CwpanAur coffee concerts at the Museum

A good lunchtime concert with the Badke Quartet - A Sad Pavan for These Distracted Tymes (an apposite title) both original and Maxwell Davies versions; Britten's Third Quartet and Mendelssohn's last quartet - written after death of Fanny Mendelssohn and full of grief and rage. Good audience in the plush semicircular Reardon Smith theatre. Afterwards, a stroll through John Piper's Welsh landscape drawings and paintings, bony dissected hills and rocks, washes in unexpected blues and yellows, nothing at all like his architectural studies, more reminiscent of Henry Moore's Sleepers. Grebes nesting (with two eggs laid) on the Dock Feeder. A map I bought in Bristol last week showed Cardiff Docks in 1915 - where we live was a railway marshalling yard, between the now-filled-in West Bute Dock and the still-water-filled East Bute Dock - so no greenfield site there. Coal dust black, more likely. As digging a few inches down still shows.