Tuesday afternoon. Rik Child, the director of Furniture Now! is showing me the top floor of the warehouse where his business is based. I’ve just been interviewing Rik. It’s been a real eye opener. Beforehand I thought Furniture Now! to be little more than a second-hand sofa store in a dowdy part of town with an irritating punctuation mark after its name. Wrong. As well as running the door-to-door recycling programme which serves the whole of Lewes, the charity organises a furniture refurbishment course aimed mainly at people who really need, for one reason or another, to do something useful in their lives. Rik is showing me around the studio used for this purpose, when I see a familiar image. A silhouette of the angel on the top of the War Memorial painted on the top of a red stool. A stylised version of the Viva Lewes logo! The students need to chronicle the inspiration for their work in an exercise book. The course teacher shows me the relevant book, and there inside is tacked one of our publicity postcards. A coincidence. I feel strangely flattered.
Afterwards I wander to Standard8, an avant-garde installation company run by friends, which has taken over another warehouse in the Phoenix, right next door. I start enthusing about Furniture Now! When I start to tell the story of the chair, I suddenly realise that the two people who claim to have taken the brilliant photo we used on the postcard in question are in the room. Colleagues Matt Haycocks and Jack Snell, for the record, who were passing round a camera at a drunken rooftop party on November 5th 2005. One shot stood out to be something of a masterpiece – both claim to be the author. No-one will never know the truth, but this is a good time to thank them both publicly for letting us use the image, now adorned in stylised form on a newly-purchased stool in our office. Small world? Small town. Enjoy the week.