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2005-06-01

The comprehensive tour of England�s south continues: this weekend I did Bristol and Bath! It�s like I�m in some sort of speed-tourism competition.

The trip to Bristol on Sunday morning was a test of the limits of human endurance. Some infelicitous and unhappy confluence of circumstance landed me on a train with only two carriages (�I can only guess that this is due to a shortage of carriages,� offered the conductor helpfully � what, is National Rail now misplacing entire train carriages? Has a new Bermuda Triangle materialised somewhere on the outskirts of Sheffield?), which were both stuffed to bursting, Tokyo-rush-hour style, with ruddy-cheeked, barrel-chested, lager-soused football fans who did not let the painful overcrowding deter them from lustfully bellowing team chants at the top of their lungs and inhaling supercans of Carlsberg as though they�d just made last orders (at ten-thirty in the fucking morning). Don�t get me wrong � I do like me a good dose of English culture, but not forcefully administered as a suppository.

After two hours of the carnival funhouse ride from Hell, Bristol could have been a festering hole in the ground crawling with radioactive flesh-eating rats and I would have happily jumped off the train and bought a postcard. Lucky for me, not only was Bristol not a squalid pit infested with vermin (like Sheffield), but it was actually the coolest city I�ve been to yet in the UK. It has that �faded eighteenth-century port town splendour gentrified with boho university chic� kind of feel to it. You know. Also, it�s very hilly, and I�m a big fan of towns set on hills � adds character, I think. The cathedral is set at the very top of a particularly steep hill, and is surrounded by a lovely spacious lawn where the local lace-and-leather gang hangs out, nursing their pallid complexions in the shade of the spreading oak trees. It tickles my fancy that the Goth kids instinctively conglomerate around Gothic architecture. I wonder whether they�re aware of the long and convoluted history of their subculture nomenclature. I doubt it. They probably don�t even know that Bauhaus was an art movement. Fuck, they probably don�t know that Bauhaus was a band. Kids these days got no respect.

The next morning I caught the bus to Bath, which was�Bath. It�s one of those must-see travel destinations that are more of an ordeal than a diversion, like the Statue of Liberty or the Pyramids of Giza or France. The town itself is breathtakingly beautiful, at least the bits you can catch a glimpse of beneath the swarming crust of yammering camcorder-appendaged tourist drones � the effect is a bit like a beauty queen wearing a beard of cockroaches.

Having come to Bath, I felt it would be churlish of me not to visit the town�s namesake. I paid ten pounds to be herded through a sweltering subterranean maze of glass-encased chunks of rock and murky pools of sludgy green water, all surrounded by signs in five different languages warning me not to touch. After ten minutes I would have gladly paid another ten pounds to be let back out. Those Romans sure were awfully good at designing tourist attractions of dubious entertainment value. After taking a few desultory photos, I caught the train to Portsmouth, which had a full complement of coaches and nary a hooligan, but was forty-five minutes late. Dear, dearest National Rail! How I adore your quaint little foibles!

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