Coast path outing

No pancakes for breakfast today, just our usual breakfast after a lie-in. Mid morning, we drove over to Penarth and enjoyed a walk along the coast path, as far as the east side of Lavernock Point, and then we negotiated our way down a steep and muddy path to the beach to eat slices of Clare's bara brith washed down with a flask of coffee. Although there were magnificent dramatic cumulus clouds, the sun shone brightly and the air was so clear the coastline on the southern shore of the estuary opposite was sharply visible, making me wish I'd brought my DSLR camera with wide angled lens, but I brought only the Olympus, for which I don;t have that kind of lens. It did however produce some nice sharp photos in high contrast situations. It's a simple pleasure to handle and much lighter to carry. Additional lenses however, will be rather expensive to buy. I can't find any of interest available second hand.

We walked eight kilometres there and back, and Clare bought fish and chips for our lunch from the kiosk at the pier. I stayed with the car as we were just over the two hour stay allowed in our sea front parking place, and we'd noticed a couple of wardens patrolling and issuing fines a distance away. When I saw them turn in our direction, I drove the car around and met with Clare opposite the pier, just at the right time. then we parked on the headland overlooking Cardiff Bay. There'd been a brief shower as we neared the end of our walk, but the sun shone through clouds moving very slowly, producing a fine rainbow that persisted for the next fifteen minutes while we were driving home. Clouds were overhead, but both ends of the rainbow arc were visible over the townscape at the same time, a wondrous sight. I didn't bother to get the camera out, but just sat and enjoyed,  as Clare drove the final leg of the journey home from the Tesco filling station. That's our first tankful of petrol since the end of February, just 285 miles on the trip meter, two hundred of which were journeys to and from Bristol for treatments back in July-August.

After supper I watched the 2016 feminist re-make of the 1980's Ghostbuster movies, which is partly a homage to the original movies and partly satire on NYC disaster movies, with some hilarious slapstick sequences and feminist memes thrown in. Sheer entertaining scifi horror rubbish, perhaps even mocking nostalgically the original, which became something of a cult movie. Dan Akroyd who produced, I think, as well as starring in the original, also produced this one, and made a vignette appearance as a tough Yellow Cab driver in the midst of the crisis saying "I ain't afraid of no ghost", his catchphrase in the original script. When Owain was about eight years old we had a Ghostbusters home computer game, which Owain enjoyed. I think I may have taken all three of them to see the first movie. After that, the much darker, violent last double episode of 'The Valhalla Murders' on BBC Four, with high level police corruption, murder and child abuse revealed as interlinked in the Icelandic winter.  It was complex and not always easy to follow. Fine for feeding pessimism about sheer human nastiness, as opposed to the kind of weakness leading haphazardly to crime which is often the picture painted in crime movies these days. 

Next week, the final series of Parisian flic series 'Spiral' begins. Fast moving, more daylight, and a mix of nastiness and weakness, integrity and corruption in the French legal system and law enforcement. It's been running with the same principal actors for fifteen years and is to my mind a masterpiece of social and moral comment on pour post-modern world.