43. A Year in the Life of Elizabeth Gaskell’s House
Posted
29th August 2025
in 10 year Anniversary, blog, Gaskell House Blogs
25-29 August 2025
Thank goodness this week was just four days (thanks to the Bank Holiday). It’s not been the best of weeks in lots of ways. Tuesday started off well until about lunch time when I discovered our website had completely disappeared. It took all Tuesday afternoon emailing and listening to on-hold music on support telephone lines to work out that our domain provider had taken the website down because it was being ‘compromised’ (aka hacked). Thankfully we don’t hold any customer data on our website, but it is our ‘shop window’ and we had enough emails and social media messages to tell us that people had noticed we were missing virtually. Anyway the rest is all very dull and involved more phonecalls and paying out money to get it fixed. The fact that I’m able to type this blog on Friday afternoon is proof that it is fixed (sort of). There still looks to be lots of font issues and things don’t look quite as good as they should, but at this point I’m just glad it is alive!
Sadly all this faff cast a metaphorical shadow over the last full week of the summer holidays and we suspect affected visitor numbers, which dropped considerably (Or perhaps everyone was just out buying new shoes and stationary instead?). Our last drop-in workshop wasn’t as busy as we hoped ,but there were some lovely animal and floral creations made, and the sunshine on Wednesday encouraged families out onto the lawn to play with the games. Thursday was wet all afternoon, but that did mean our Tea Room sales picked up as people lingered over tea, cake and books waiting for the rain to ease. We also had a delivery of new books for the shop, which was an excuse to coo over new books.
I met with a working group of Trustees on Wednesday (in the House) to make a start on a new short term business and activity plan for next year and some longer term thinking. This was followed on Thursday evening on Zoom for our monthly Board meeting.
Gaby and I distracted ourselves for a few hours on Thursday with a meeting about our plan for Christmas – which I must admit, cheered me up massively. The fact that we now have a plan and a budget is a big step forward and who doesn’t like to talk about Christmas decorations in August?!
I spent most of Friday working on planning and budget forecasting for next year, submitted another funding application expression of interest and got some costing to upgrade our rapidly crumbling IT infrastructure. Ah the joy!
Ellie and Gaby, I hope, are having a much better Friday at the House, hosting our final wedding of August.
Sally Jastrzebski-Lloyd
