Right early this morning I succumbed to Clare's persuasions, and accompanied her to Maindy pool for a swim. Not so early, as I take quite a while to become functional, and the rush hour traffic didn't help, so it was quarter to nine by the time we got into the water. We had a good half an hour before the first school parties moved in. I managed twenty miserable lengths and thought I would burst. I enjoy swimming in the sea, but not in chlorinated indoor pools. It was so long since my last visit that my name had been taken off the admissions system. I had in any case lost my free admission card and had to re-apply, but one was ready for me by the time we left. It took me a while to recover, but I did feel better for the additional exercise. So exercise is obviously something I need to do more of, now I have the free time.
I went and did a couple of hours washing up in St John's tea room at lunchtime. I learned that the advert for a new Vicar had appeared in the Church Times, and the Times (there's posh), and was encouraged, jokingly, to re-apply. This move has clearly boosted morale, as it means an appointment by October is possible, and that will be good for the church.
After this I went and did a stint of database building for Cardiff Business Safe. It appears that the offices where CBS was based under an informal arrangement emptied two months back by the relocation of City Centre Management to the Old Library, will be handed back to the landlords at the end of next week. This is a worry because it's still several more weeks before CBS can move into its promised allocation of space in the new HQ for Civil Parking Enforcement in Charles Street. Even this arrangement is uncertain because all there is at the moment is a gentleman's declaration of intent, with nothing on paper.
When you think that no pub, bar or club in the City Centre is allowed to open without having a security radio on site, as a condition of its license from the Council and enforced by the Police, it's disturbing to consider that the not for profit voluntary organisation which provides and maintains this radio network for the City, may have to face several weeks with no workplace to call its own. Admin can be done from a laptop at home, but there's a lot of troubleshooting needed daily, and a stream of repairs and kit replacement which cannot be done from a car boot.
CBS was set up as a voluntary body, with lots of good will on the part of all those interested in public safety and crime prevention, so that the security network's existence and use could be independent of the fortunes of any of its stakeholders, whilst relying on a measure of practical support from all. This aimed to put it above politics, but this aim has not been achieved. Party politics is not the issue. It's the internal power politics of local government and those whose aim is to protect their own fiefdom, and disguise their failings - a common weakness of all large organisations and empires in which accountability becomes too complex a process and all to easy to turn into a superficial ritual that disguises reality. As it stands, we're due for a couple of difficult operational weeks.
This evening I attended a 50th anniversary CACEC lecture in honour of its founding father William Hodgkin at City URC, given by one of Wales' leading luminaries, Geraint Talfan Davies, former Millennium Centre and Arts Wales director and head of various TV channels. His theme was 'Religion and the Arts in Wales today'. It was a brilliant, well thought out analysis of the state of religion and culture, with a call to Universities to undertake in depth research into the contemporary role of religion as an inspirer and motivator of contemporary culture, in both languages. Hopefully this lecture will shortly be published and promoted to a much wider audience than the dozen of us who attended.
Archbishop Barry was in the chair. He greeted me on arrival with a smile and volunteered that the new Vicar of St John's appointment had been advertised today. I told him I'd already been informed. There was no point in saying that the process could have been advanced a lot earlier as we'd agreed when I gave a year's notice of my departure. Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans, as John Lennon once said. The important thing is that the ball is now rolling, and life is going in new directions for all of us.
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