The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

Sunday was just brilliant. Who would have thought just three short years ago that a concert featuring the incidental music from Doctor Who would sell out the Donald Gordon Auditorium at the Wales Millennium Centre within two hours of the tickets being released to the box office of the WMC. It just goes to show just how popular Doctor Who has become since its triumphant return in 2005. A few years ago, only a couple of hundred sad old fans would have bought tickets, leaving the 1986 seat auditorium sadly empty. Not that the old series had enough good instrumental music, apart from Dudley Simpson’s majestic score from The City of Death, Doctor Who music sucked.

I arrived in Cardiff at 1.30pm. I had previously arranged to show a couple of American fans around the locations from the series, but that had gone spectacularly pear-shaped, so I really did not know how I was going to fill the five hours before the concert started. I had a quick wander around Queen Street before heading down to the Bay. Engineering work on the track meant that I had to catch the replacement bus from Queen Street Station to Cardiff Bay Station.

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Tuesday night was Halloween, it was also a TIMELESS: Cardiff meeting. I finished work at 5.30pm as usual, but instead of going straight to Cardiff on the earliest possible train, I went up to my sister Carolyn’s house. She had decorated the house with cobwebs and pumpkins and was having a Halloween Party for my nephews with sandwiches, cakes and toffee apples. There were also silly games like Ducking Apples (trying to get an apple out of a bowl of water with your mouth) and Bobbing Apples (trying to get a bite out of an apple hanging from a doorframe without using your hands).

All this wound up by half past six, so I was off on the 6.47pm train to Cardiff. Shortly after leaving Treherbert, I received a text message from Tim Farr, warning me that as there was a problem with the kitchen at the Central Bar, TIMELESS had decamped to the Gatekeeper’s Arms, another J.D. Wetherspoons pub in the city centre.

As the train got closer to Cardiff, it began to fill with students in fancy dress. Witches, wizards, zombies and ghosts as well as characters from fiction, including for some reason a man dressed as a tennis player. At Cardiff Central Station I spotted a student dressed as James T. Kirk from the original Star Trek series. I gave him the Vulcan salute with my right hand and said “live long and prosper”. He laughed and replied the salute.

So, a pleasant hour was spent in the Gatekeeper’s Arms, even if they did bring the wrong meal to me at first, and I was wondering if I would have time to eat the meal my meal before I had to hurry to catch my train back home.

It was a quiet journey home, apart from the pair of pretty young lesbians snogging a few seats in front of me when they thought that the only other person in the carriage was asleep.

I got off the train and realised, just as it departed for the sidings at Treherbert Station that I had left my baseball cap. So, I asked a man at the station, they checked in the sidings. Sorry, no trace. Oh well. Although yesterday afternoon, someone from the sidings popped into the Library with my tatty baseball cap that had turned up when the were cleaning the train, for which I am extremely grateful.

20six Comment

Valerie / Website (2.11.06 11:06)
that was fun

Today is a gorgeous sunny day. Only the bitingly cold northerly wind betrayed the fact that this was the 1st November yesterday and Christmas is less than two months away. As soon as the sun set on the ever-shortening day a bitter frost set in. This should finally persuade the deciduous trees to lose their leaves, which they have been hanging onto this autumn for grim life.

It is also half term and the Library is packed with children. Sadly they are not borrowing the books, they are coming in to use the public access PCs to surf the Internet. You would have thought that they would be out enjoying the last almost decent day of sunshine until at least next March, but no, they want to sit transfixed in front of the Information Superhighway.