April 2022 - a month of endings

April felt like a very busy month, marked by the end of two personally significant eras. I was working my notice in my job ahead of a move into a new role in May. I also spent a weekend in Shrewsbury so I could attend the closing service of the church that my mum and dad joined as founder members about 20 years ago.

It was also a month where I had a birthday, we had visitors at Easter and I went to ten football matches. I will be doing a second post reviewing the games otherwise this post will be too long. I've already posted about Barry Town getting relegated. After the relegation I went to their last game of the season up at Cefn Druids. I took my nephew Zac along for the first time to a game as just the two of us. We stopped at Mcdonald's on the way, which made his day.

At Easter we had visitors. My sister Sarah brought her three kids to see us on Good Friday. We went into the city centre and that meant we got to see some of the Dog's Trail statues of Snoopy. Here's Cathy with her two nieces and Snoopy.

Then in the week after Easter, we saw my sister-in-law ahead of a big birthday for her. We had a family meal out in Gloucester and Cathy and I got to wander around Gloucester Docks which is all done up and fancy now. We met a random egg dude outside the military museum.

There was also a dock crane looking all industrial and cool. I always like seeing cranes.

The final Sunday at Hope Church in Shrewsbury was handled well by the leadership team. It could have easily been a sad occasion. Instead, after a short service, there was a meal out for the people who attended. It felt celebratory with a positive atmosphere in the room. I sat next to my friend Clive, who I spent many church youth group evenings with back in the day, and we talked about fun times we had 30 years ago.

The church's decline seemed to happen quickly. Last summer I went to services with about 50 people present, but there was a domino effect of people leaving and a couple of months back the trustees met and decided the church had reached a point where it was no longer viable. I wanted to go up for the last service because it had been really important to my dad - he expended a lot of emotional energy over the years there, and he had talked to me about it (a lot!) during long phone conversations.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my dad would have wanted me there to represent him at such a historic moment. Just as he was present at the birth of the venture, I was there to see it close.

The other personally significant closing of an era was working the final weeks of my notice as the manager of the paediatric diabetes clinical network - a job I had been doing for almost 7 years. I did my best to finish well and get everything cleared off my desk or handed over to people who can continue various projects. It's stressful trying to document as much head knowledge as possible in a way that will make some sort of sense to the person following after. I doubt I captured everything, but as I have said to lots of colleagues, I'm not going far and they will be able to track me down easily enough if they want. 

At my leaving meal on the last Friday in April, I was presented with a cartoon of myself with various aspects of my work and interests represented. 

The umbrella is from the logo on the network, and the mammoth character in the background is from a book that started as a leftfield dicussion in the kitchen of my colleague Rose and is now a published resource for children with diabetes. The cartoon was drawn by Rich, who I used to work with 15 years ago and who illustrated the book about mammoths. He drew me a bit jowly, but I forgive him. 

So, it was a crazy busy month, but a good one. I even hit a milestone on my baseball card blog, publishing a post with the 1000th card in my collection, in my 500th blog post. That blog then took a back seat for the rest of the month as I was trying to keep on top of  everything else.