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.

Fortified with sausage rolls and knowledgeable about the height of stone engineering, we departed for the much larger though less famous henge to the north: Avebury. I had never been to Avebury and this is a much different experience from Stonehenge. On the way there we admired various houses with thatched roofs which we were surprised to see, who knew people were still using that tech in earnest there in the UK. Eventually we arrived at the Avebury parking lot and walked the short path on down to the museum.

Avebury is quite the spot. It is the largest stone circle in the UK, so large that the town of Avebury sits inside of it. Which, is that where you would put your house? Wild, people just moving into the middle of the thing. The stones themselves are impressive for having been propped up despite their size, but the stones aren’t really the main attraction of Avebury since there isn’t any of the architectural stacking that you get at Stonehenge. Instead what is most impressive about Avebury is the massive earthworks. Their full extent is only evident via archeology, but even today when they are a shadow of their former selves it is still astounding how much soil and chalk they moved to construct the place. You get a hint of this as you walk down the path to the museum and necessarily make your way through a cut in the circle.

In the museum, which is small but good, they have a number of artifacts on display from the henge. Despite its magnificence and proximity to Stonehenge there were not many people at all visiting so you could take your time strolling through. I was most interested in some of their experimental archeology, specifically how to decorate ceramics with small bird bones, so make sure to keep that technique in your back pocket, ceramicists.

From the museum we set out on the path around the circle. You have to be careful crossing the street as the circle is bisected by the road and town. The houses obscure a bit of what the site would have been, where the earthworks created a place apart from the surrounding landscape. The ditch itself has been filled in by time some, as alluded to above, but as you hike up the ridge you can get a sense of the scale of the place. But the most exciting part, especially for my super amazing wife, is that whereas Stonehenge was surrounded by sheep, here the sheep were inside, amidst the stones. That is a significant point in Avebury’s column. We spotted from afar one particular sheep using a standing stone to give its butt a really good scratch which, amazing, a compression of the ages, the past comes alive, the works of these ancient peoples slamming into the present day as a sheep uses their handiwork to just really get at a hard-to-reach itch. Incredible.

Also like Stonehenge, Avebury is set within a larger landscape of ancient monuments. Our circumnavigation complete we checked out some of the Avebury shops and then departed for the four-minute drive to the path for the West Kennet Long Barrow. Across the street where you park is also Silbury Hill, which I didn’t think would be so significant when I read about it, but in person is quite the thing. Its regularity sets it apart and it really is pretty gigantic, monumental as it were. You walk away from it as you hike up the path through the barrow. To get there you have to cross a field of cows which frankly was a delight, two of them accompanying us across the bridge. On our way up a person descending pranked us a bit by telling us the barrow was about to close, so we hustled on up, but it doesn’t close, it’s just sitting there on top of the hill.

The barrow is pretty neat. There are explanatory signs and you can walk inside which maybe is weird because it was a tomb, but very cool to be so close to history. You can also walk on top of the barrow to get the widest views of the landscape; the rolling hills are really gorgeous and you can ponder the connection between Silbury and the barrow and what it meant to these people. But about this time we were needing to get back so we walked back on down the hill and said goodbye to our cow friends before making the drive back to Bath. Dinner was at Thai Weir, which has just fine Thai food but a great location right beneath the Pulteney Bridge, and we reflected on how easy it was to drive through 5,000 years of history and have your meals span everything from a full English breakfast to a green curry dinner.

Reading this week:

• The Search After Livingstone by E.D. Young, Revised by Rev. Horace Wallace, F.R.G.S.

Our second day in Bath we did not spend in Bath but instead spent visiting stone circles. The first of these was of course Stonehenge. To get there we would have to drive, and to drive we would have to get a car, so the first task of the morning was (after breakfast) getting to the car rental spot. They did not have the car we had originally booked and so gave us an electric one instead. I of course typically drive a car that is older than I am, and doesn’t even have cupholders, so every time I get in a car that was made this century I am pretty wowed. This one had like a fake overhead camera thingy when you were backing up, wild. This was also my first time driving on the left-hand side of the road and that wasn’t too bad to get used to but I made sure my super amazing wife was keeping me honest about which side of the road I was on at any given time. The biggest thing to get used to was that my left-side mirror was much farther left than I was used to but who needs to turn left anyway. We were also slowed down by some road construction blocking the road we wanted to take leaving us confused and driving in circles instead of to circles in the English countryside, but eventually and without any allisions more serious than bumping a curb we had arrived at the visitor center to Stonehenge.

Visiting Stonehenge was a priority for my super amazing wife, but this was not my first time. As I mentioned before our family had visited the UK back when I was a wee lad and we made sure to get out to what the guidebook describes as “probably the most important temple in Britain [up to about 1500 BC].” This meant I was surprised at the visitor center, which was built in 2013. I was expecting the old one, which this site describes as “a collection of brutalist concrete bunkers,” I think unkindly, though I have fond memories. But the new visitor center is swooping and set into two halves (museum in one, gift shop/café in the other). Entering through the middle you pay your entry fee and then visit the small museum.

I was a bit disappointed in the museum. Maybe I didn’t give it as good a gander as it deserved since it was a bit crowded at the time, but I felt it could have been larger. Though since that impression I have learned that a) there are many Stonehenge-related artifacts in other museums, which I suppose would preclude their inclusion in this one, and b) there has been a lot less archeology on the site than I would have expected. Before reading the guidebook in depth just yesterday I thought there would have been far larger number of excavations but this is not the case, if you don’t count the 17^th/18^th century antiquaries digging into practically all the surrounding barrows.

Stepping out the back of the museum, the next surprise was that there was a bus to the monument itself. Again I remembered the old visitor center which seemed really close to the monument, but this new visitor center is a mile and a half away, the guidebook tells me. You can make the walk and I think in retrospect I would probably recommend that but we were a bit behind schedule and so we took the easy way out.

Now high up on my list of “things I really like” is continuity of use and so one of the most fun parts of our visit to Stonehenge was that it was surrounded by sheep. And I mean surrounded. The fields around Stonehenge were all grazing pastures and there were sheep everywhere, doing all sorts of sheep things, by which I mean eating, lounging, and walking around. My super amazing wife, as often covered here, is a big fan of sheep, so this was a highlight of the visit. I just thought it was so great that these same fields have been farmed in one way or another for thousands and thousands of years and show no sign of stopping. Apparently starting in about 1500 BC the fields around Stonehenge started getting farmed, as indicated by the wind-blown dust that fills some of the earthworks of Stonehenge, and here it is still going. And I mean, why should a world-famous heritage site keep you from grazing sheep? (I realize the sheep probably help preserve the site a lot more than not having sheep)

However, I dunno, I didn’t really feel anything upon seeing the stones themselves. I had expected the hair on my neck to stand up, to sense the energy in the lay lines, or whatever, but nope, they were some rocks. Maybe the culture that built them is too distant and alien for their spiritual necessities to resonate across the centuries to me, specifically, but I think walking up to the monument would have helped. We had kind of skipped to the end of the centerpiece of a wider landscape and maybe that was a mistake. If I were to spend a whole day at Stonehenge I think a priority for me would have been to get a better understanding of the wider site in which it stands and explore it much more, on foot. There are many many henges and earthworks and graves that surround Stonehenge, integrating it into a wider landscape. For many centuries you would have approached Stonehenge on foot from the River Avon, up through the appropriately-dubbed Avenue to reach the top of the hill on which the henge resides. You would be surrounded by so many other signs of the deep history of your peoples to this place. And maybe the walk would have replicated that, I dunno.

In the meantime we admired the sheep, and the signs suggesting funny photographs you could take and tag Stonehenge in on social media, and caught a bus back on down to the visitor center. This being lunchtime we got some sausage rolls in the actually very nice and very reasonably-priced café. Then we exited via the gift shop, which was quite extensive and had a lot of cool stuff, including what I liked best which was examples of the different ways people have interpreted Stonehenge through the centuries, such as this neat woodcut by Yoshijiro Urushibara. Loaded with some Christmas shopping, we found our car with all the neat features, and head on out for our next set of stones.

Reading this week:

• My Second Journey Through Equatorial Africa by Hermann von Wissman

We alighted from the train station in Bath and were instantly enamored. How does it keep all this Georgian architecture intact? We had arrived in the morning, much before check-in time at the hotel, but they nonetheless were kind enough to store our bags so we were off to priority #1: the Jane Austen Center!

The Center, or Centre, is a museum dedicated to Jane Austen with its home in a house down the road from where Jane Austen lived alongside her mother and sister after her father died. It is a fun place and works to give you a good insight into the Regency setting of Austen’s novels. You start the tour with a lecture from one of Austen’s characters, in our case Emma from Emma, who was great. I learned a lot of interesting stuff on the tour, like the fact that there is no real contemporary portraits of Jane Austen. I was very hurt on her sister’s behalf however, because at one point Jane’s sister Cassandra painted a watercolor of Jane, but as soon as they tell you that they go on and on about how terrible of a painting it is and like, come on. Be nice. Sorry she didn’t have a camera.

From there we wandered Bath for a bit. The Regency atmosphere we just learned about in the Jane Austen Center was heightened by the fact we were visiting Bath in the midst of the Jane Austen Festival. We didn’t attend any of the Jane Austen-specific events, but what it did mean is that we would be in a restaurant and at the next table over would be a couple in full Regency dress, which was a delight. Another highlight of our wanderings was Persephone Books, which is based out of Bath. They specialize in neglected books by (mostly) women and besides being a very good concept for a shop is just also a very nice shop. Be sure to stop by.

But enough dilly-dallying, on to the main event: the Baths! The Roman Baths, specifically, the reason the town is named Bath. But you knew that. This was a significantly better museum and experience than I thought it was going to be. I thought it was going to be hokey and it has a bit of a hokey veneer but is in fact quite in-depth. We were on a guided tour but they tell you to show up an hour early, and we did, and that is actually a good idea. The guided tour and self-guided tour are different experiences so it is worth it to make time for both.

On the un-guided tour you of course walk around the complex. You start on the terrace of the baths and eventually descend to bath-level, which is now below ground. The baths themselves do not look too relaxing these days. Because they are open-air and the water is at a perfect petri-dish temperature, they are full of algae and green. They do clean them occasionally but we were on the tail-end of a cleaning cycle. Back in the day the baths would have had a roof which would have kept the pool much more pool-looking. But after admiring the baths then you wind through the museum, which was really fascinating.

The museum really works to paint the long, long history of the site. Before the Romans showed up in 43 and built a big ole’ temple/spa complex on top, the hot springs had long been a pilgrimage site for the peoples of Britain. Which means that the museum has all sorts of artifacts from the Roman and pre-Roman eras. The second coolest thing they have in there are pre-Roman coins which I think is fantastic just because it is a glimpse into a whole strange and alien civilization. Plus some of the coins had boats on them. But that of course leaves the coolest thing, which had to be the only words in British Celtic known to survive anywhere. One of the uses for the springs was cursing people, and you could write your curse on a lead tablet and fold it up and toss it into the waters for the gods to take care of. They have in the collection one of these curse tablets written with Latin letters but in British Celtic. They don’t know what it means, because this is the only surviving record of the language and like, imagine that person. Speaking Celtic, but a) knows Latin and b) has a beef with someone they want the Gods to take care of. That is a person who bridged worlds.

At the designated time we met our guide and compatriots for the guided tour, which focused a lot more on the archeology of the baths. Like the Globe, there are chunks of the baths that they can’t do much archeology on because the buildings on top of the baths are also historical. Oh well. But our guide was deeply knowledgeable and really loved the site and really tried to let us see the site through his eyes. Like at one point on the floor there are indentations apparently where the oyster bar used to be (common bath snack doncha know), and he explained these were from generations of people clamoring for oysters as they enjoyed the holy and very relaxing waters. At the end of the tour there is a fountain of Bath water which you can sample (but direct from the spring of course, not the green stuff). Our guide said he drank it every day and it kept him fit and healthy. I thought it was fine-tasting but my super amazing wife didn’t like it. The highlight of the gift shop was me saving the day by nabbing a small dog that had escaped from its owners and was evading them in the store. Fun stuff!

After the baths and a bit more walking, dinner was Sally Lunn’s very historical bunns. That was a lovely meal orchestrated by two women who were absolutely running trying to keep up with the dinner service. Sally Lunn’s also has a museum but it was closed by the time we finished dinner, so it was finally time to retire to our hotel room, which my super amazing wife was delighted to discover included a bathtub.

After I had run through my three boxes of archives it was time to rendezvous with my super amazing wife, who had entertained herself rather than watch me go through boxes of old records. Lunch under our belt we detoured to things more squarely in her realm of interests, in this case tea and Shakespeare. After a brief stop at Twinings tea where she took advantage of their 3-for-2 deal, we head for the first time across the Thames to south London to make the pilgrimage to Shakespeare’s Globe.

This was not actually my first visit to the Globe. Back in middle school my family did a house exchange in Scotland, except dad figured out that it was cheaper to book a package deal with a week in London than to just book the airline tickets by themselves, so this whole trip was over my old stomping grounds. I don’t think having viewed these places as a preteen and then as a 30-something provides any particular insights. My biggest surprise upon revisiting the Globe was that although I knew it was a recreation (albeit on a somewhat smaller scale), I didn’t realize it had been built only in 1997, so when I visited it last it was like, new. Though my biggest memory was that they did not have any lapel pins in the gift shop back then, so I had to go with a pin-back button, the kind of move I would mostly refuse to make these days, because the other difference between me as a 30-something and me as a preteen is that now I have standards by golly.

On this visit to the Globe we took the guided walking tour, which was very good. It started off in their little museum there in the basement. It is pretty good and especially with the guide it gives you a good grounding in why the theater was where it was and what sorts of entertainments they were putting on and how. The big competition around there for eyeballs was bear-baiting which is just like, those poor bears and those poor dogs. But after the museum we went out into South London to let the guide paint for us the Elizabethan world on the backdrop of the modern world. Besides pointing out where all the bear-baiting was happening (one of the spots is like a nice-looking seafood place now, history is wild), you also got to learn about ferrymen, and the local brewspots that were there were breweries for centuries and centuries. They also showed you the original spot where the Globe was, except they can’t do much archeology on it because a large chunk of the spot is covered with a newer building, but not a “new” building because that building is also historical and they can’t modify it or take it down at all to take a look at the Globe. Man must be wild to be a country with so many layers of the sort of history that leaves brick walls, specifically.

The tour ended at the gift shop, where I was distressed to learn that although they now have lapel pins, none of them said “Globe Theater” (I try to ensure my lapel pins say the name of the place I got them from), so I had to go with a cat holding a skull instead. You all will have to remind me where it is from. But with that bit of Elizabethan atmosphere absorbed, we head back across the river. There we took in some of our last sights of London, including fun things like Roman wharf timber and remaining bits of the Old London Bridge (conveniently both are in the same spot). It was important to absorb these things because the next morning we were off to the next big city of our vacation. So we tubed back to the hotel, had a good night’s sleep, woke up early, schlepped our too big suitcases through a couple of Tube stations not designed for too-big-suitcase-schlepping, and eventually arriving at Paddington. I had time to grab a sausage roll before we caught our train, which was a very nice ride. I was stunned to see we were going at over 110 miles per hour, but I suppose that sort of thing was just normal around there. But all the better because we were excited to finally arrive in the city of Jane Austen’s dreams: Bath.

Of the various museums we were going to go to on this trip, the one we were perhaps both the most excited for was the Victoria & Albert Museum, or the V&A for those who are into abbreviations. It’s an art and design museum, you see, and art and design are some of our most favorite things. Having decided you can’t have too much of a good thing we went once again to Café Tropea for breakfast and then had our first tube adventure. This was fun and easy and we just used our credit cards which is a technology our American minds could not comprehend and we took a straight shot on the Piccadilly Line and I was pleasantly surprised to find out that we didn’t even need to go above ground to access the V&A, we could just take a tunnel and pop out into the basement. Fun!

Tell you what man we were excited for the V&A and it lived up to the hype. My super amazing wife had done her reading more than I had and so was aware of the Cast Courts. These are wild. So the theory was that it is hard to go see say Michelangelo’s David in person and so what they did was bring David to you (provided you are in London) in the form of a plaster cast. They went into a lot of effort to do a good job on these casts and also used other reproduction methods, and a chunk of the exhibition was just about different reproduction techniques. The Cast Courts themselves were built around the dimensions needed for the largest casts, those of Trajan’s Column, which lemme tell ya, are HUGE. Since my super amazing wife was familiar with the Cast Courts we went there first, and since I am such a hound for showing up to museums early we were there before nearly anyone else, so here we were in these cavernous rooms just chock-a-block of the world’s finest sculptural works squeezed together for an admiring public which consisted of just us. It was revival architecture but for interior decorating. My kind of style really, but I nearly lost my super amazing wife somewhere between the Portico de la Gloria and the Tomb of St Peter Martyr. We were off to a great start at the museum.

Look from here I will simply have to recreate the experience of going through the rest of the V&A, which was just absorbing like body blows of beautiful object after beautiful object by telling you about them one after another, relentlessly, making you jealous, like I was, that there is so much beauty in the world and yet we have only a limited time in order to perceive it. In the guts of the museum itself our first stop after the Cast Courts was the extensive jewelry collection. We had wanted to see some particular pieces, and we did, but why limit yourself to one when they have thousands of pieces spanning millennia. After that we just stumbled upon a hall full of tapestries, and like, we like textile arts, we have to go see the tapestries. We are here to see the tapestries! I couldn’t stop saying that in my head. But here are these works of art, gigantic, 500 years old, how did they do that, what luxury to decorate your house with such things just to keep out the drafts. From there we just blast through the theater and arts section, catching glimpses of Dua Lipa’s Mugler bodysuit alongside Stormtrooper armor alongside the biggest celebrity they have to have had, the costume worn by Manuel in Fawlty Towers, yes, Manuel! Manuel from Fawlty Towers, one of the greatest British TV shows of all time (though I can’t even watch The IT Crowd it is too funny), they had that sucker just on display in a corner, now we are going through a whole section from William Morris of the Arts and Craft Movement, which is another highlight that my super amazing wife really wanted to see, but on the way there you have to stop by the particularly famous bed, and now we are very nearly lost and also hungry, but we manage to find the café, itself just a gorgeous environment, surrounded by Victorian-era tile which in itself is a delight to the senses but also we were eating some rather good salmon, alright back at it, gotta view the fashion special exhibit, I liked it all, it was all super great, up and at ‘em through another hallway, what is that chair, it has to be modern, it is so chic and sleek and minimalist, but no, it is Victorian, how did they even know to do that back then, you have to explain it to me, wait there is no time, now we are in an entire hallway, an entire hallway! of ironwork, wrought and cast and bent and shaped which we admire because my dad is a blacksmith and we want to find things he would like, and there are so many things, it is too much, my heart can’t take it anymore, we gotta get out of here and we stumble out into the sun instead of going back through the tunnel to the tube because by then we needed the cleansing rays of daylight to let it all wash over us. It is a really fantastic museum, you should definitely go.