A pub at 11am is a strange, oddly sombre place at the best of times. The crowd usually consists of hangover-nursing stragglers ordering a cooked breakfast after a big night out, the early starters getting the first pint in, and the older blokes who've just found a nice, relatively quiet place to get a cheap, relatively nice coffee with their newspapers.
On the morning of the Queen's funeral, at first glance, the Owain Glyndŵr pub in Cardiff didn't seem much different. Around 20 people sat around the fairly spacious city centre drinking spot as the funeral was shown on basically every screen (except for those bizarrely showing a cricket match between Sweden and Denmark) and the volume was cranked up high.
And in those moments where the music went quiet as the Queen's coffin was prepared for its procession to Westminster Abbey, the pub was deadly, unnaturally, silent. Even speaking up to order a coffee felt wrong.
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The significance of the pub's name wasn't lost on me, especially since the King's visit to Wales on Glyndŵr day angered a lot of people in Wales. Michael Sheen was scathing of that timing, saying that if it was done on purpose, "it seems insensitive to the point of insulting". It was initially hard to tell whether the mood in the pub was one of deferential respect or genuine interest - with people's attention only half-focused on the proceedings. But once the Royal family appeared on screen behind their mother, grandmother and great-grandmother's coffin, all eyes pivoted towards, and then stayed glued on, the screens.
The crowd was generally mixed in age and increased in numbers as the funeral went on. This might've just been the usual lunch crowd - and chatting with people there, a lot were only visiting the pub for something to do on a bank holiday where almost everything was closed.
Some were genuinely just casual passers-by, like James, 35, from Cardiff, who seemed generally indifferent. He said: "I was supposed to be working a day shift but the build was shut, so I'm here waiting for my friend to finish work, not to watch the funeral. I was a bit gutted when I found out the Queen was dead."
Others, though, were there more deliberately. One 66-year-old man, who didn't want to be named, told me: "I came to watch the funeral today in a pub because I'm at work, so I've taken my lunch early to have a look."
He explained why people might gravitate to the pub for such a big moment: "I was around when televisions weren't in public houses - back when we had the coronation, and King Charles' investiture as Prince of Wales. Today the public house is more of a focal point, and many more people will watch it in a pub than they would've back then."
On whether he feels a duty towards the royals, he said: "I think everyone's a royalist in some way or another. I think my generation are still partly royalist where the younger ones aren't so much."
That generation gap was especially clear when speaking to father and son Mark, 46, and Ethan, 18. The pair were visiting Cardiff from Gloucester ahead of Ethan starting a police training course through the University of South Wales.
Mark, gesturing towards his son, said: "I'm a royalist but he's not!" However, Ethan pointed out he'd still happily swear an oath to the King when he started his course.
Peter, 34, originally from Guernsey but a Cardiff resident of 15 years, sits squarely in the middle of that generation gap - and his attitude towards the royals reflects that. He said: "I'm actually here to kill some time while waiting for my mum, but now I've found somewhere to watch the funeral it's actually quite a nice atmosphere. In general I've got no problem with the Royal family. I'm not a massive royalist but it's a nice tradition and I don't really see the harm in it.
"It's something which I definitely have some emotional connection to, specifically because my own grandmother is 89. I think the memory of watching it in a pub will really stick with me; even if not everyone is here specifically to watch it, there's a definite hush in here."
The name of the pub - in many ways directly at odds with the level of attention the royals have been getting - didn't really factor into people's thoughts. This may have been because so many of the people sipping beer and watching the funeral had the tell-tale packed suitcases of tourists passing through, unaware of the debate raging around the Prince of Wales title.
Susan, visiting her daughter from the USA and visiting Cardiff to get away from the London crowds, said: "It's very unusual. It's like if a President died, that's what I can relate it to.
"My closest comparison is when JFK passed away, because I'm old enough to remember that funeral. This is not what we planned for my visit and it's very interesting, as an American, to be here during this once in a lifetime situation."
Ultimately, it was just clear that the funeral was an objectively massive event. Not everybody was there to mourn, not everybody was a particular fan of the royals, and not everybody was even there on purpose. It would be unfair to say that Cardiff, as a city, had fallen into a deep and sombre moment of mourning. The city centre was a ghost town during the funeral, but mainly due to the raft of shop closures that accompanied the Bank Holiday.
When the new King visited the city on Friday, September 16, whether you fell on the side of the crowds waving earnestly to the King outside the Senedd, the Castle, and Llandaff Cathedral - or whether you were one of the protestors calling the monarchy's very existence into question - it was impossible not to notice the visit when you were out and about.
The funeral felt very different. In a pub, you'd be forgiven for not realising was open, on a usually-busy street reaching almost lockdown levels of desertion, a few dozen sets of eyes silently swivelled from pints of beer to a collection of TV screens.
A room full of people, not particularly united in their views on the monarchy, not particularly there out of a deliberate desire to watch the proceedings, nonetheless doing the same thing, together, for a brief moment. You'll always remember where you were during the Queen's funeral. I was at the pub.
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