Retail suicide?

Yesterday presented my first opportunbity since Christmas to complete my younger grandson’s Christmas present, having forgotten a few minor items before the holiday. The said grandson shows some promise (and a lot of enthusiasm) as an artist but, like most nearly-eight-year-olds, he has been painting for a few years with the usual cheap and cheerful materials which are perfectly adequate for total beginners. However, I concluded a while ago that he deserved something better. So at Christmas, daughter Jennie and I set off for a large art and craft superstore on the outskirts of Newport which was expected to stock everything on my shopping list. To my surprise the shop did not have everything on my list but the missing items were few and easily obtained in Cardiff, or so I thought. Despite daughters anxiety to moderate my ambitions I managed to assemble a kit of paints, brushes, pencils and papers of the very brands that I would use, together with a carrying case for convenient storage.

So I set off on my first shopping trip of 2012 with the last of the morning commuters and the other early shoppers, on the half-hour bus journey. I should have known better. Don’t misunderstand me. I have grown to like Cardiff in the short time we have lived here but there are aspects of shopping here which, though doubtless experienced up and down the UK, simply shouldn’t happen in a place that is a capital city. Wales deserves better. Instead of wasting half a day walking from one end of the city centre to the other without finding everything that I wanted – and interrupting the bus journey home to try yet another shop – I should have gone online and bought the lot with half a dozen clicks on the computer. But I am old-fashioned in some respects and like to support local businesses first, where possible, before rushing to the internet, even when those “local” businesses are branches of national chains.  At least they contribute to the local economy by employing local people. This preference also harks back to my time in retailing and in running my own shop for a few years.

So what else was needed? Well, a decent soft eraser (rubber, not kneadable and certainly not plastic), a double sharpener catering for pencils of different thicknesses and with its own reservoir for waste shavings), and a tough  A3 clipboard. I have found the latter immensely useful as a light, portable worktop which needs little storage space when not in use.

As far as I know, Cardiff city centre has three quite substantial shops selling some combination of stationery and art and craft materials, with a further even larger specialist in art and crafts just a short bus ride away. The double sharpener was easy to find, the soft rubber was in one shop only and the A3 clipboard was not found at all. Later in the day I contacted a major business stationer with a branch in Newport, a few miles away, but apparently they didn’t stock A3 clipboards.

This is a very minor issue in the great scheme of things but I come across examples all too frequently. I had plenty of time on the bus returning home to wonder why retailers are so unimaginative in the extent of the products they sell. Why, for example, did the large branch of a national newsagents/stationers/booksellers devote a display unit some 8-9 feet wide by 5 feet high entirely to soft pencil cases, dozens of which were the same in size and style and differed only in colours – but no clipboards at all. Less than a quarter of that display space could have been used for A3, A4 and A5 clipboards in a variety of styles and materials. Why did one of the major art materials retailers have no identifiable soft rubber erasers, yet found ample space for numerous plastic erasers of various shapes and sizes?

And theres is no point in arguing that no-one makes A3 clipboards or that there is no demand for them. One of the most successful online businesses sells them – and in a variety of materials at that. It doesn’t surprise me that amazon.co.uk is such a success or that the “high street” is fast losing out to online shopping.

Cardiff’s shopping arcades

Frequently in the past I have been heard to bemoan the loss of individuality in the shopping areas of Britain’s towns and cities. That trend started, for me at any rate, in the days when the big, household name retailers, colonised high street after high street across the country, using their buying power and their marketing budgets to ensure that the small, local, family businesses who had been providing both goods and real service, were killed off and driven out. Some time later, as we all know, the big names themselves migrated to much larger premises in custom-built retail parks away from town centres, taking customers away from the old shopping areas and further damaging so many of the older, small businesses that had managed to cling on to a precarious living despite the giants.

Cardiff has undergone many big changes during the past decade or two so that even long-term residents, who have not visited the city centre for a few years, might be forgiven for getting lost in the new developments. The most recent of these is the St David’s 2 shopping centre. If you like modern, commercial architecture you will love this. It is a massive extension of the old St Davids Shopping Centre, which makes it possible to walk from one end of the city centre to the other without going outdoors and it is a great place for “people watching”. If retail therapy is the new religion, this must be one of its most spectacular cathedrals. I hope it is successful for all involved as a lot of people are employed there. Certainly it draws the crowds and it should do well. However, I will reserve judgement for a couple of years while I wait to see how many of those bright new shops are actually selling (in a sufficient quantity to remain in business) what those crowds want to buy.

I am not a big fan of modern architecture, whether domestic or commercial, but Cardiff has a most effective antidote in its wonderful Victorian and Edwardian shopping arcades. I can do no better than to refer you to http://cardiffarcades.wordpress.com/ where Amy Davies, a local freelance journalist and photographer, is posting her fine photographs of the arcades. What an environment in which to shop, full of visual treats and a great reminder of the sheer style of times long gone.

Cardiff Bloggers 4 and final

It has been a month now since my third post about Cardiff bloggers, through which I have been trying to generate some interest in the idea of building a large list of local bloggers each of whom could suggest others for the list and thus start a useful online network.

So far it hasn’t worked. Although the list in my blogroll expanded from the initial half-a-dozen family and friends to just over 50 at the time of writing, nearly all have been discovered by my own efforts. Hardly any have been suggested by the bloggers themselves or others and almost no interest has been shown through the comments.

It seemed a good idea at the time but clearly my initial ambition has not been shared by others so I shall waste no more time on it. The “Cardiff Bloggers” section of my blogroll has been deleted.

Cardiff Bloggers 3

With 191 posts and 739 comments (including my responses) this blog passed the 50,000 visitors milestone a few days ago and almost unnoticed. I didn’t feel that I deserved such a statistic at the time simply because I have not been in good blogging form for much of the past year. However, if anyone wonders why I bother to blog at all, the figures speak for themselves. The name of the game is communication.

And it is in the interests of local communication that I have decided to “celebrate” my 50,000 visitors by making further efforts to encourage the creation of a large network of Cardiff-based bloggers. No doubt there is a pretty impressive list of Cardiff-and-district-based bloggers somewhere (how could there not be in this capital city of almost a third of a million people) but I have yet to find it. Mind you, my wife will tell you that I am good at not finding things in a cupboard here at home – sometimes I don’t even find the right cupboard. Anyway, in the interests of preventing the few local bloggers of whom I have become aware from becoming an increasingly introspective and secretive sect, I have added a few more links to the “Cardiff bloggers” category in my blogroll and I will continue adding links as they come to my attention until the whole thing become unmanageable in this form – by which time it will also be quite useful. If your blog should be on the list just leave a comment below (keep it polite!) and I will respond appropriately.

Oh, and by the way, to my lovely regular visitors and to all the others who have dragged me kicking and screaming into the 50,000 league, thank you, you have made it all so worthwhile.

Cardiff Bloggers, part 2.

In reply to the comment from Philip Baillie following my earlier post about Cardiff Bloggers, it would not be appropriate for me to pronounce on the “best” of the Cardiff-based blogs that I have discovered so far – whatever “best” might mean.  I have linked to those that seemed the most interesting, to me anyway, when I discovered them back in September and I have found more since then.

I remain interested in finding blogs, produced (mainly) by private individuals based in and around Cardiff, rather than by commercial concerns, and preferably avoiding football, rugby and pop music obsessives! The idea is to help create an ever-widening network of local bloggers of all ages with a great variety of interests.

My earlier “Cardiff Bloggers” post was easily found via Google, or via the WordPress.com search engine, yet no other Cardiff-based blogger has contacted me so far.  Therefore it seems unlikely that any other individual or group shares my interest in assembling a local network.

In this Capital City of Wales there must be more than a couple of dozen non-commercial bloggers in a population which is well in excess of 300,000.

Cardiff bloggers

Having lived in Cardiff for nearly three years I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago to discover (via Twitter) that there really are some rather good bloggers in this city – apart from other members of my family of course! So, in the interests of widening the local network, I have added a few links in the new category, “Cardiff” , on the right side of this page.

Of course, there is no reason why there shouldn’t be “some rather good bloggers” in Cardiff. My surprise was not in how interesting their blogs proved to be but rather that they existed at all, as I had been looking for other bloggers and tweeters in Cardiff for some time and came across them quite suddenly, as if they had been hiding from me previously.

It will be interesting to see how big a network of Cardiff bloggers can be assembled over the next year or two. I will be especially interested to discover more bloggers (and tweeters for that matter) from the eastern fringes of Cardiff.

More folding bike

The Raleigh IKEA folding bike has one unfortunate weakness, namely that the chainguard is made of a rather fragile plastic. As if to emphasise the problem, when the bike is folded the chainguard becomes very vulnerable to impact with the ground or other hard object. My bike was slightly damaged in this area already when it was delivered to me. I reckoned that it would be easier to repair it than to parcel it all up and send it back but it was a long time before I carried out the repair.

Actually, it was not so much a repair as a modification and reinforcement. Originally the forward end of the chainguard was supported by a rigid black metal bracket, the bottom end of which can be seen in the picture above. The top of that bracket is hidden from view but that, too is bolted to the chainguard.  This original bracket was kept and I attached to it an additional bracing piece (coloured silver in the picture) to give added support to the chainguard. Then I curved another strip of metal to fit inside the chainguard and attached it with the three bolts shown in the picture.

I cut away about 3cm of the plastic at the botton of the chainguard which was broken already or at least cracked and serving no useful purpose. The external appearance of the bike has barely altered.

The Raleigh Oakland is gathering dust in the garage as, unfortunately, I have done very little cycling this year and I do miss it. The plain fact is that the prospect of cycling within a few miles radius of my home is not very enticing and I have been busy with lots of other things. It might be a different story if pleasant company were available but no club activities seem to apply in this area. All the same, a bit more exercise would do no harm so perhaps I should try to form a group of leisure cyclists based on the east side of Cardiff – anyone interested please comment and we can see about getting in touch.

Cardiff cycling and buses… …free!

What a pleasant surprise to read in WalesOnLine about the plans for Cardiff’s transport.  I have been disappointed by Cardiff’s provision for cyclists for some time but this scheme seems likely to bring about big improvements, and fairly quickly too.
The free bike plan for the city centre will be useful provided that some anti-theft provision can be included. Otherwise I can see a lot of Cardiff’s bikes going missing very quickly. Apparently the Paris scheme suffered from a large amount of bike theft. If the scheme proves both secure and popular I hope it can be enlarged without delay to meet the demand. If around 200,000 people travel into Cardiff daily, 60-70 free bikes spread between a dozen or so bike rack locations seems a touch less than adequate!
It occurs to me that it might be surprising to see how many older people use these bikes. I, for one, can cycle without ill effects many more miles than I can walk. Perhaps, for those who own bicycles already, a substantial increase in the numbers of bike racks in and around the city centre would be more useful than the free bikes themselves in the first instance. Then our presence, on our own bikes, might encourage others to use the free bikes when they become available.

To see the sea

For some time my daughter, Jennie, and I have been wanting to see what the shoreline looks like to the east of Cardiff Bay in the Severn estuary. The opportunity came yesterday when we set out on a walk, of uncertain length, in sunny, mild weather. We were accompanied by grandson Mk II (normally referred to as “Cheeky” on Jennie’s blog) who is not quite five years old but who walked most of the way with us and seemed to enjoy every minute as much as we did and we adopted a fairly slow pace for his sake.

Tredelerch Park, Cardiff. It will be interesting to see this in a couple of months when all the new foliage is growing.

 It wasn’t the prettiest of walks although it started quite well when we left the houses behind and walked past a large sports ground, over a railway bridge and into Tredelerch Park. Here a large lake supports dozens of coots and mallards and a pair of swans. There were other walkers in the park, some of them walking dogs, but it was quiet and a pleasant open space. From the park’s small car park we crossed a couple of roads at the roundabout next to the main entrance of the Lamby Road recycling centre and then walked a short distance along Wentloog Avenue before turning off on a footpath.
If the rest of the walk lacked picturesqueness it must be said that it had a certain character, offering for much of its length a panoramic view of a major landfill site and recycling centre, separated from our path by a reen. This is a man-made waterway which acts as a drain. These are numerous in the low-lying coastal area between Cardiff and Newport. Unlike many of the others that I have seen on my cycling excursions, this reen appeared to be  almost totally devoid of any form of life. Apart from two swans that we saw right at the beginning (and which may have been the offspring of the pair on the lake, driven away to make their own home somewhere else) there was no sign of living creatures.
After a long and slightly winding stroll we climbed on to the sea wall alongside the Severn, which is a few miles wide at this point, and waved at England on the other side. I don’t think anyone waved back. They probably had better things to do in England.

Looking across the wide Severn Estuary towards Weston-Super-Mare. Flat Holm island is just visible on the right.

The sea wall was like a railway embankment minus the railway. I believe that there are plans to complete a public footpath all the way around the coast of Wales within the next two or three years. I am not holding my breath but at least this sea wall will provide a fine base for such a footpath and I hope that those responsible for the development will have the vision to make it multi-purpose. There is adequate space for cyclists as well.

Cardiff from the sea wall at Rumney. Part of the Millenium Stadium can be seen near the middle of the picture and Capital Tower is to the right of the righthand pylon.

 The tide was out so that all we could see was several hundred yards of mud flats with the sea sparkling under the bright sun in the distance. After taking a few photographs it was time to go home.

Here we go again!

It looks pretty good for a 20-year-old doesn’t it? Or at least it did until a couple of days ago when it acquired the dent next to the headlamp. On Friday evening, four weeks (almost to the hour) after the first incident, my car was attacked again on our drive by someone armed with a double brick removed from a nearby wall. Once again the noise of the impact was muffled by double glazing and by my slight deafness and, once again, no-one was to be seen when I looked out. The culprit escaped along a short footpath which connects the closed end of our cul-de-sac to a nearby road.

This time no glass was broken (which was pure luck) but a professional repair would cost even more than it would have done the first time. Presumably the method would depend on whether an original wing could be obtained and a wing replacement carried out followed by preparation and painting. Alternatively, a good panel beater could beat out the dent and get the wing more or less back into shape, with the finishing touches done with body filler – followed by preparation and painting. The latter procedure would be more complicated than it appears at first sight because there are three slight creases built into the original shape of the wing, plus fairly sharp folds at the front and top edges.
I haven’t decided what to do about it yet other than to prevent rust getting started before the repair is done.
Once again I reported the incident to the police who arrived somewhat apologetically a couple of hours later. Two very polite officers called. One noted all the details that I could give him while the other knocked on neighbours’ front doors to find out whether anyone had seen anything but with negative results. I felt sorry for them. It was Friday evening and they were obviously having a busy time. Their radios were going mad calling them to other incidents and they hadn’t got a minute to waste.
I have thought a lot about the frequency of this sort of mindless vandalism since the first incident. There seems to be no dispute that it has been increasing over the years and no particular reason to think that it will stop increasing.
It could stop increasing though, but only if and when the great silent majority of the population decide that enough is enough and then make enough noise about it to persuade The Government to alter its spending priorities drastically. So that they cease to spend billions, that in any case we cannot afford, on unnecessary wars and new aircraft carriers, on a grossly bloated Civil Service which is clearly increasingly incompetent and inefficient, and on propping up failing businesses so that their senior executives can have their bonuses and their “jollies” as if nothing had happened.
Just think what the umpteen billion pounds saved could do if spent instead on greatly increasing the police presence on our streets, on improving local facilities for youngsters who have nothing better to do but roam the streets, on bringing back government-supported old-style apprenticeship schemes to take the place of unemployment benefit and give back to the feckless minority of our youth some pride in achievement, hope for a better future and respect for themselves and for others.