all kinds of writing

all kinds of writing

Last May (click here) I wrote about how our friend Tony Birks-Hay, Jane’s first tutor when she went to art college in Oxford aged 18, had suddenly died while on holiday with his wife Leslie in France.

A fortnight ago we went to Bath to see a number of his works still owned by Leslie which were on sale at the Anthony Hepworth Gallery in Brock Street, just off the Royal Crescent. It was a sad occasion for all who had known him, but it was good to see the little red spots appearing in some abundance as the evening went on.

At first we thought that Leslie was the only person in the gallery whom we knew, but - after a while - Jane was delighted to discover that Charles Bound, and his wife Joy, had made the journey from mid-Wales to pay their respects to Tony. For, by coincidence, it had been Tony who introduced his ceramics to Jane (when he and Leslie ran the Alpha Gallery in Sherborne) and Jane had included Charles in the most exhilarating and original of her books on ceramics: The Human Form in Clay: (The Crowood Press, 2001, ISBN 1 86126 413 5). Indeed, Jane had a standing invitation to visit Charles and choose one of his pieces as an expression of thanks for her appreciation of his work.

see http://www.charlesbound.com/index.shtml

Later that evening the four of us went to Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant a few streets away and, over an excellent meal, agreed that we would make the train journey to Welshpool some time. So that’s something to look forwards to.

Next morning we decided to try out the new Thermae Bath Spa, to be found - appropriately enough - in Hot Bath Street. I say ‘new’, though it actually opened in 2006. Still, that’s a mere blink of an eye in terms of how far back the city of Bath has been known for its waters.

Provided you can put right out of your mind the outrageous charge of 35 pounds a head for two and a bit hours, you can have a pretty good time.

(For comparison: private entrance to the Széchenyi Spa in central Budapest, skipping the queues and giving you all-day access to 18 indoor and outdoor pools and saunas comes to about 13 pounds; while the Caracalla Therme, in Baden Baden, charge 14 euros for a two-hour session (with dozens of different baths, spas etc, and even an - optional - nudist floor), down to 12 euros if you use a voucher supplied by your hotel. And in Tunisia, for half what we paid in Bath, we hired a car and driver to take us to some marvellous natural springs right on the coast).

The photo at the top shows the only pool, right at the top of the building. No more than 30 foot across, it gets seriously crowded, but it’s a decent 34-35 degrees centigrade, so it’s somewhere you can relax in, especially if you bag a place under the only source of gushing water, which comes on every 10 minutes for five minutes or so.

A floor below is a decent sized steam hall, with an impressive waterfall shower and four glass-walled rooms, each infused with a different essential oil, such as frankincense, eucalyptus or sandalwood.

And that’s about it. The changing rooms are a farce: the staff are very helpful, but the narrow passageways are full of people waiting for cubicles to become free, or stuffing their clothes into narrow lockers. And the showers are on a different floor!

Still, it is the only natural hot water spa in Britain so, presumably, they think they can get away with charging an arm and a leg. Shame.

Painting and bathing in Bath

Thursday, 5 March 2015