Bath

 
The universe was not in balance that day. 
 
Shoppers were thickly bunched around those German wooden shack style kiosks that sell bubble and squeak with a frankfurter dipped inside, like it has dived into a sea of potato and got its head stuck. And Christ on toast, it was cold, like a Siberian mountain pass made brittle by icy winds. My cardigan was open and flapped around like a windy flag and at the time I didn’t realise I was freezing. The cold pinned me to a bench and hurried along a warmectomy, syphoning out every last speck of warmth from the cells within the marrow of my bones.  
 
I was in a seated coma for ten minutes and nothing could heat me up. Not simmering mulled wine, not a flame-grilled venison burger placed on the centre of my chest, not a ghoulish cry of brrrrrrrr while rubbing my hands. True cold stiffens your bones, gnawing at the gusto of the most committed shopper, hitting the body in repetitive beats. In between those beats you grow progressively numb; a sulky surrender takes a hold. The tempo quickens and builds to a life-sapping drone, an extra-sensorial drone- maybe animals can feel it too. It then covers its victim in a scent of frosty parsnips, easily detectable to others, who come to view the cold in you as a disease, spreadable by touch or breath- frozen white in this case. You are to them, beyond simply cold; you are the cold. That’s why fellow shoppers gave me a wide berth that day while I stumbled through that market, a kind of lost yeti.  
 
A new challenge arose when I considered the details of leaving Bath later. There were a handful of trains, but a psychological obstacle lay in front of me. According to my doctor, thoughts, as well as having their own shape, colour and sound, also have a temperature. Thoughts of wood carving, plump nurses, bargains, childhood sweets, rainy night cafe’s, road trips, pens and group consensus are examples of warm thoughts. Colder thoughts are Monday mornings, bus shelters, TV licenses, responsibilities, application forms, potato salad and grease stains on denim. Apparently, your body temperature dictates the nature of your thoughts. So a warm body will bring about thoughts of endless summers in Italy, rather than mucking out a piggery with a broken fork. My doctor also advised that a warm head makes decisions that include warm variables. It will choose warm places, people, food and times.  
 
When it came to the question of my returning train, I was presented with either the 2:05pm or the 4:07pm. It sounds like a reasonable choice, but my colder brain (not my heart of belly hearts) was magnetically forced towards 14:05pm because in essence it’s a colder time. 2pm is for cold activities like hanging out washing, beginning a tax return form or embarking on a reverie about a garden slug that you once mistook for a piece of rubber then promptly stood on with a bare foot.  
 
I wanted that 4 pm departure quite badly because it would lead to the most convenient onward train connections where I wouldn’t be waiting on platforms staring down at the sorry relics of half-eaten sausage rolls.  But in the same manner that a fire hypnotically draws you in, or from the roof of a tall building you look down and hear a little internal voice urging you to mindlessly jump, so too did the time of 2pm reel me in. I was hypnotised into choosing it. Countermeasures scattily arrayed themselves in my brain until one became clearly and absurdly the frontrunner: If I heated up my body, my mental gear would incline towards choosing the 4:07pm. This I could achieve by racing to the train station as if maddened by urgency.  
 
Without further frozen ado, I hastened along the high street with long, groin-disturbing lunges to the station. Although my strides were fast and I was pumping my arms, I was still feeling 2pm. With a sense of exaggerated drama, I broke into a jog then ran hard on the cobbles, slipping a little and barging into shoppers. I added a sparring session with an imaginary opponent then a front crawl swimming stroke to become a swimming running man- just to add a touch of the bizarre to an already eclectic social landscape.  
 
My body did indeed heat up. The tips of extremities started to tingle, this spread to the inner core where cords of warmth snaked around my belly. Itchy needles pricked at my neck and forearms. A body that had been stiffened to shattering point had turned a corner. When I reached the station, (leaving in my wake pedestrians ruffled and agog), I became aware that like a man who had over-egged a pudding or put both his shoes on one foot, I had fallen prey to new trouble: I was too hot! My thoughts suddenly turned thermogenic, meaning bent towards the piping hot time of 11am, the hour of driving tests and toe amputations- and especially crazy considering I had only arrived in Bath at 10am. Oh I tried to resist. At the ticket office when ‘eleven’ was forming in my mouth, I tried to contort it to ‘four’ and ended up saying something like ‘elaw’ which the ticket attendant assumed was a strangely accented ‘hello’- hardly appropriate for the mid stage of a transaction. Alas I was on a three-change indirect service back home. 
 
That night though I had a warm bath to contrast with the cold city of Bath and this bred thoughts of furtively eaten biscuits, yawning tiger cubs, trombones in attics, old maps, cobbled alleyways leading to wooden-framed windows of cake shops, whispers in a library, newly knitted green mittens and hazelnuts on a farmhouse kitchen table. 
 
Then the universe was nicely back in balance.