We had a lovely walk last night down from the house past the farm onto the beach at one end of Oxwich Bay. Watched the sun set as we strolled back across the cliffs with a wander over to Three Cliffs Bay one of the most wonderful bays you will see in Wales. We woke up with the dawn chorus to another beautiful blue sky day. We were Up early as Kathy was serving breakfast with Anita the amazing Hungarian housekeeper and I was cooking breakfast with Gary one of the chefs also from Hungary. Seems I will be expected to do breakfast on my own later. Again trying to lose weight will be a problem. It’s so hard to resist a full English breakfast when you’ve actually cooked it! Learning also about checks and recording for food health and safety. There are so many fridges and freezers in this place.
Once the guests finished breakfast and we’d cleaned up Kathy then joined the prayer ministry team to serve some of the guests as this is a prayer ministry week. By all accounts this was very encouraging.
I went into the tiny reception office with Ian an ex-serviceman who met Frank Collins to learn about the admin system for bookings. They are in the process of moving from a manual and largely paper based system to a new bespoke online CRM system. Mind-boggling complications for running the bookings for this place and that is despite there only being 14 rooms and restrictions on what length of room bookings they take. Must admit I had a rather naïve view on what running a smaller retreat like this would be like.
After a lunch of roasted butternut and coconut soup with garlic bread, I then spent most of my time sorting out the CCLI song recordings. That was fun as I had over 50 prompts to sing worship songs to myself as I got on and entered records of them being displayed by projection via the CCLI website. I was a bit rusty on taking phone calls but managed to work on my polite greeting rather than my usual “Yes what?” That you may get from me at home.
So now Kathy and I have the late afternoon off. We can discard our black trousers and white shirts (we looked like brother and sister stood next to each other) and relax on the beach or up the Bryn behind the house. I believe Kathy has gone off surfing!!