Croeso i Gaerdydd

As promised, some initial incoherent observations about the country and city we are slowly learning to call home...

* £9.80 to cross the bridge over River Severn into Wales in a van?! Croeso i Gymru indeed! (Incidentally, the van we'd hired to transport all our worldly possessions was as anticipated white - but sadly I forgot to purchase the prerequisite copy of the Sun to display proudly in the window.)

* The Welsh language really is marvellous, but at least partly because it's so cheeky. In many cases it seems that, to make an English word Welsh, all you have to do is change or knock off a letter or two and Bob's your uncle. Lesson one: "coffee" is "coffi". Lesson two: "cinema" is "sinema". Lesson three: "theatre" is "theatr". I'll be fluent before long - or, rather, as fluent as it's possible to be in a language with so many consonants...

* The Cardiff accent (in English), like the Nottingham and Birmingham accents before it, makes me smile. There's something mellifluous about it - even when the speaker is talking about a routine surgical operation that was botched and resulted in the horrific death of the patient. That this particular speaker was preparing our food in a takeaway at the time didn't do much for our appetites.

* Cardiff seems to be full of disused churches with smashed windows. This has lead me to conclude that it's a godless, dissolute place and thus helped to explain why Charlotte Church is so at home here. We'll fit in fine, too.

* Speaking of la Church, no sightings of either her or that muppet Henson yet. Perhaps that's because we haven't ventured out onto the notorious sick-strewn booze strip that is St Mary's Street of an evening yet. Or perhaps it's because she knows I'd drink her under the table.

* Churches (of the ecclesiastical kind) aren't the only things that are boarded up round here. So are what would have been both our locals, the Moorland and the Tredegar. A shame we didn't move in earlier, because I could quite possibly have kept them both in business. In fact, I could have immortalised the Moorland on SWSL in much the same way as JonnyB has the Village Pub, and before too long I'm sure people would have been flocking to Splott and hopscotching all the dogshit on the pavements to see what all the fuss was about.

* Sorry, yes, our house is situated in Splott. It's an area of the city, not (as one friend suggested) the place where a children's TV show is set. There's something very strange about the street names round here. On the other side of the very logically named Newport Road, for instance, there are a few streets named after East Anglian cities and towns. Meanwhile, the roads off Clifton Street on one side are all named after precious stones - Sapphire Street, Topaz Street etc - whereas on the other they're all named after types of precious metals. Well, it starts off with Gold Street and Silver Street, but before long there's evidence of some serious barrel-scraping - as you go further south, Copper Street, Lead Street, Iron Street, Tin Street and Zinc Street. Best of all is the other road that runs perpendicular to them and parallel to Clifton Street - it's just called Metal Street. As for us, we live on Florence Street. Sadly, it isn't one of a whole load of roads named after Italian cities of global significance during the Renaissance period. Or characters from 'The Magic Roundabout'.

* Splott has, erm, character. And, like most places with character, it also appears to have characters. Take, for instance, the cheeky young whippersnappers whom we heard greeting a passing cyclist with an array of airborne glass bottles. Probably the same youngsters who, no doubt high on nothing more than youthful exuberance, lobbed something sharp and metallic in our direction when we were unable to furnish one of their number with a cigarette a few nights later. More harmless is the bloke I'm going to call Headphone Man - with good reason, for a pair of those enormous DJ style headphones appears to be permanently attached to his pony-tailed head. I've seen him a couple of times, sat on his step with the front door open, nodding and tapping his slippers on the pavement. Once he looked up and smiled at me. I hurried on, though. If there's one rule I live by, it's 'Never stop to talk to anyone wearing slippers in public'.

* If someone offers to take you "up the Valleys" there's no need to snigger and politely decline - it's not a euphemism. It's a bit grim up there, mind - claustrophobic and narrow in the valleys themselves, to the extent that you instinctively feel the air's clearer and cleaner when you get up and out onto the hills. I think there's a series about the area on BBC2 Wales at the moment, imaginatively titled 'Valleys', but it clashes with 'Coronation Street' or something equally unmissable, so it's gone unwatched. It wasn't all grim, though - we also went to Caerphilly Castle, which boasts its own leaning tower (albeit not quite on the same scale as that in Pisa) and an assortment of medieval weaponry, including a device designed to fire "large darts" and allegedly sufficiently powerful to skewer seven men through in one fell swoop. Probably not as accurate as Raymond van Barneveld though.