Bath, of course, thrives by stoking a whole cruise liner full of hype. This year it’s Jane Austen but the Georgian builders also get roped in to set the scene (please don’t mention the slave trade) and otherwise we have to make do with the Romans who turned a boggy hot spring into a R&R destination for grubby and probably smelly legionnaires who needed a soak after marching around subduing the natives. We do not talk about the brothels on London Road, the extra marital uses of the Sidney Gardens or, indeed the drinking dens and brothels of Kingsmead. We don’t talk about Bath’s industrial past; the pong of the dyeworks, the pioneering engineering, the digging of the Kennet and Avon canal which – when joined to the Somerset coal canal – provided an easy route for transporting coal from the North Somerset to what William Cobbett called the great wen (London). We don’t talk about the pollution of the river which was probably as bad then as it is today, or the Great Western railway which most of us can’t afford to travel on. We don’t talk about the Somerset and Dorset line (known as the S&D i.e. slow and dirty) or the twin tunnels which were so small in girth that engine drivers and firemen expected to pass out regularly in the carbon monoxide and smoke, praying that they didn’t do it at the same time.
Perhaps I’m being unfair. If you drive into any major European city; in France for example, it’s almost obligatory to pass a few cement works. Drive north from Barcelona and you’ll see an industrial landscape comparable with the finest of Middlesbrough or Wolverhampton – and they don’t brag about it either. But personally I’m glad that I can still walk along the riverside and the canal and find hundreds of interesting plants without the danger (apart from some cyclists) of meeting anyone wearing a voluminous dress and bonnet or a soldier sporting a skirt, hobnailed sandals and shaved legs. Bath is divided by the river into two utterly different psychogeographical regions. North of the river is the posh, Georgian architectural bit where the visitors come, and to the south where the industry used to be, we have student accommodation and the uncontrolled growth of hideously expensive retirement properties which are a very profitable way of extracting value from pension savings – and for anyone contemplating buying one I’d advise that finding a GP, an NHS dentist or an appointment with the NHS Hospital may be the quickest way to lose the rest of your savings. Private care is booming here.
But a quiet, early morning stroll along the riverside path reminds me that nature always manages to make an appearance regardless of the noise and dust of building sites and traffic. I’m a creature of habit and so my walks tend to concentrate on a few areas. If I was trying to impress I suppose I could call the walks transects – which is a natural history word for repeating a walk along a particular route and recording everything I see. When this is done over a period of years, it yields invaluable scientific information about climate change and its effect on wildlife. I can begin to see which unusual plants are the chancers with no chance of setting up home. I could see (but haven’t yet) both otters and beavers in the river and we have filmed mice, rats, deer, badgers, foxes squirrels and cats on our allotment; and I can also see newcomers settling down having found a new niche for themselves. Slow walking could be a thing just as slow cooking has, because everything becomes richer and more engaging as I learn more about the area. The wildlife of an area has a certain “thusness” and directness about it that the muddy pond of mediated experience – (can you see the word media barely hiding in there?) – just can’t match. Mediated Bath is like the worst of takeaway food – it always leaves you malnourished and hungry – but wild Bath is always at hand; in the pavement cracks, in basement walls, in unkempt verges and building sites and instead of scuttling along my walks like a rat, I can walk slowly and savour every moment as a kind of epiphany. So build on – you rubbish architects, greedy developers and landlords. You and your buildings as ephemeral as a hatching mosquito and less deserving of our deference.
As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading a lot about fungi, and it seems to me that if we’re taking the latest science at all seriously, we have to accept that a serious amount of mutuality goes on in nature. Plants and fungi almost universally exchange nutrients to their mutual benefit. Lichens have evolved an even closer togetherness by uniting bacteria and/or algae into an apparently singular life form. Plants rely on insects and larger animals for pollination and seed distribution; swapping pollen for nectar and taking seeds away in paws and fur and droppings. Even apex predators normally tend only to kill and eat when they’re hungry. In fact Nature seems to prefer a situation where every life form gets something out of the arrangement: all of nature except we humans who think we’ve got the right to take it all without regard to the needs of any other creature.
I have a correction – or perhaps an addition to my piece yesterday which mentioned a black apple which I was told was French in origin and called L’Abri. The apple tree on the allotment site matched the description of an American apple called Arkansas Black very closely especially in its perfumed flavour of apple and custard; but today in a bit of further exploration on the National Fruit Collection website – which is brilliant – I came up with a Belgian apple called Abi Noir which looks almost identical to the American is much cheaper – £14 as opposed to a greedy £350 for the bare root tree.
This morning we worked in frost and sunshine on the allotment and it was lovely to be outside in the winter weather. Our son phoned to ask about presents at Christmas and said he’d be happy to buy us a portable moth trap if we’d like it. Well yes we would, rather!! trying not to sound too excited. There’s more wildlife around in city centres than you’d ever imagine. Below are a few photos of bits of the wild that caught my eye as I walked back from the garage, all within sight and sound of the building site across the river. They are, clockwise, an abandoned bird’s nest, the riverside path, the last bloom on a dog rose and the river bathed in mist. If you look carefully at the nest it includes bits of wool, bindweed, insulation mat, grass and twigs. You see, nature is even better than we are at recycling. The nest, by the way, was right next door to the recycling depot.
