Longest day

I walked to the wound clinic for my weekly visit, and then walked across to Splott to collect the car, which has been there nearly three weeks, in an attempt to diagnose and fix an electrical fault which left the nearside car window half shut, and the central locking system working, but in a somewhat eccentric manner. 

Our very experienced VW mechanics had no success, and took it to a specialist auto-electrical company, which also failed to diagnose the problem. The locking system works, but needs checking each time the car is opened from the passenger side, and the window is shut. We need to avoid using it for the time being, while the garage tries to source a complete functioning door mechanism from a car of the same age, going for scrap.

Passing through the city centre on my way there, I stopped to take some photos of St David's House site clearance, and got chatting to one of the workers letting lorries in an out of the site's only gate. He told me that once the rubble had been cleared to ground level and excavation to remove buried concrete foundations of the old structure were getting under way, an archaeologist had been working there to see what was still there from the Temperance Town area levelled in the sixties to make way for St David's House.

Houses were built on land freed for use when the river Taff was diverted from its course to its present location, when Brunel's navvies constructed the GWR line and Cardiff General Station. As well as tenement building foundations, iron-work and pottery shards, whole fireplaces from cellar rooms were uncovered. After Newtown, on the other side of the South Wales line from here, this was an area much settled by immigrants from Ireland or deep rural Wales. It's an era documented by photographs, in a way that the old course of the Taff, and the ruins of St Mary's and its churchyard, prior to the railway, never were.

After lunch and a much needed siesta following my 3.7 mile walk to Splott, I felt fresh enough to go out again for a few laps of Thompson's Park, to bring my day's total up to 5.4 miles. I'd like to sustain this, if not improve on it. The extra exercise this week has done me good, I know.