“Oh!” said the Boy Wonder (all other tactics for delaying our departure from the park having failed). “Flowers! Go look at the pitty flowers?”
“They are lovely, aren’t they?” I said. “Beautiful.”
“Byooful,” agreed B, attaching himself to the railing.
R and I had not had high hopes of today’s trip to the Principality, the weather being vile and Chez B being in in a state o’ chassis*, with builders and their tools and materials everywhere you looked, a humongous skip parked on the drive and effectively blocking ingress and egress, and the lower stairs in the process of being semi-demolished and rebuilt. And this was before the workmen drilled through a wire or something, and tripped the alarm in irrecoverable fashion, turning the entire building into the Seventh Circle of Hell for the rest of the morning.
“Wassat noise?” enquired the Boy, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Which noise?” I said. “The drilling, or the sawing, or the alarm going nee-nah?” “Yes,” said B.
I’m sure it will all be worth it in the end.
Anyway, it turned out to be one of those days when it paid to begin with low expectations, because we had an absolutely excellent time, with the Boy sunny, chatty, and charmingly mischievous throughout. After his lunch we decided to brave the park despite the weather, so we popped him into wet suit and wellies, and squelched away from the House of Pain. “I don’ wan’ to have a nap,” said B warningly, about five minutes before dropping soundly asleep, and staying that way for a full hour. When he woke up he did Swinging in the Rain with R (“Higher, Grandad! I wan’ to go higher!”), followed by some work on the climbing frame. Then he coaxed us both onto the roundabout, which is when we discovered that old people can’t be on roundabouts for very long without feeling distinctly sick, so he got to use it in solitary state after that, with R pushing. Then more swinging – by which time the cold and damp had struck through to my bones, though they were having no discernible effect on the Boy, so I coaxed him out of the playground with the suggestion of splashing in puddles.
We had to take a circuitous route out of the park to avoid photobombing (filmbombing?) a BBC drama that was being shot in various bits of it, and unfortunately this took us past the bandstand, which lost us another twenty minutes or so. But eventually, by splashy degrees, we made it almost all the way to the exit – which is when we had to stop and admire the flowers. I’m not really a fan of British municipal planting – I much prefer the more naturalistic drifts of flowers and grasses I’ve seen in other places such as Belgium – but as these things go, I have to say that Cardiff Council do it pretty well. I’d been admiring this bed of tulips and forget-me-nots even before B homed in on it, and R has chosen this image as his favourite of the day because he liked it too. In the seemingly unlikely event that we get a fine day in Cardiff before the spring bedding is ripped out and replaced, I’ll try to bring you a photo of my favourite bed in this park, which contains brown and purple tulips and deep red bellis perennis. It sounds unlikely, but it works.
*Juno and the Paycock (Seán O’Casey). English ‘A’ level text, 1974. It occurs to me, nearly fifty years later, that the Irish might have some comment to make about this.
