Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

17:  A Nice Hot Bath

Wednesday dawned early, or so it seemed.  We were heading out of town, so we needed an earlier start than sleeping in would allow.  Just getting to the railroad station could take the better part of an hour, so any travel day would include 5-6 hours of just getting to and from our destination.  Today we were going to Bath, a town we’d visited for about an hour on our last trip when we took a three-city one-day coach tour.  For us, an hour isn’t enough, and for Bath, it really isn’t enough. We left from Paddington and headed out direct to Reading, whence we’d take a different route from our previous trips; instead of heading north to Oxford, we’d be striking west.  Along the way I saw rowers and punters on the Thames.  The chestnut trees were blooming in this spate of hot weather, and the rapeseed fields were shoulder-high to a man.   Since I’d spent one trip out looking at buildings, and one trip looking at the wildlife, I now turned my attention to my fellow passengers. The Paddington-Reading leg was fairly full, and I’d been forming an opinion during the previous week here.  There’s a difference between a “smartly dressed” woman in London and one in Paris.  Parisian women are always chic and trendy; accessories are the thing: a good quality classic outfit can be turned to three or four different purposes through proper accessorization.  The right purse, a half-dozen bangles, a scarf, or a different set of shoes can change one outfit from morning to evening, from work to play.  The end results vary, but they’re always pulled together, thought through, and…well…smart. The smartly dressed British woman doesn’t do this.  She has a general look that she likes, and she uses it for every venue.  Jacket on, jacket off, scarf on, scarf off, hair up, hair down; that’s about as innovative as the British woman gets.  She has her look, and she sticks with it.  And for the British women, the “look” comes in one of three flavors: Prim, Hippie, and Beat.  There’s a lot of the socialist in British women’s styles, and often they come across as just a little bit unkempt, just a little bit frazzled.  It’s not as stylish as the Parisians, but it’s attractive in a Fifth Column sort of way.  Men, too, have their looks, and stick to them even more rigidly than the women.  Smartly dressed British men come in two main flavors: Proper and Polo.  One might add Pensioner (Dockers and a blazer) but it’s not too prevalent.  And of course there’s the Slob, the Yob, and the Twit, but we were talking about the smartly dressed Brit, weren’t we? After Reading, the train emptied out.  We passed south of the sextet of cooling towers at the massive nuclear power plant, built next to the old coal-fire plant.  I know Blake was talking about something else, but these were working for me as stand-ins for his Dark Satanic Mills. It was already warm outside.  The morning haze was quickly burning off, and the sun was bright on the rapeseed fields, so yellow that they hurt your eyes to look at them.  At the back of the car, the café server kept up a running patter with her voice like a Sheffield bandsaw, and even my wife couldn’t sleep.  She dozed after the server quieted down, but I woke her up at Swindon, so she could see her boyfriend’s hometown.  Her “boyfriend,” Justin Hayward (of The Moody Blues) grew up in Swindon and, looking around, we both agreed that it’s a bit of a pit.  When we stopped there, a lot of kids got on.  Why?  They couldn’t be going to Bath; Bath was for old farts like us.  But the train was continuing past Bath, going on to Bristol and the beaches beyond.  Kids on holiday during Easter week with temps near 80°F?  They were definitely heading to the beach.  I would.  Wouldn’t you? After Swindon there was a lot of pastureland with sheep and new lambs lying out in the clover—idyllic stuff—and then we were in Bath. Bath is a hilltown and, from its Roman inception, it’s been a resort town, a magnet for those with enough money and time to travel.  The baths are, of course, the main draw here, and on our last trip we visited the baths, went up to the Pump Room (seen in almost every Jane Austen film ever made), paid our 50p, and drank a glass of ghastly mineral water.  The baths are interesting and almost temple-like in their serenity, but we didn’t need to see them again.  This time, we wanted to see the other section of town that appears in nearly every Jane Austen film ever made: The Royal Crescent. But, as I said, Bath is a hill town, and the train station is down by the river, so you have to walk up into the historic section of town.  From there, you have to walk up even further, and then further still, as you make your way past Queen’s Square, to The Circus, and finally to The Royal Crescent. The Royal Crescent (designed by John Woods) is a broad semicircle of Georgian homes, all identical with one ground floor topped by narrow windows between two-story tall Ionic columns, all topped with classical cornices and balusters.  They were begun around 1730 and the last one was built around ten years later.  Back then, they were often rented out to visiting toffs who came to Bath “for the waters,” which really meant “to be seen by Society.”  Today, they’re still residential homes (except for the hotel that takes up the two or three numbers at the center), though now each home has been split apart into multiple apartments. At #1 Royal Crescent, one home has been preserved as a museum, and it is outfitted just as a Georgian home of the day would have been.  In this period of wigs and Whigs, I expected a lot more frippery, but the décor was actually rather clean-lined and simple.  This was the age of Chippendale and before wall hangings/wallpaper was ubiquitous, but the colors were generally strong, deeply saturated, like the robin’s egg blue and cream of the salon, or the viridian green and taupe of the drawing-room.   Instead of an audio guide to lead you about, each room in this museum is staffed with a docent who knows just about everything there is to know about the room.  Especially fascinating was our chat with the gentlemen in the downstairs, who described the workings of the kitchen and dispelled a few myths about Georgian life expectancy.  We looked over some of the recipes of the day, and they’d put Paula Deen to shame.  We saw a sugar loaf (first time for me) plus the nippers that you used to cut off a chunk, and he described the process whereby sugarloaf was made into confectioner’s sugar for icing the cakes for these upper-crusters.  The things we take for granted, today! We left the Crescent and walked through The Circus, a similar, albeit earlier example of the same sort of architecture.  But where the Crescent is a semicircle giving everyone a wonderful view off the embankment, The Circus is a full circle with a park in its center.  It was fun, walking around and naming the movies and scenes where these locations had been used.  We turned a corner then, walked down a bit, and found a lovely tapas bar in which to have lunch. After lunch, we proceeded across the small town core to Great Pulteney Bridge.  This bridge has been compared to the Ponte Vecchio in Venice, but I think the only people making that comparison are folks on the Bath Tourism Board.  Yes, it’s a bridge and yes, it has shops on it, but when you walk it, you really wouldn’t know it was a bridge and when you stand off to the side to appreciate it, there’s little to appreciate.  It’s short, plain, and crammed with tourist shops.  The Ponte Vecchio it ain’t.  But we continued on past the bridge to take a gander at Great Pulteney Street, yet another attempt to put a monolithic stamp on all architecture in Bath.  It’s a nice street, leading down to the Holborn Museum, and because of its regularity and uniformity of style, it has a definite Haussmann/Parisian feel to it, but they didn’t go as far as Haussmann did.  It’s too monotonous; Haussmann’s genius was to put wrought-iron balconies on the 4^th and 5^th floors of his broad boulevards, which both enhanced the perspective he wanted to highlight and also put a human scale to the buildings.  In Great Pulteney Street, there’s nothing for the eye to catch onto, nothing to aid with the perspective, so it just looks like a long, bland, block of limestone. Coming back, though, we dodged down to the canal, got an expensive soda and ginger beer, and watched the seagulls flock on the waters while canal boats negotiated the cul-de-sac formed under the bridge.  Across the river was the Parade Gardens, a beautiful garden and a favorite for sunning, sitting, and people-watching.  Eventually, though, the heat got to us—it was approaching upper 70sF—and we needed some shade. There are a lot of other, small museums in Bath, but what we decided we wanted to do was to go to the abbey.  Bath Abbey was dissolved under Henry VIII and reinstated as an abbey under Elizabeth I.  It’s not a big place, but it is full of light (thanks to the Protestants and their vendetta against stained glass).  When they were looking into replacing the stained glass, they decided not to, and kept clear glass, which allows all the light from the southern exposure to fill the ambulatory and the nave.  As we walked in, we heard music—always a good sign—and we sat, rested, cooled off, and listened to a rehearsal of Bach’s “Passion of St John” on period instruments.  The group was quite good, the singers excellent, and it was an oasis that slowly filled up in direct proportion to the rising mercury outside. Eventually, though, we had to leave.  A train trip, tube trip, and bus trip would eat up hours.  On the train home we saw cards placed on the top of many of the seats.  Inspecting them, we saw they read “Reserved”.  We asked but the only person who answered was a snooty American teenager who treated us as if we were idiots, and provided us with no real information (“It means they’re reserved,” she unhelpfully informed us).  Talking to other, less obnoxious people, we learned that the seats were reserved for a certain section of the trip (say, from Swindon to Reading); you could sit in them without problem prior to the reserved leg, and in many cases, no one came to claim them.  Reserving doesn’t mean buying, I guess, because when we got to Swindon, most of the reserved seats were still empty. We got home rather late, a bit sunburned, and very hungry.  I’d taken out some minced beef and proceeded to work in our dismally equipped kitchen and whip up a dinner of Penne Bolognese using stone knives and bearskins.  That was enough for the day.  We were finally cool again, and we needed to sleep, because tomorrow was going to be even longer. k