I've spent the past week at my parents' house in Cardiff, splitting my time between sleeping, eating and singing at the Cathedral. It's been a good week, and, rarely, all 5 of us have been in the same place at once.
Coming home always seems to be different each time, yet still it's somehow reassuring, and it always makes me compare my experience of London (and Oxford before that) with Cardiff, since those are the only places I've ever lived.
As I got off the train and exited the station this Monday, I was struck by the freshness of the sea breeze and the high quality of the air, made apparent to me after having been away for about 3 months, since I went to Florida.
Then, as I walked through the city centre, I observed other changes. The centre Cardiff I very quiet at 10 a.m. on a Monday. I'd never noticed this before. Making my way down Mill Lane, I spotted that one of the nightclubs had a sign that boasted it's "Cardiff's London-style club". What the hell is that supposed to mean? That the drinks are over-priced, or that London is somehow some magic Dick Whittington metropolis? It reminds of that brilliant episode of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin where Perrin decides to have an anti-sale, increasing the prices of goods at his shop, a shop based on the premise of selling only absolute rubbish [media link]. In the case of the club it appears that if you advertise that you're more expensive, people will buy it. Such is the perversity of human nature.
As the week's progressed, I've noticed other things that are changing here. House prices and rents, for one. Jack came to visit for the day on Wednesday, and we went down to Cardiff Bay. I was astonished to see in the window of an estate agent that an ordinary one-bed flat was going for £650 a month. That doesn't place it far behind London prices at all, considering that I'd paid £600 per month for my studio in Cricklewood. Then yesterday, a medium latté (or whatever retarded Spanish-Italian-French-Esperanto hybrid term they use for 'medium' in that particular coffee chain) cost me £2.19 at Costa. They were charging £1.60 for own-brand muffins as well.
All of this wouldn't be quite so crazy if wages kept pace with those in the Smoke, but it's a completely different story. Looking at jobs advertised in the South Wales Echo this week, it seems that the contractor for rail staff is paying around £10K salary for a full-time assistant station manager. Contrast that with the London Underground worker who was in the press earlier this year for taking stupid amount of time on the sick, and was on a £32K salary as a driver of tube trains.
It's the inconsistency that's baffling. It would appear that there's some group that has enough money to pay London prices for houses and consumer goods and services, despite the enormous wage disparity between the two capitals. I can only guess that Cardiff prices are being driven up by some combination of equity in properties already owned, the rentier buy-to-let brigade (curse them), and the stupid levels of consumer credit available in this country (Britain now has a higher amount of personal debt per capita than the USA, which in turn is well above mainland Europe). It's not a pretty picture, and I am sorry to see this sort of ludicrous price inflation is now affecting even the Principality I call home.
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