. We’ve been having some major web hosting problems and some emails have been being bounced back to sender as ‘undeliverable’ for a few weeks. Despite our efforts to prevent this, we’ve received little support from our web host, so we’ve started the process of change to a new one. This has been more complicated than we anticipated, but is now (hopefully) almost completed. We sincerely hope that our problems are over and apologise to and thank those of you who have patiently persevered and have kept us informed.

Also we’ve let you down this month because we have no photograph in Showcase. We’ve approached several camera clubs over the last year but nothing has been forthcoming. In fact it’s been about a year since one of the many camera clubs in the area sent us an image to share in Showcase. We’ve been surprised by this as we thought amateur photographers would be queuing up to exhibit their work in this open gallery, but not so I’m afraid. It’s a real shame because there are some lovely, easily emailed, images on camera club websites. So, if you are missing seeing photographic excellence on Showcase, visit them! (the addresses are in ‘Photographers’ listings)

We do, however, proudly present our August Showcase and there you can enjoy Tom Henry’s painting ‘All in the Same Boat’, a detail of Jenny MacKay’s ‘Canopy 2’, ‘Ceilidh’, a jazz composition by saxophonist Rob Hall, ‘Jaz’, a short story by Isobel MacDonald, and ‘Walk to the Reservoir’ a poem by Sandy Laird. Our thanks go to each of these contributors.

Our thanks, also, to those of you who have sent us your group’s season’s programme. Sometimes people are surprised that we don't go directly to their websites for their event information. Sorry, but with 70 plus sites to trawl, we just don’t have the time to do that. So please would you send us a copy of your season’s programme whenever it’s available? Thanks.

On a broader issue, we also find that some people are a little surprised to learn that we receive no financial support whatsoever from local or national government or from any other non-governmental funding organisation such as the lottery fund. We fund the website out of our own pockets and from the small amount of sponsored links which we put on the site. We produce the site because it’s something we really want to do but we like to think that our work has benefits for the wider community too. We would love to have more support but it seems that we can’t manage to tick the right funding application 'boxes' for one reason or another. For example, we seem to need to have a committee of management and a 'constitution' in order to comply with the criteria of many funding sources. We are not a new-start 'project', we do not employ young people, do not run 'events' and do not create employment for artists directly. And so on. Successful delivery doesn’t seem to count. We see this 'box-ticking' as symptomatic of broader trends towards so-called 'accountability' in society today. But I digress. We do have overheads so, if you think that our cause is worth supporting, please do tell your business friends about our ‘Sponsored Links’. We’ve decided to hold our charges at £30.00 per annum. Ridiculous we know, but we want to include small businesses. We're also looking into ways in which we can incorporate sponsors for individual pages of the site. More anon.

I notice my hand hovering around the central heating switch tonight, and I’ve retrieved a woolly cardigan from under the t-shirts, so it looks like my weather words at the top of the page no longer apply. Well, we had a good run!

Best wishes from us both.

Joanne and Don.