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Friday 22nd January 2010

Cardiff is one of the many cities in the UK which is modernising at a fast pace and parts of it now look practically futuristic. But looking out of my hotel window I could see the Millennium stadium on my side of the river signifying the new (though it is ten years old and already looks a little battered and old-fashioned), but across the other side of the brown waters of the river Taff is old Cardiff, where the kind of terraced houses that filled industrial cities in the 20th Century, reminding me of childhood days visiting my grandparents in Middlesbrough. Maybe soon those drab houses will disappear too. I am not saying I want that. Just enjoying the juxtaposition of old and new. You get this in many cities, I know (I myself live in a nineteenth century house), but the distinction is sharp in Cardiff and the houses opposite the stadium look like they belong in the suburbs and not at the heart of the city. I like them though. There is a nostalgic cosiness to them, that is not on display in the swish new shopping centre, with its massive TV screen which seems to be tuned into BBC News all day long and blares out to daytime pedestrians and night time drunkards alike.
The railway station also seemed stuck in the last century. It hasn't yet been given the facelift that many big cities have given to their transport hubs. There is an M & S in the corner, but most of the other (and rather few) shops seemed oddly and maybe reassuringly old. Just a WH Smith, a small cafe with no real branding that I noticed and an Upper Crust, which seems a surprisingly dated food outlet now. I remember when an Upper Crust shop seemed like the height of sophistication - imagine, your sandwich filling came in a baguette! Like they only had in France!
But now we're so spoiled by a range of exotic and amazing food that now the Upper Crust concept as well as its oddly dated logo are almost painfully twee. I can't remember the last time I ate anything from there. But had I been hungry at Cardiff train station, I wouldn't have had too much choice (but I would still have gone to M&S).
I am not someone who mourns change or thinks that we should keep everything as it always was, but in a town like Cardiff where the changes are coming thick and fast in some places, whilst other parts are lagging behind, the distinction are more apparent. And you get a time-traveller's eye-view of how things used to be done in the past, how they are now and how they might be in the future.

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