Motorpoint move

Apart from a couple of hours in the office each day, and a College Tutor group meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the first half of the week has been uneventful and quiet at home with Clare away. Yesterday was  quite the opposite, starting with a busy RUG (Radio Users' Group) meeting in the Motorpoint Arena, with the best attendance for some time, and as usual, I acted as scribe. 

The City Centre Management team is moving to a new office accommodation in the Arena building in March, and this week it has been confirmed that Cardiff Business Safe is to move in with them. After the RUG meeting Ashley and I were taken by Ray the building manager to see the hundred foot long open plan office where we will be housed, hopefully in a corner. The room has a full length balcony and a view south towards the Bay over the main railway in between two tower blocks. Fine for the summer. I wonder about deep midwinter though.

We were shown how to navigate our way through the service areas beneath the arena itself to the main gate, a route we need to use for late access. Here's a place I never got to visit when I was the local Vicar. The arena is currently decked out with a bandstand and dance floor for this week's Strictly Come Dancing tour show. The staging travels the country packed into large trailer lorries. Last week an ice skating show was here. This week a couple of parking bays are filled with melting ice from the refrigerated floor installed upstairs last week. It takes a couple of weeks to melt in situ, unless it needs removing to free space. The basement also gets used as a film set in between times. It's never a dull moment for building manager Ray, who's in his early sixties. He's full of energy, and thrives on the diversity and challenge of everyday life at work.

I had to depart in haste to catch a bus home, and then take the car to Dinas Powis to have a lively lunch with Russell and Jackie, and was only five minutes late, due to the panic ensuing from losing track of my house keys. I'd not put them in the usual jacket pocket, and they'd hidden in the far recesses of my top coat pocket and I had to phone Clare, not being able to recall who had the spare house keys. Thankfully I detected them with great relief after I'd started driving. Then I had a funeral preparation visit to make to a family in Caerau, prior to one of the two funerals I've been asked to do next week in 'the Res', as Jan the Vicar is on leave.

I got home in good time to cook a meat eaters' paella for Owain and myself, with excellent Tesco spicy chorizo and slivers of chicken breast to add to the usual vegetables and rice. We washed it down with a decent Valencian wine blending Tempranillo and Monastrell grapes and talked of politics, the economy and work. We agreed the paella was one of my best efforts to date. Owain left, just as the prequel Star Trek movie was starting, and as I hadn't seen it before I watched it, while writing up my notes from the morning's RUG meeting. The film was good enough to slow me down considerably, and it was very late by the time I emailed them off for approval and crawled into bed.