A cold bright sunny day. Although I was in bed for more than nine hours, I was awake for two of them and felt I needed more, but it was time to get up and get on with the day. After breakfast, I made a few minor modifications to my grandpa's story ending, then moved the text to my laptop to error check it with Libre Office, before sending the finished pdf to cousin Dianne. I can already imagine a slightly extended ending, to include a few extra pieces of information, but quite like the sense that where it ends is right on the brink of where another story begins.
For lunch, I cooked sea bass with brown rice, fresh carrots and parsnips from this week's veg bag, (Oh so sweet!) and after eating siesta'd again for an hour before going out. I seem to need it at the moment. I started walking into town along Romilly Crescent and intercepted a 61 bus just as I was passing the stop near the Danish cafe. My mission was to buy tin of pimenton picante from Wally's and some olives for cooking. I remember the shelf where my favourite Spanish spice is kept, but was puzzled because the label design, which has been constant for the last ten years, was different. When I examined the tin, it was from the same producer in Caceres, where varieties pimientos are cultivated so close to the ground they get baked by the heat of the sun and acquire a unique smoke flavour - according to Rick Stein, who eulogised about them on a TV trip to the region years ago.
I wandered through the shopping centre as far as St David's Metropolitan Cathedral, and popped in to say hello to the Almighty. It was lovely to see new bilingual notice boards and banners promoting Holy Year recently declared by Pope Francis in Welsh and English. Glass doors and a new modern baptismal font at the entrance to the nave enhance the look and feel of the building too. When we returned to Cardiff 23 years ago and St David's was one of the several active churches in the city centre, it looked much the same as it did when we left for Geneva.
About the same time as I retired the congregation of Ebeneser Chapel opposite St David's moved out to the suburbs and the building was sold to the Catholic Archdiocese of Cardiff. This led to its transformation into a much needed modern church social centre, an upgrading of the clergy house and renovation of the Cathedral itself, a very costly and ambitious project. As a result the church building no longer looks as if it was still the 1970s.
The sound of pneumatic drills at work punctuates the neighbourhood around the Cathedral at the moment. Work on demolishing the empty Debenhams store building behind tall safety screens has now started. This sound takes me back to 2006 when the first phase of redevelopment began with the demolition of Oxford House and neighbouring multi-storey car parks, another section of the 1970s city centre redevelopment. In an innovative plan, the space occupied by Debenhams will be transformed into a new green space, a square with the east end of the Cathedral as its boundary. That's something to look forward to in a couple of years from now.
Meanwhile, I try to figure out how the contractors will extract tens of thousands of tonnes of concrete rubble from a building embedded in a shopping arcade. For the time being I think they'll be able to use the roof car park goods vehicles used to deliver stock to the store. Sixteen years on from the opening of phase two of the St David's shopping centre, I continue to be interested in how projects of this scale in the public realm are carried out.
I walked back home along the Bute Park side of the Taff. Different kinds of daffodil are now flourishing in large numbers, likewise snowdrops, fat buds on bushes of white and red camelias are bursting into colour, a strong contrast to their dark green leaves. Bare branches of trees that blossom before their leaves appear are just starting to acquire a hint of colour as their buds grow. Spring is creeping up on us!
At sunset there were a few light cloud in the sky, a light rust colour. Venus shone brightly on its way to the horizon and a few minutes later Jupiter was visible through a hole in the cloud. When we went out to look again, Venus had set, Jupiter was heading the the same direction and Mars was visible overhead. By that time the constellation of Orion was visible, and a few other bright lights. I don't know if any of those were planets. Were Saturn, Uranus and Neptune hiding behind the wisps of cloud earlier? The temperature went from eight down to one degree. It was too cold to gaze at the heavens for long.
I spent the rest of the evening watching episodes of the new crimmie set in the Cleddau Estuary and Milford Haven, called 'The one that got away'. It's really good.
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