Cardiff Bus Station To Be Rebuilt Brick-By-Brick

Ben Wildsmith

It starts before you even get there. If your flight is from London, and let’s face it unless your destination features 24hr access to Carling Black Label it will be, then some sort of odyssey is in store before you can even dream of negotiating security frisk-downs.

Your choices are threefold. You can drive to the shoddily-tarmaced farm entrance 35 miles away from the airport, where a one-eyed operative in a khaki jacket will take your keys so his less verbal colleague can park your car in a field you will never see before ushering you on to a minibus.

You can pay for actual airport parking. I’ve never done this, but judging by the price, I assume that a Hollywood star of your choice picks you and your car up from home before ensuring that you are sexually satisfied and parking your vehicle inside a Faberge egg on double yellow lines outside Arrivals.

The robbing bastards.

I’m on the bus, of course. Leaving home a full thirteen hours before the flight, I must pass three hours in Wetherspoons before it leaves.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to that on the day-to-day. I’d happily spend all day every day in there instead of working, I get more exercise going for a pee in ‘spoons than I do earning it.

Perception

It’s a problem of perception. This is supposed to be my ‘me time’. All that dignified toil and diligent saving has brought me here and whilst an Ultimate Burger Meal Deal would usually be an unthinkable treat, today it seems to underline the bargain-basement nature of my life in general.

I nicked a couple of mustard sachets and binned them later in case I meet Trotsky in the afterlife.

For a laugh, go on one of the innumerable ‘Cardiff in the good old days’ Facebook groups and insult the old bus station.

To hear the oldsters defend it you’d think it were the gateway to Shangri La, rather than a piss-reeking waystation to Ponty.

Still, though, they have a point. A unified point of departure and arrival into the city centred the place for us.

Now, buses depart from random points that seem to have no geographical rationale.

Mine is going from David Lloyd George Avenue at quarter to one in the morning. From what I’ve read of the Goat Major’s lifestyle, hanging around Bute Street’s soulless little sister at that hour wouldn’t have been his style.

Adventures

We gather there with intentions diverse as the globe. Some of us are off on adventures, others anxiously trying to reach home. Everyone is a long way from where they want to be and there’s a quiet camaraderie in that.

Politicians, of course, don’t experience kindly glances at bus stops very often. Hotel workers dashing to see stricken relatives at home will never show up in their rhetoric. Where are the votes in that?

Airports, like hospitals, are places that process humanity en masse. As you are ordered about, told to take off items of clothing, groped, scanned, and scrutinised it’s a job to hold on to your sense of humanity at all.

Flashes of humour and compassion from workers in these places go further than I reckon they imagine, as the official attitude is necessarily of suspicion.

Even the police require a reason to stop you, whereas in the airport you are assumed to be a bomb-laden, drug-carrying people trafficker as soon as you get there. Jesus, butt, I can get that at work…

Finally, you are disgorged into the departure area where the natural light and release from official scrutiny is apt to persuade you that a tenner for a pint is reasonable.

See you on the other side.