Pure Gummidge

Following complaints from my readers, this is not a blog about London. This is a blog about feeling at home - whatever and whereever that means.

I was lucky enough to spend saturday in the city of Bath, a beautiful place - All cream stone, dark roofs and green trees. I must confess though, I prefer it in the summer, when the pale stone is bathed in the July sun (and yet kept refreshingly cool by the breezes sweeping in from the country), water crashing over the weir below Putney Bridge, everything dust and warm noise...

As I reminisce and write this, with impeccable timing, it begins to rain. Ah well.

I put away my notebook and rise from my bench in the Botanical Gardens of Victoria Park, I remember the numerous childhood trips to visit my grandmother in her village to the East. I remember climbing the steep-sided hills around Batheaston - Bannerdown with the fosse way along its back, the level top of Little Sailisbury where a Roman fort once stood, Brown's Folly with its low pointed tower just rising above the treeline (one of my earliest memories, my dad holding me and pointing up the stony interior as we sheltered from the rain) - feeling the mud pull at my boots (always the black mud, no matter what the season, because of all the springs under the ground) and the sunshine toasting the back of my neck.

This is solid, dependable country, I can feel it through the soles of my shoes.

The city itself is the province of tourists much of the time, chasing ghosts of Austen around the stately fronts of Royal Circus and Cresent (a magnificent set of buildings, themselves built on foundations of straw, so I'm told - there's a metaphor there somewhere), or of the fashionable set in their modernised townhouses and barbour jackets, but the country around it is firmly in the hands of sensible, rational people with West Country accents, whoever the land itself belongs to.

Kids race past me on those odd, back-to-front scooters, their parents trailing after them in green wellingtons with buckles on the side. This is definately the posh area of bath, up near the Crescent and Brock Street, but I can still hear the comforting tones of the country in amongst the breathier accents of the well-to-do. In a world of uncertainties, I find its slight burr a source of calm - problems seem to be pushed slightly into perspective.

Problems in the cowshed? Not to worry, mate. Late for your train? Hop in, my lad, we'll have you down there in two shakes. Socio-economic problems surrounding a two-state solution to the situation in Gaza and the West Bank? Give I a moment with a pencil and paper and we'm work something out.

Only on the issue of rugby do these unflappable people find real source of anguish. Gloucester and Bath are rugby towns, and even my grandma, from Derby orginally, has cleaved to the local passion. The afternoon's six nations fixture between England and France had her, my uncle and cousin transfixed. They don't seem to do outbursts of triumphant joy in the West Country - a try from England drew shouts and cheers, certainly, but they seemed more like the acknowledgement of a job well done, a standard met. Alternatively, fumbles and slips were met with calls of disappointment. "Come on my lad", they seemed to say. "You know better than to knock that on. And where's the defence? You'm playing scrappy, and you knows better".

No, my cousins do not talk like pirates. That would be the good folk of Devon and Cornwall - and if you are brave enough, I reccomend those of you who know her to ask JBS for a sample.

The people of Somerset are a reliable lot, and I'll miss the land and the people until I can get back down here; probably this summer at the earliest unfortunately.

And the beer. I'll definately miss the beer.

Bath, February 2011