Reading this week:

• Ulendo by Malcom Alexander
• Once a District Officer by Kenneth Bradley

Our third day in Bath would in fact be spent in Bath but would be our last. So we had to make the most of it, and walk among the stars. Which meant of course that we started the day at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy.

It is a very nice little museum and is in the very house where William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. To be specific, it wasn’t in the house that he discovered Uranus, because he took all the observations from the back yard, so I guess it was outside the house. But then again I guess the discovering part in astronomy is mostly like math and stuff and he probably did that inside so maybe I am splitting hairs. Or splitting the light spectrum, because William Herschel also discovered infrared radiation, and the museum houses the prism he (maybe) used to discover it (on loan from the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich).

One thing I really appreciated about the museum is they do a lot of work to credit William’s sister Caroline Herschel. William and Caroline started off as musicians which is what brought them to Bath in the first place. But William’s hobby was astronomy (though I dunno maybe his real hobby was telescope-building, he would apparently skip meals because he was in the middle of grinding mirrors) and he enlisted Caroline to help do all the math (and also grind mirrors) and she took to it. So the brother-sister duo discovered a whole bunch of stuff, together and each on their own. A very cool little spot.

This brought us to tea time (or more accurately time for tea, but it was really lunch). Since this was Bath and the place to see and be seen we were off to the Pump Room! This was a lot of fun. The Pump Room is a feature of several of Jane Austen’s novels and so we had to go for the authentic Jane Austen experience. After navigating our way past a somewhat gruff security guard used to turning away people who were looking for the Roman Baths, we were seated and ordered tea. We had ordered in advance the Traditional Pump Room Afternoon Tea service. As I mentioned in Bath I we were in Bath during the Jane Austen Festival, which meant that several of our Pump Room compatriots were in Regency dress which greatly added to the atmosphere. They also had live music in the form of a pianist who would alternate between classical fare and more modern hits. We couldn’t figure out where we had heard one song until my super amazing wife identified it as the K9 Advantage flea commercial (don’t worry I am cultured). I tried to make up Regency-era gossip but it was unconvincing. To finish off your meal they have a fountain in the Pump Room dispensing hot spring mineral water. With fond memories of the water downstairs in the baths I had some, and then had to have some more when my super amazing wife hadn’t gotten a picture the first time around.

Sated, we wandered Bath, visiting a yarn store and some book shops until finally making our way to the No 1 Royal Crescent Museum. As alluded to above, Bath is a popular backdrop to movies, especially Jane Austen adaptations, and my first glimpse of Bath was via the eyes of a lovelorn Dakota Johnson. The Royal Crescent features prominently, so we had to go, and also conveniently the museum at No 1 shows you what life was like in the Georgian era if you were wealthy and also lived in Bath. It is a very nice museum, with an interesting system where in each room there were videos explaining Georgian Life via Jane Austen excerpts. The videos were projected discreetly onto walls or played from screens hidden in vanities, and as each video ended you had time to walk to the next room before that video started playing. The only confusing part about the whole thing were of course the Jane Austen festival-goers who I kept thinking were tour guides. I always like the wallpaper in these 18^th-century houses and the furniture and I take pictures imagining I am going to decorate similarly someday. But my proudest moment was instantly recognizing a setup for a turnspit dog in the kitchen. Man I am so cultured.

The rest of the day was spent acting like a Jane Austen couple and strolling about, looking into more shops and having a drink. We were taking the train back to London that night and had the bright idea to move up our train ticket time, a plan which was thwarted for various reasons not least of which was that a car had hit a bridge which delayed all the trains so the first one running was in fact the first one we were going to be on anyway. But with another lovely day behind us, we eventually boarded the train and were on our way to wilder pastures.