Action shots

A visit to St Mary's Bute Street this morning to celebrate Mass for half a dozen people, my final interregnum duty there. Fr Dean Atkins is to be licensed as priest in charge there the day after we leave for Nerja. I met him on my way out afterwards, and was able to deliver my good wishes in person, having remembered him during the service. Fr Barry Thomas was in the congregation at Mass. He was the chaplain who preceded me in Monaco, and despite him settling in Llandaff diocese in the time since I retired, the only time we've met before was on one of my visits to North Wales with USPG thirty years ago, when he was an Archdeacon in the diocese of Bangor. He has done locum duty in the diocese in Europe since retirement, in Switzerland, where I worked. Funny how we tend to notice co-incidences in connections between people from disparate backgrounds, or similar backgrounds in utterly different situations. But, less evident are those coincident connections which don't materialise, even when mutual acquaintances feel certain they should.

In the afternoon, I took my DSLR for a walk down to Blackweir bridge, photographing groups of people playing baseball on the way, and then photographing youngsters jumping off the bridge into the Taff, to find out what my camera could do. Two middle aged men were sitting drinking beer from cans on a nearby bench and watching. They got up and began walking to the bridge arguing arguing animatedly. The next thing I knew, one of them stripped off his tee shirt, pushed through the group of kids thinking about their next exploit, and somersaulted down into the water. I was too far away to follow the exchange with the kids, but after a few minutes climbing out of the water, he was ready for another. This time he executed a half decent back somersault into the water, thereby claiming bragging rights over the bemused adolescents. The kids stayed in a gaggle on the bridge, few of them jumped again after this.

For the first time this year, I saw a cormorant on a rock in the river below the weir, spreading its wings in display and shaking itself, although I couldn't see another one anywhere around. I got some worthwhile pictures. The bird shots were best. Others at full length lens extension were not as good as I'd like. I played around with burst shots and obtained a few interesting sequences, but they weren't that sharp, and suffered slightly from motion blur. It was overcast, and bright sunlight on the scene might have improved matters a little. I'd like to try a repeat of this exercise with my new HX300, with triple the length of zoom and greater pixel density to work with. Its processing power is also greater, so a comparison of similar long range motion shots would be helpful, to know how best to optimse the camera set-up. For the most part I use cameras on auto, and maybe could do better if I worked out how best to adjust for specific and quite exacting conditions. As ever with me it's a matter of learning by doing.

Owain came over in the evening, and the three of us went out for a meal at Stefanos Restaurant in Wyndham Crescent. Clare heard that it's closing and up for sale, and wanted one last outing there. I had to rush home afterwards, not to miss the start of the second pair of episodes of the French crime drama on BBC Four 'La Disparucion'. This keenly observes an extended family thrown into crisis by a daughter going missing and each finding their own secrets exposed. So nice to have something in French and easy to follow.

     

Central Square redevelopment - the long view

It's taken me a while to get around to it, but at last I've uploaded the photos I've been taking over the past six months of redevelopment work in Central Square, the area in front of Cardiff Central railway station. You can find them here. The area used to house the city's main bus and coach station, and the east side will, in a few years from now, eventually house the next generation bus and coach terminal, once Marland House and the car park occupying that site have been demolished, and built over. This site is interesting from a historical perspective.

With a somewhat longer memory than contemporary planners and developers, I recall from my time as Vicar of the City Centre Parish Church, that this is the site which, prior to its present unprepossessing edifices dating back to the 1960s, was the crowded site of older buildings, business and residential, dating back to the early nineteenth century. These were on the ancient water-front of the Taff, later re-routed in the heyday of Victorian expansion. They took over land which from the eleventh to the eighteenth century was the churchyard of the original St Mary's Priory, planted by the Benedictine Monks of Tewkesbury, right on the edge of the river where trade ships from around the Severn Estuary and further afield unloaded their wares. 

St Mary's Priory, on the present site of the Prince of Wales pub on the corner of St Mary Street and Wood Street, was reduced to ruins due to flooding, and a new church at the north end of Bute Street was built to replace it in the 1850s. As the riverside area was so prone to flooding, the course of the Taff through the coastal flood plain was straightened and acquired embankments to reduce the risk, much as we see it today. I wonder who benefited from this cemetery land-grab, which led to the Victorian reconfiguration of the ancient port of Cardiff into the familiar layout of today's townscape.

In a couple of years it'll all look different again. I understand the new BBC Wales headquarters is to be built on the old bus station site, now being cleared. A new office block nears completion next to the site on the west side, where once stood a brutalist 1960's County Council building, and prior to that St Dyfrig's Parish Church, next to the road bridge across the river into Tudor Street. 

St Dyfrig's was a Parish with a small dense urban footprint - a fine costly building, someone's vanity project maybe? The site was compulsorily purchased for redevelopment in the name of social progress, and few contested this. Again I wonder, who benefited? There are few left alive now who worshipped there in its last days. It was still standing when I was a youth. I know its last Vicar Bruce Davies, who was University Chaplain. I recall how each year it hosted an outdoor nativity scene behind the church railings segregating the building from the street. When we instituted the same kind of arrangement at St John's City Parish Church, thanks to the City Council a dozen years ago, St Dyfrig's was in my mind, with good reason.

These days, Tabernacle Baptist Church on the Hayes hosts a live re-telling of the Nativity Story several times daily for visitors to the city centre. It's a massive voluntary enterprise, driven by Christian vision and good-will, reaching far beyond the simple figurines behind church railings, accessible to passers by and vandals alike. The St David centre commercial redevelopment has made possible a regular throughput of hundreds of thousands of shoppers to the city centre. I wonder how many will be touched in some way by this energetic contemporary witness, very much a response to the challenges of our very secularised day and age?