Day 47 -16th Feb

BIG WATERY BUS

Hot to Cold

All things told,

The silence of the mind

Is not achieved

But sought after.

Some laughter punches through,

Some faux-relaxed fitness people

Get in—

Because it’s there.

Have we been here before,

Together,

Some battle-weary legion

In an old Roman bath?

Let the fitness people laugh.

They come and go.

They don’t pipe Muzak in here

(Not yet).

Fat is held in high regard,

All hangs outward.

Bodies embalmed

In a medium that does not understand them,

So can be displaced by them—

Down-at-heel passengers

On a late-night, watery bus.

A big cauldron

Of our own pain and juices—

Love, comfort,

And abuses.

Or an echo

Of ascension and Eleusis?

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Sulis Minerva was a unique Romano-British deity, worshipped primarily at the hot springs in what is now Bath, England. She was a fusion of the Celtic goddess Sulis and the Roman goddess Minerva, blending local and imperial religious traditions. The Romans were masters at smoothing together the gods of conquered lands, grafting them onto their own more centralised and established pantheon. Sulis was a native goddess associated with healing waters and the hot springs of Bath. She was believed to cure ailments, and her worship suggests a deep reverence for the geothermal forces beneath the land. She represented that old woodland, misty England vibe—the kind you still feel in ancient forests and stone circles.

When the Romans arrived in Britain, they identified Sulis with Minerva, their goddess of wisdom, strategy, and craftsmanship. Merging the two was a classic imperial move—integrating local beliefs to ensure smoother control.

The gym I go to has a really big spa bath.

There’s something really nice about being able to use this, and I totally get the appeal of Roman baths—how they probably provided a much-needed reprieve from a stringent and driven culture. A place where people could just let all the bullshit of the day wash off.

I get a similar feeling on the London Tube. This city wasn’t built for cars, so sometimes you’ll see an ultra-wealthy person in central London opting to hop on, standing beside a single mum coming back from a late shift working minimum wage at a discount supermarket. Nobody says anything, but there’s this silent maintenance of the social fabric—an unspoken acknowledgment that we’re all just weary humans held together by shared space.

These small, interstitial moments—where we’re all just existing, side by side—where we repair this fragile social fabric—are incredibly levelling.

There’s a lot of talk about third places in American culture—social spaces that aren’t home or work, places where people meet and build community. Think cafés, pubs, or libraries. With the rise of hyper-individualism and digital life, young people are rediscovering the importance of these spaces.

But I think there’s also something to be said for what I call fourth places.

Fourth places aren’t about socialising. They’re where we exist together but alone, recharging in proximity to others without the expectation of interaction. The post office queue. The bus. The communal hot tub.

A fourth place is subtler—where you share space with strangers without having to be anything.

There’s a popular YouTube channel, Subway Takes, that captures this energy perfectly—the sense of people just existing together in liminal spaces.

Ancient Roman baths were, in many ways, third places—some in Rome could hold thousands of people, where deals were struck, laughter echoed, and, let’s be real, some discreet fornication probably happened in a weird VIP section. But mostly, it was just the hoi polloi and the elite shucking off the bullshit of being human. A big, spiritual Berocca for the soul.

For me, the big Roman bath at my gym is a fourth place.

I have a hot tub at home, but I rarely use it.

The big Roman-style spa bath is not a third place where I’m catching up with friends or feeling or living ‘the good life’. It’s not best utilised as some place to experience the ‘high life’—of course, that’s how people treat them when they are leveraged to demonstrate a heavily curated, bourgeois life on Instagram. But really, in a run-of-the-mill leisure centre, its true spirit comes through. It’s not work, it’s not home, and it’s not a third place. You can be with other people and not be remotely social. This is essential for neurocomplex people, but I think it’s beneficial for almost everyone. If you’re all peopled out but don’t want to be alone, get yourself a fourth place.

It completes the quadrant.

And for that, I thank the Romans.

For all their conquests, raping, and pillaging, at the end of the day, they got the inner bogan in us all.

The one who’s having a fairly average day and just wants to say—

"Fuck it."

And get in a hot tub and do nothing for a bit.