If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I worked out in the car down to Bath that it’s almost ten years since I was last there. It was for Faith’s birthday. She took us to the Island Club, Bog, near the weir. Of course, I didn’t remember anything about the city itself. This time it was Rachel’s birthday. If memory serves me right they were both significant numbers.

Anyhow, I was up by six, having got to bed after one, and we left Chelmsford not long after seven. The roads were kind to us. We stopped for coffee somewhere on the M4 and were winding our way down the steep slope into Bath by noon. It lived up to its reputation as the most congested city in England, but we eventually got ourselves parked and set out with our guidebook to walk around what turned out to be a far smaller city than I remembered.

We couldn’t have wished for better weather, and by mid-afternoon we both had sunburn from laying on the banks of the river, and in the Circus (below) at the top of the hill, just across from the Royal Crescent. The rip-off prices kept us out of the baths themselves, but we mooched around the Abbey, dodged the buskers as best we could, and switched to shutterbug mode, snapping everything in sight.

The more of it we saw, the more I remembered. It struck me as a cross between Oxford and Canterbury, taking the best from each and mixing in a little bit of something foreign

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 4th, 2002 at 5:37 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.