Like the sinister, seething swarm of clacking bureaucrats who have made London such an obstacle course for the unwary, the crooked builders and smirking small-time retail tycoons who run piddling small towns have jostled to squeeze a quart into a pint pot and cover the narrow streets of their cities with incomprehensible paint and irritating signs and arrows. In the case of Bath, these frightful men and women, worthy successors to the syphilitic, nose-dripping, smelly-trousered aldermen of a couple of centuries ago, and the vacant uprooted peasants who man their Mickey Mouse camera systems, have made their jerry-built Georgian Butlin's-for-toffs noticeably traffic-free.
It isn't really the thirty quid I mind, or the fact that the bus lane, in which of course none of the Cathedral City's thirty or so town buses is to be seen, must have been the obvious place to be (or I wouldn't have been there). What I mind is the singularly unflattering portrait of my car, stretched and flattened to resemble a huge grinning silver cowpat.
This is fashion airbrushing in reverse. I will email Charlize Theron and Jordan to ask if they can recommend a decent Hollywood (or better still Philadelphia) vanity lawyer. A girl has her pride.
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Goodness me Lud! First it's a damned conspiracy to hold you up as you pursue your lawful purpose, now it's smelly trousered aldermen using inferior cameras & photoshop software to traduce your car.
Did you make any New Year resolutions btw? Something like, I must try to be more controversial or similar ;)
Edited by woodbines on 16/01/2010 at 18:02
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Maybe it's a warning of what they will do to your car if they catch you again.
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I used to live in central Bath Lud. It was even then, the mid to late 1980s, a bit of a nightmare for traffic but it more or less worked if you timed it right. I hadn't been back until a month or so ago since '92. You know how it is, you think you know a place pretty well and all I needed to do was drop someone at the railway station. Totally unrecognisable. That whole southern end of the town has changed beyond belief. Huge new shopping complex. Re-routed roads. Bus lanes everywhere. Horrible. I got lost in a town I used to know like the back of my hand.
Incidentally, I followed a PT Cruiser through our miserable little forgotten Cromwellian northern outpost today. For some reason I think I suddenly got the irony of it. They have always previously failed to get my attention even to the point of mild scorn but this one was being driven by a sort of elderly ZZ Top clone or maybe more like a Seasick Steve character. It all rather worked as a package.
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Mind you that's the best written gripe about a fixer I've ever seen in these hallowed passages in all the years etc....
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I used to live in central Bath Lud.
I work there, 3 days a week. Was it in that bit where the traffic takes it in turns, outside Waitrose? One of our meeting rooms overlooks it - nice view of the abbey as well, which is lucky because it's called 'abbeyview'.
Fortunately I walk up to the office from the train station, and I admit the idea of driving there doesn't appeal. You have my sympathy.
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Lud, that's absolutely dreadful. No, I can't see the frivolity in this either...
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Brilliant bit of writing though...
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But Sire, they've got to fund their final salary pensions some way, now that the Ice bank has gorn belly up ... look at that 30 squid as a donation, I'm sure you'll fell better for it friend.
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Thats the most amusing piece of literate scorn i've seen in years, much obliged m'Lud.
In their clouded minds do the beasts that stalk the corridors of the borough council not understand that the more unpleasant nay impossible they make it for those worth cultivating as visitors (those with some lolly) the less likelihood there is of said visit occuring.
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Rock on Lud. Anyone who moans at those writings just doesn't get it anyway. Any of it!!
Yours in admiration,
MD
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I drove into a place called Bath
for joy for fun - and for a laugh
The motor singing free from pain
mimsering along - in a bus lane
In City Hall there was a cry
An outsider, here we spy
Lash those lenses on that grill
Coffers here - they must fill
It`s `Central London` in his barge
teeth a gleaming - looming large
Lets have him now - take a shot
He`s been before but has forgot
We shifted lanes - for the bus
let the motorist curse and cuss
preserved by Kodak for posterity
An end to City Hall`s Austerity
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What I mind is the singularly unflattering portrait of my car stretched and flattened to resemble a huge grinning silver cowpat.
Your PT Cruiser was hardly grist to the brochure photographer's mill in the first place though, was it ?
Nicely expressed. That and the wine made me chortle. I thank you.
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Damn, Hawkeye beat me to it. I can only add that even Renoir couldnt add sufficient curves to a picture of PT cruzer and make it look anything resembling voluptious.
did you get the key to the merde de vache fixed by the way?
Edited by Altea Ego on 16/01/2010 at 23:20
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Voluptuous eh... there aren't many of those and they can be a bit embarrassing. Delahaye tourer by Saoutchik... pretty but no thanks. Mind you I'd rather have one of those than an Altea.
Fob working fine thanks. Car has given up shouting Rape! when key inserted in ignition.
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Bath is the nearest thing I have to a home town. I was raised there to nearly eight years old during the second world war, and lived there again in the mid-fifties. My parents left for Dunfermline while I was away at university and off in London with the raggle taggle gipsies oh, then lived nearby in Batheaston in the mid-sixties.
My mother who wasn't entirely English loved the place, my father who came from Bristol despised it. The term 'jerry built' comes straight from him. Mind you, the colonial and imperial fortunes that led to the development of Bath, acquired in India, Africa and the Caribbean mainly and in the most spectacular cases depending heavily on the 'triangular' - i.e. slave and sugar - trade, must have come quite often partly from Bristol which was a big slaving centre. My father wasn't quite so keen on discussing that.
Both my parents are buried there and I have a deep affection for the place anyway. But that doesn't make me blind to its faults. It's provincial, poncy and nearly as smug as Bristol, the pubs are rubbish and then there's the scrofulous, whining, grasping, moronic, aftershave-wearing council.
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