I was lucky. Somebody had already given me a heads up (more about that phrase later). Cardiff Bus operate forty two No.11 services each day and all but one of those go to Pengam Green. The one exception is the 15.40 from Hayes Bridge Road which goes not to Pengam Green but to Wentloog Business Park. This Bus-Book-Beverage adventure was therefore done over two days, the first to Wentloog Business Park and the second to Tesco in Pengam Green.There no end to the fun this challenge offers.
First things first and time to find a book for the journey. The fact this one started next to the Central Library was ideal. I popped in and grabbed the first book I saw. The fact it is about sheep is purely coincidental. It is extracts from a diary about life on an organic farm in Gloucestershire. It’s a good and insightful read into the tough life of being a farmer and endeared more sympathy in me that the interviews I see on TV news with farmer union officials.
The No.11 took me through Adamsdown, Splott and Tremorfa, areas I am used to researching via my involvement with Roath Local History Society. It may not seem obvious these days but the old parish of Roath used to go all the way down to the sea and included these areas, hence my interest.
The bus got to Rover Way and swung eastwards past the Secret Station sculpture by Eilis O’ Connell, now just a shadow of its former self and looking rather forlorn. I wonder how many people accidentally find themselves trapped on the No.11 heading out towards Wentloog on a daily basis. We drop a few shift workers off to work and pick up quite a few more on the return journey.
The next day I caught another No.11, this time to Pengam Green and had my lunch in Tesco. I was taken aback – even Tesco’s café have digital order boards these days. I just about coped. I had the Mac & Cheese or as we used to call it when I was growing up, macaroni cheese. It barely covered the bottom of the shallow dish and I was questioning the value for money but then ten minutes after finishing it I felt stuffed. The dish looked like and indeed evidently had the properties of that yellow expanding foam you get at DIY stores.
To walk off lunch I went for a stroll around Tremorfa Park. It is built, like much of Tremorfa, on the site of an old airfield, Pengam Moor. And what an interesting history the airfield has. It was where the airship pioneer Ernest Willows first built his airships. It was the base for Wales’s only operational RAF Squadron, the 614 Squadron, albeit only for a short period of time. And it had commercial flights operating here both before and after WWII, before Cardiff Airport relocated out to Rhoose.
Right, returning to that phrase ‘heads up’. I first came across it some twenty or thirty years ago which working with people who used to adopt this emerging American-like lingo, mainly to hide the fact that they didn’t have anything of substance to say. It was all ‘on the same page’, ‘thinking outside the box’, ‘touching base’, ‘leverage’ and ‘low hanging fruit’. ‘Heads up’ in hindsight seems obvious now; someone says something and it is so important that you need to raise your head to listen to them. For some reason however I had only ever heard the phrase ‘they’ve got their head up their arse’, so when people told me they were giving me a ‘heads up’ I naturally assumed it was a shortened version of that phrase. Think about that next time someone says ‘heads up‘ to you. Picture it and try not to laugh.
Cardiff Capers 