Cardiff in the rain

Right now the Baroque nerves are about as jangled as they can be, and no wonder! Here's one I prepared earlier (you'll see...):

The train station in Cardiff is rather thrilling as you roll up to it in a minicab, in the rain, the day before the big rugby match with the town full of drunken Frenchmen wrapped in creased Tricolours – bearing the legend above its massive portals, THE GREAT WESTERN, it reminds the receipt-seeking, minicab-paying, mobile-phone-answering person of the romance that used to attach to this whole process of getting from one city to another.

Ms Baroque has today spent several hours in the capital city of the land of her fathers, and of course this exciting station is one of the bits her grandfather – and even her great-grandfather - would still recognise, at least until they got onto the platform. At that point they might lose the point, especially if they decided they wanted a last-minute coffee.

Fortunately that didn’t happen to me. I got my coffee earlier, at a place called Shot in the Dark.

We weren’t shot.

And this, dear readers, sums up the excitement of travelling to Cardiff! I used to go there a lot, staying with a glamorous BBC-working cousin, and I loved it: the castle, the old buildings, the feeling of not being in England, the people speaking to me in Welsh (see, in London everyone thinks I’m Jewish; in Wales they talk to me in Welsh). It’s what my children’s non-Baroque grandmother would have called a damned shame: there’s the whole clan, sitting in America yearning to go to Wales, the trip of a lifetime, and there’s me in the rain trying to get home in time for dinner while the ghost of my grandfather runs alongside my cab, going, “Stop! Wait! Maybe I drank in there! And that place, it could look a bit familiar…” In the end, my colleague and I are quite happy to get a train half an hour earlier than the one we’d thought we’d get, although he’s also partly annoyed because it means he’ll be in the pub before his friends.

And the romance? It was all in the lettering, just as it is on the (frankly thrilling, I think) Welsh National Opera building (which I’ve never been inside, alas). It certainly isn’t in the way my knees feel as I type this, or my poor shoulder hunched over a 12-inch-wide fold-out tray on an overcrowded commuter train... (Editing in: I had pretty much had it by Reading. That was two hours ago. I won't even talk about the conversations I was trapped in the middle of on the 73 bus; I got off and walked, in the end.) And Grandfather feels a little forlorn.