iPhone Auto-Correct Strangeness

I was typing the phrase “I don’t” just now in a text message. I missed the space bar and it suggested  “Odontoceti” as a correction.

What’s more reasonable? That the combination Idont is supposed to be I don’t or that I intended to write Odontoceti?!

I don’t even know what the word Odontoceti means.

Pretty Christmas Lights

The lights went on today

The only question now is: how many will still be working in three weeks’ time?!

UPDATE – the middle third of the Sydney Street lights are off already. Failing after 2 days is possibly a record. They won’t be fixed, they never are.

Remember, Remember, the 5th of November!

5th November is England’s only real historical festival. Unlike most countries we don’t seem to have anything much that is just ours, full of archaic tradition that hasn’t just become a way for corporations to sell us more stuff. Bonfire Night is the closest we come, and done right it’s my favourite night of the year.

Tonight, we should all be out on the streets with bangers, letting rockets off in crowded areas and nearly setting fire to ourselves with sparklers. The council should have spent months building a mountain of old pallets, hay, cardboard and lots and lots of tyres to create a monstrous, acrid inferno that boils puddles at 10 paces.

I LOVE bonfire night. I think it should be a national holiday. I have perfect childhood memories of cold nights, thick socks under wellies and freezing faces peering out from under bobble hats*.

The thing is, we don’t seem to do it properly anymore. I’m excluding the Lewes celebrations here, since they do it right. But the town is too small for the whole of Sussex to join them – let’s face it, every town should be doing something along those lines. There should be no reason why the people of Brighton have to crowd into Lewes’s narrow streets every year.

The sky should be alive with fireworks. The smell of wood fires should drift across the breeze to all corners of the country. A car journey should pass countless houses all holding their own mini displays with fires in little braziers or piles of wood and leaves burning slightly out of control, dangerously close to the trees and the conservatory. From any vantage point, you should see rockets flashing in all directions. The telly should be full of scary Firework Code safety messages and Blue Peter should feature maimed children who swallowed roman candles last year.

What does Brighton do? Bugger all. There is an (I’m told excellent) firework display at the cricket ground but these things really should not be happening behind a pay barrier, inside an arena. They should be open, public, municipal events on the beach or at Preston Park, with a fire and treacle toffee. I’m sorry, but paying £10 for corporate explosions doesn’t cut it for me. They don’t even have a fire. There’s a clue in the name, Brighton – bonFIRE night.

We’ve got another year to think this through and do it properly next time.

* – autumn was colder back then. And it was the north.

Thermae Bath Spa – 2000 years of spa tradition?

I’ve just spent a wonderful anniversary weekend in Bath. We’ve both visited Bath many times before, but neither of us had been inside the new, multi-million pound spa centre and so we booked to spend all afternoon there on the day of our anniversary.

First, the good. The steam rooms are wonderful – four large glass cylinders, with a central rainfall shower which allows several people to shower at once. Each of the cylindrical steam rooms is scented differently, for example Eucalyptus in one or Lavendar in another. Though we could only really smell anything in the Eucalyptus and Mint one. The ends of the room feature a series of foot baths, circular sinks you can sit in and fill with spa water to your liking then switch on the air streams for a bubbly foot treat. It is the nicest and best designed area of the spa.

There are also two sets of showers – hot and cold – weirdly identified with laminated pieces of A4 that are starting to decay in the heat and humidity. This air of not quite being as 5-star as they’d claim continues with the globules of mould growing on the sealant between the panels of glass that form the steam rooms.

On the roof is another triumph, the open air pool with wonderful views across to the Abbey. The pool is deep enough to swim if you feel energetic. We didn’t, and bobbed around the bubble jets and massage fountain. We returned to the roof for sunset, where the biggest problem of the spa presented itself – the water is simply not hot enough.

The rooftop pool is barely above 28ºC by my rough guess, which is pleasant enough during the day but far too cold as the sun sets on an Autumnal afternoon. You don’t get the billowing steam rising off the water as you do in the Blue Lagoon in Reykjavik! We were glad to get out.

In the lower ground floor of the spa is the other pool, the Minerva bath. This is a bland, pale white area from the textbook of inoffensive architecture. It’s a real missed opportunity to create some sort of aethestic or emotional link to the Roman spa a dozen metres away. Instead, they’ve created something not dissimilar to a distinctly average hotel. How wonderful would it have been to step into a modern take on the Roman baths, with a nod to the past reminding you you’re doing exactly what has been done here for 2000 years?

The water in the Minerva bath is a bit on the chilly side too.

Unlike any other spa in Europe, there are no hot pools or hot jacuzzis. Usually there is choice of small pools at 25º, 30º and 35ºC to relax in, with a large, cooler swimming pool to swim in. At the Thermae Bath Spa there are just the two tepid swimming pools.

The building itself is also too cold. You should be able to get out of the pool and be comfortable in the ambient temperature. But even in our robes we were shivering as we moved between floors.

The spring beneath the city pumps out 1,000,000 litres of water a day, at a temperature of 47ºC. So there’s really no excuse for the air and the water to be too cold. It can’t be a safety issue, as the foot baths allow you to scald yourself with hot water should you so wish.

There are also no saunas, which the Romans wouldn’t have contemplated by the modern designers obviously felt superfluous.

We booked an aromatherapy massage, which was nice enough. But the design of the treatment area was also disappointing – cold, white and a little clinical, where it should’ve been warm, cosy, sumptuous and inviting.

Whilst it’s worth a visit for the fabulous steam rooms and the magnificent (if a little small) rooftop pool, it’s hard to call it a world-class spa and I couldn’t help but feel underwhelmed. The bog-standard municipal spas in Hungary and Iceland are much cheaper and much better, thanks to the hot water and convival, social atmosphere. The five-star spa attached to our hotel in Budapest was magnificent.

Perhaps we’ve just lost the spa tradition in this country. But it doesn’t help when we’re inexplicably denied proper hot spring water.

There’s the distinct feeling that the designers did the minimum they had to, to fix the strange anomaly of there being no spa in Bath. But it’s a missed opportunity. In the end, the UK’s only natural hot spa is a pale imitation of what the Roman’s had a couple of centuries ago and can’t compete with anything the rest of the world has to offer.