Wrinkles in time

Bill O'Keefe, our excellent tour guide on Saturday, has a compendious knowledge of his native Cardiff and it was all too easy to miss the numerous asides he added to the main story. One of them concerned the arrival of vast numbers of Irish immigrants to work in industrial South Wales during the 19th century and especially the mass migration forced by starvation during the potato famine of the 1840s. (Bill assumes his own surname can be attributed to that influx.) The new arrivals may have found the streets paved with gold in a metaphorical sense but in reality, we learnt, many of Cardiff's pavements are made of the Irish limestone that was used as ballast in times when incoming Irish cargo ships were less crowded. Today, as we were walking through Canton, I looked down and there it was, layered like history itself.

Earlier I spotted another bizarre convergence in this 1670 majolica plate in the National Museum. Who would have thought that Josephine Baker's notorious Danse sauvage banana skirt from 1925 had a 17th century precursor?!

[Addendum to yesterday's blip. Some commenters mentioned Shirley Bassey's connection with Tiger Bay and [i]Atoll [/i] kindly reminded me that the Welsh band Manic Street Preachers wrote a song about that very fact. You can see Ms Bassey herself singing it here.]

We will be returning home tomorrow and I hope to catch up with some sadly neglected journals.