I travelled to Frome for the first time and as Tracy Emin recently remarked Frome is the new Rome. Reader, its not, theres not enough wide open spaces and not enough massive ruins. Indeed as in any small town nestling at the bottom of a valley with a floodplain, there is precious little place to expand into, and hence the valley folk are at war with some developers who plan to build on the old (Insert type of mill site here) and create luxury flats with electric charging points and grass roof to appease the council who will obviously be contesting the development. But they’ll win, the developers, they always do, but sometimes the local population manage to see into the bribery and backhanders and occasionally thwart the skulduggery peddled between councillor and developer. Lets hope something like this happens in Frome.

My friend is living down there in a crumbling rented three storey bath stone house.Theres plastic on the windows to mimic double glazing and there’s  rugs over the windows to mimic curtains. The kitchen is a wonderful chaos with freshly baked sour dough every morning, nettle pesto, unknown powdery spices to mix in the olive oil before soaking up with the bread. There is freshly made mayonnaise in the fridge and  always a pot of tea on the Aga. There’s a lovely hippy sat at the end of the table, he was visiting Frome briefly to tie up his affairs before deciding wether to go back to the mountains in India or to buy a boat to charter out of Greece, around the Ionian Sea. A nice problem to have. 

There’s a man who walks past the house everyday around 10am to drink strong alcohol in the park with a load of other similar folk, enveloped within a meander of the River; only now the flow has decreased you can see shopping trolleys and traffic cones rising up from the muddy banks. One man in the park wears mirrored steam punk sunglasses and a pork pie hat; I’m reliably told he’s called Punk Dave and he is a twat.

In Frome there’s a sense of art, there’s exhibitions everywhere, people come here to paint, to sculpt, the light is good and it’s cheaper than London. Which is why Londoners come to hang out and prance around, to take advantage of the cheaper properties and to channel their inner artist. It’s a picture perfect, snow globe type town, the river is dirty in stretches, but that’s the fucking Tories for you, and the rent is sky rocketing, possibly to do with the disastrous budget Truss and Kwartang Kwartang Biscuit Barrel let leash on us, forcing up interest rates and plunging folk into an uncertain certain future. The mortgages may be fixed but the clock is ticking and many will fall by the wayside. A place like Frome relies own smaller independent shops, and at the moment those smaller independent shops can’t afford the rents. Life is tough, it’s getting tougher, and I’m forgetting to write my blog regularly and let you know what I’m upto. The Feds were closing in, I needed to make cover. 

Up the Bally Foxes.