Bath

I’d forgotten what a beautiful place it is. The sun came out as we got off the train, it was much milder than Oxford and the stone glowed. Because we’d managed to persuade a guard at Swindon station to re-open the door of a train that was just about to leave (a first!) we arrived an hour before our son and A who were cycling from Bristol. So we wandered and I fell in love with the angels climbing Jacob’s ladder on the front of Bath Abbey (extra). I did not fall in love with the crowds heaving around the Christmas market, though it is the best Christmas market I’ve seen in this country by a very long way.

After a leisurely lunch the four of us went to see the Roman Baths which I’ve been meaning to visit since their millennium revamp. An excellent exhibition. I was very taken by the frustration of the curses, inscribed on lead and thrown into the waters. Docimedis asked Sulis Minerva that the thief of his pair of gloves should lose his mind and his eyes, which seemed a little disproportionate. (Imagine those supposed to be getting Universal Credit having a Roman goddess on their side…) And by the gold-leaf-covered mask of Sulis Minerva, of which there was a line drawing on the cover of one of my school Latin books. Imagine digging a ditch for a drain and coming across that in the earth, intact. That's how the baths were rediscovered in 1727.

Having had views of the main bath at various points from the exhibition windows, we emerged into the colonnade around it at dusk, just after the oil lamps had been lit. A brilliant whirl back through almost two thousand years.

Bath Spa waters apparently cure everything so I am now 100% healthy, despite A having taken us to a cider tasting bar after we’d left the baths and two of us having then gone on to a friend’s birthday party. 

A thoroughly good day.

(This is the steaming pool immediately above the hot spring and in the rounded windows of the elegant 18th century Pump Room above you can see where Jane Austen's characters would have taken the waters.)