It is true to say that the majority of Bath residents live in a bubble, separated from the rest of the world and society. With the exception of housing and unemployment, which affects the entire country, us Bathonians have it easy. We live in a safe and clean city. Just look at the national news to see some of the horrible things taking place in other towns within the UK.
Still, moaning is in our nature. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t complain and Bath residents are no different. Except, as we have no real issues to concern us, we find other things to whinge about. Twitter is a great place to see such complaints.
Below are just some of the top perils to affect the residents of the Georgian city of Bath…
Seagulls
I mentioned these myself the other day (you can tell I live in Bath!). Tweets I have observed this week range from locals moaning about the gulls’ noise, existence and habit of defecating everywhere. The funniest thing was, although everyone seems to hate the birds, there were a number of tweets on Monday, made by appalled residents who had spotted some dead gulls lying in the road. What do you actually want, people?
Killer ants
The word killer is an exaggeration; although the way some people carried on, you would have thought some being on high had sent the insects to Bath to murder us all. In reality, a few larger than life ants, some with wings, hatched one hot afternoon and crawled about a bit. By the morning they were all dead. Some people blaming the seagulls for their demise. Yes, seriously.
Primark
A lot of posh toffs live in Bath. Therefore the proposal of a Primark opening in the city centre predictably sent a wave of fake outrage across the west country Internet. Until now, Bath hasn’t had a Primark – a popular, budget clothes store. The nearest one being in Bristol. No doubt the local snobs would love it on Saturday afternoons, as all the “riff raff” would leave city like rats, on the X39 bus to Bristol, to pick up some affordable rags from the shop they consider beneath them, leaving the streets of Bath free of commoners and allowing the upper classes to enjoy copious glasses of Pimms and trips to The Rec. When this Primark opens in Bath, I honestly think it will kill some of more toffs. Those who are still living after The Pound Shop opened last year.
Bath Spa
Not the train station station, named Bath Spa. Nor the posh swimming pool of the same name. No I’m on about the city where I reside, known as Bath. It has come to my attention that some people are calling the city “Bath Spa”. These people are clearly very, very wrong, but they seem insistent upon it. To be honest, I couldn’t give a shit, but it’s annoyed many tweeters, who are again suffering from fake outrage at the fact their city has been called anything but its correct title. Snobs. If you ask me, we should go back to calling the city Aquae Sulis. I’m a man of class and tradition, after all.
I’ve been following a lot of the Ashes series this past fortnight. When I say ‘a lot’, I spent the last two weekends watching non-stop cricket on my iPad. I did little else. I am not normally a huge cricket fan. I’ll watch the odd England international and have seen Somerset play during one of their annual visits to Bath. I’m no David Lloyd.
While my knowledge of cricket is similar to that of Gareth Southgate’s understanding of football (i.e. I know nothing), I have thoroughly enjoyed watching Australia suffer at the hands of Ian Bell and the rest of the England team.
I do like the difference between how football and cricket players conduct themselves in post-match interviews. Your typical professional footballer will scratch the bag of his ear nervously, using the words “you know” a thousand times before hastily leaving the interview to commit some form of adultery. Whereas your England cricket player will be polite, confident and gracious throughout. When his questions have all been answered, he’ll go to a local orphanage and read children a bedtime story.
Even off the field they’re different. I loved how Graeme Swann got arrested for drink driving in the most middle-class way possible. After a dinner party, where he drank a few glasses of wine, he arrived home (by taxi), to find his wife’s kitten trapped under the floorboards of their home. In a scene fit for a BBC sitcom, Swann is forced to drive to Asda in the middle of the night, to buy screwdrivers to get the cat out. A decent chap is Swann, who was found not guilty, and rightly so.
How does your typical footballer get charged with drink driving? No doubt in his Bentley, speeding down a motorway at 120 mph, after he has spent an evening at a nightclub drinking excessively. Probably with prostitutes. They too would be found not guilty, but that is because our legal system is fucked.
Top-flight footballers are generally twats, whereas crickets are role models.
Despite my love of football and interest in cricket, I’m not really the sporting type. However, during my school days, cricket was the only sport I chose to play – as opposed to other sporting activities, which were forced upon me during PE. I always thought I was pretty good. In reality, I was probably rubbish and the people I played with were just being nice to me, or equally poor.
Watching the cricket this weekend did make me wonder though. Maybe I was good at it. What would have happened if I had carried on with the sport, instead of retiring at the ripe old age of 9? I could have been Joe Root.
There is always a way I can resurrect my cricket career. I may not be as good now as I was during my school days, but if I can find a distant relative who is an Aussie convict, I think I could get myself into the Australian cricket team in time for the third Ashes test next month.
It’s still very hot. To withstand the heat, I have had all the windows open in my flat during the day and evening. Forget spiders coming in, my fear of catching heat stroke has outweighed any acrophobia I have.
Some creatures did find their way into my flat through the windows. Firstly a couple of mosquitoes. Now I know I am blessed not to live in a country where you can catch malaria, but I don’t like the idea of being dinner to a flying bug. While lying in bed the other night, I heard the distinct, high-pitched buzz of a mozzie – this lead to a somewhat bizarre battle at midnight, involving me, a can of fly spray and two tiny flying bugs in my bedroom. Ha ha ha! Die bugs die. You’re not eating me – remember, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. After polluting the atmosphere within my flat, the buzzing stopped. I went to sleep, amid the fumes, hoping my heart wouldn’t stop in my slumber.
I didn’t die in my sleep (although you probably guessed that as you’re reading this). I did however clearly fail to kill another bug during the late night battle. Yesterday evening, while in the bathroom answering a call of nature, a huge daddy-long-legs came flying out from behind the shower and towards the light. Now I’m not afraid of these, which is a little surprising considering my spider-phobia. Although this one was large and had a massive thing hanging from its body, which I can only guess was a stinger, seventh leg or super-sized penis. The insect may have been pleased to see me. I was not pleased to see it. It’s not a nice experience to occur when you’re on the toilet and it did scare me quite a bit – let’s just say I was sitting in the right place!
I thought I would take advantage of the hot weather this afternoon and do something constructive. The annual defrost of the fridge-freezer. I started at midday and it is still dripping away, the ice very much in tact, despite souring temperatures in the flat. Why does ice take so long to melt? If the polar ice caps melt as slow as the ice in my freezer, we won’t have to worry about flooding for a billion years.
If you are not a resident of Bath, you will probably not appreciate tonight’s blog, as it is solely going to rant about the seagull population in the city. It’s shit. There are more seagulls in Bath than on Brighton beach at a seagull rock festival.
The thing is, you can always hear them. If you are in Bath and are reading this, turn any television or music off and open your window. I can guarantee you will be able to hear the distinct cackle from the vile bird.
Tuesday night I was at Bath City. A single chip found its way onto the football pitch. Within minutes a scene fit for an Alfred Hitchcock film descended upon the football ground – loads of seagulls fighting over a soggy piece of fried potato. There must have been more seagulls in the ground than there were fans.
Luckily I live away from the town centre where I hear the gull problem is a lot worse. The council blame the bird population on household and business rubbish thrown onto the streets on bin men day. In this case, I am going to side with the residents and businesses. They dispose of their rubbish in black bin bags. How else are they supposed to get rid of it, when Bath remains one of the few cities in the UK still not to use wheelie bins? I tell a lie, we used to have a wheelie bin in my set of flats. It then got taken away as the council got a new bin lorry without a mechanism for lifting the bins. Surely if everyone put their rubbish in a sealed plastic bin, the seagulls wouldn’t get fed?
BANES should introduce wheelie bins to all. Help us out. After that, any resident caught littering gets fined. Any tourist caught feeding the seagulls, and believe me, I’ve seen it, is drowned in the River Avon. Seems fair to me.
I ranted to Simon about this via text, who pointed out that until Bath’s toff population start to moan, the council will do nothing. Simon is of course correct. The seagulls never seem to target the expensive, Georgian properties on the outskirts of the city and in surrounding countryside, where the most affluent live. Local authorities bow to the wealthy, anyway – just look at the difference in council tax rates between the bottom and top band – minute if you compare the range in actual property costs.
Maybe the toffs, who no doubt cried to their MP when fox hunting was made illegal, should take up a new sport – gull hunting. Everyone is happy then.
I think it was better when I just blogged about football.
It’s hot. I’m not complaining. No, not at all. It would be rather hypocritical of me to do so, especially after I moaned about the winter we had, which seemed to drag on forever. It is quite warm though, isn’t it?
This weekend has been spent primarily in my flat, wandering around in nothing more than my Leeds United shorts, drinking copious amounts of water, watching the excellent Ashes series, stopping only to piss out the water I have consumed by the gallon.
Nights aren’t much better. Due to a family of foxes which live nearby, I cannot sleep with the windows open. Doing so causes me to be awoken at 3am to their loud shrieks and screams. Regular readers of my blog will know that while I am against fox hunting as a sport, I am currently lobbying it to be brought back, but instead of in the countryside, onto the streets of Bath. As well as killing the foxes; the hunters, hounds and horses will be permitted to kill/maim other unsociable creatures such as seagulls and the charity-muggers which plague the streets.
Until my request to bring back hunting reaches the House of Commons I guess I am left with two choices – sleep with the window open, and suffer sleep deprivation thanks to noisy foxes – or sleep with the window closed, and suffer sleep deprivation thanks to lying in what is basically an oven, hot enough to cook a Christmas turkey.
Like I said, I’m not complaining.
About Me
So you stumbled across my blog. No doubt after searching for something bizarre on Google. Before you hit that 'Back Button', why not stay and have a read for a few minutes?
If you are after a website which gives advice on how to hack an iPhone X, download the latest Steven Seagal movie, or view nudy ladies, you've come to the wrong place and may now press 'Back'.
However, if you would like a lifestyle blog, written by a 30-something chap, living in Bath (England), feast your eyes on this.
You won't discover how to copy PlayStation 4 games. What you will find is a blog, covering life in the West Country, the highs and lows of supporting two unsuccessful football teams, while sharing a house with a wife and rabbit.
All written by a man, somewhere on the sanity-scale between normal and eccentric.
