Room 101: Lee Mears – Bath hooker

1. Planners and Planning applications
I want to build a kitchen in the basement of a semi-detached house in Bath and then extend it out the back so it doubles the square footage. Also, in the garden I want to build another house.
Both are on the edge of the flood plain but to the planners being on the edge is as good as being in it when it comes to the new property. So while everything else has to be in keeping with the old house – i.e. three floors – which I fully understand, I'm not allowed to put the kitchen in the basement of the new build because it is deemed to be at flood risk.
Really it's the amount of boxes you have to tick and hoops you have to jump through to get anything done that gets to me. I'm just about to re-submit another application – fingers crossed this time!
TRP verdict:  You're out. As a Bath player you should be used to planning nightmares after the long-running battle to redevelop The Rec.
2. Bad Manners
And I'm not talking about the band from the 80s! Smiles cost nothing at the end of the day. For example, I can't see the point in berating a fellow driver if they have made a mistake and apologised. It is so much easier to say, ‘not a problem' rather than get all aggressive and fired up. I think I possess what you might call an ‘Inner Karma', possibly because I get to bash people all day for a living!
I believe if you do good things to people, good things will be done to you. On a professional front, manners are all important in my other business interests. I co-own a coffee shop in Bath with Matt Stevens called ‘Jika, Jika'.
We place a big emphasis on our staff being courteous, with the premise that the customer is always right.
TRP verdict:  You're in. It would be rude not to.
3. Lawmakers
It winds me up how the powers-that-be continually see fit to tinker with the Laws of the game. Before the start of every season there seems to be a new directive for this and that. To be fair I think the new scrum commands are better than what we had before, but as an ‘old git of the game' I can remember plenty that were never going to work. The old collapsing of the maul was one example. I think it was one of the ELVs back in 2009.
As players are born manipulators/cheaters within a few weeks we had it sussed out that you could have one man legally pulling a maul down, leaving seven extra defenders. And people wondered why nobody scored any tries that year! Rugby was a beautiful game when I started playing it, so they should just leave it alone.
TRP verdict:  You're in. They are a law unto themselves!