Ate breakfast at the Y's cafeteria (more cereal and toast, but I could supplement with yogurt bought at the counter) while I re-input contacts after a last-ditch, hard-restart on Perry (my pocket PC) last night. I needed to return it to the proper default settings for use in the UK with Vodafone. What a pain in the bum to take care of this. I only hope I managed to record all the right info on paper so I can reinstate it. And that I can reinstall my important supplemental programs--Sudoku and my keyboard and mouse software.
My hunt for Internet access began at the library, where they're in the middle of a computer changeover, with many systems down. I got 15 minutes of visitor's access on one of the few computers that were functioning, but couldn't reinstall PC software (or even reply to email) because of administration limitations on the computers. I can tell this technological learning curve is going to be uphill a little longer.
Giving up on Perry's reset for a while, I walked around waiting for the free Bath walk to start at 10:30. Just when I got used to looking right first when crossing streets in London, I come here, which has lots of one-ways requiring left-hand attention. How do people know a street is one-way here, anyway? They all seem equally narrow and there are no one-way signs posted. Some streets have "no entry" painted on the asphalt, but not consistently. I'm on my toes at every intersection.
Near the abbey a fountain reads, "Water Is Best. Erected by the Bath Temperance Association, founded June 15th 1836, June 8th 1861." Subtle, weren't they?
I arrive at the abbey courtyard, which also fronts the Pump Room and Roman Bath entrances. A street piper plays in the square, locals talk to locals with "See ya, guv'nor" and "Hello, love," and tourists query the driver of Bath sightseeing bus. Bath is much quieter than London...I can record the piper but couldn't hear Big Ben above the traffic noise.
Enough people have congregated for the Bath walking tour that they split us into three groups of about 12. We have Myra and a trainee guide David. We started with the Abbey, which was built on the site of former churches by order of Bishop Oliver King. He had dreamt the church was to be decorated with Christ surrounded by a heavenly host and angels going up and down ladders to and from heaven. These are depicted in stone on the front of the church. One upside-down angel looks like he's falling, but he's the one climbing downward.
On either side of the entrance, a rebus of the bishop's name is carved in stone--a bishop's miter (Bishop), an olive tree (Oliver), and a crown (King). They say the average person couldn't read and needed pictures to help him get along, but I think it takes a lot of smarts to figure these things out--plus a healthy dose of pun to pull it all out.
We went past the new Bath Spa, which was supposed to open in 2001 and has been plagued with costly delays, including the use of a pool paint that wasn't waterproof! Halt construction, enter litigation, point fingers, find solutions, etc.
This is to be the first time Bath has had a public spa since the 1800s when Jane Austin lived here, so there's a lot of hoopla around it. There are signs that it may be opening soon at last (furniture was being delivered this morning), but the skyrocketing costs and endless delays are a sore point for many Brits. Most snipe that the spa is likely to be more for the wealthy set than anyone else. Pensioners (senior citizens) are supposed to get a price break.
Bath used to be walled in Roman times, and some parts of wall still exist. We wound around back alleys to pass the Royal Theater, where professional London troupes start their run for a week before they head off to the big city, then got a description of architecture by Wood the elder and Wood the younger.
The elder Wood is the one who set up the Palladium [sp?] style of mathematical precision and Roman balance throughout Bath's architecture, and the younger followed on, only with less regimentation. Nearly every building in Bath looks the same thanks to these two, and to the use of the creamy yellow local stone.
Wood the elder was not particularly liked for his arrogance--he was only about 27 when he started rearranging Bath's layout to suit his vision--but he was listened to. He defined the look of Georgian architecture for Bath, insisting that the aristocracy follow his lead.
Myra explained that the buildings on Queen and Gay (a doctor) streets shows his style and his approach. It uses the best quarried local stone for the pristine front facade, yet uses inferior (lower from the quarry) rubble stone for the rest of the building behind the facade. These two photos show the front and back.
We also walked along roads and gravel paths mentioned in Jane Austen's Persuasion (which is set in Bath), and took in a brief history of the famous Royal Crescent and Royal Circus (circle), designed, some say, in homage to the moon (crescent) and sun (circle) just a few long blocks apart.
Napped at my room after the two-hour tour, then walked the short distance to Holburne Museum of Art, home of several Gainsboroughs and Turners and a small Wedgwood collection.
They also have an interesting exhibit celebrating the building of the Great Western Railway, which goes from London to Bristol in almost perfect level. The engineer/designer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, cut new-fangled tunnels and channels and worked around geology in creative ways to keep the track flat the whole way.
The site of the Holburne estate, Syndey Park, was dissected for the rail by a channel with pedestrian walkways over it, and then given a promenade so strollers could watch the construction and enjoy the trains going by. I walked some of the promenade and imagined the workers and first train carriages rumbling by. That was nearly 200 years ago--the anniversary of Brunel's achievements. (Brunel also built the first ocean liner to go across the Atlantic in a week. That's being celebrated nearby at Bristol this year, too.)
I was feeling peckish after so much walking, and had high tea at 4:15 at Windsor Hotel on the way back. In the front of their hotel, they have a sedan chair (litter) like the kind the rich folk hired to carry them all over this hilly town, and sometimes up and down stairs inside buildings, in the 1800s. Myra had told us about them. A local leader got the sedan runners, a rangy crew at best, to register and number their chairs, and taxis have done so ever since.
Whoever invented clotted cream had a good thing going. I plopped it generously on strawberry-jammed scones while sitting in a 19th-century Bath hotel, propped on the edge of a period rose-colored chair, leaning over an oval, brass claw-footed wooden coffee table. Its varnish is white in spots--heat wounds made during countless teas before me.
In between bites on my tuna sandwiches (I was allowed to order one flavor of sandwich from their menu and they brought me two of them--sheesh, who wants to eat two full tuna sandwiches in one sitting?) I pecked at Perry and updated my contacts list with 21st-century technology.
So weird, this juxtaposition of old and new, slow and fast. It's everywhere. At the Holburne, I had studied fastidious embroideries and miniature paintings that would have kept their creators busy for months. Not thirty minutes later, I watched boys playing football on the grass at Sydney Park. "Get the ball, don't waste time!" one of them yelled when the ball went out of bounds on their makeshift field.
Yet everywhere I go here, galleries and antique shops and streets are filled with examples of slow living, slow creation. Times when buildings took decades and centuries to erect, when a friend might wait 11 years for a portrait to be finished by Gainsborough, and when the idea of speeding at 45 miles an hour in a train smooth enough to drink coffee and write in (as Brunel predicted) was the glorious promise of the technological age.
"Don't waste time," said the boy of 10. Sad that one so young already thinks there's not enough time to go around. I walked by at my holiday leisure, no doubt a classic example of a time-waster, and feeling the old pull of that belief--that any hour not spent in complete industry, in busyness, in doing or creating or achieving or learning, is time that has been frittered. Debunking this belief is one of my purposes on this trip.
I stirred sugar and cream into a refill of tea and sipped it. An oak still takes 100 years to become 100 years old. Tea still takes 3 minutes to brew just right. Some things, thank god, can't be rushed.
