Dusk in Bath and a Shady Man

So it stopped raining after I wrote my entry yesterday. After the Caffe Nero closed, I had about an hour to burn, so I went to have dinner. I thought about going to Pulteney Bridge, but as I approached it, I saw the Saracen's Head and decided to go there instead. If you'll remember from the picture captions, this was Charles Dickens's favorite pub here in Bath. Well, it lacked the charm of the Eagle and Child (Bird and Baby) of Oxford, the favorite pub of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein. I was a little disappointed-- I expected it to be filled with smoke and ghosts.

And on the subject of smoke-- everyone smokes here, and most of them indoors. I can feel the cancer starting to grow in my lungs already. Don't they know they're killing themselves?

Anyway, one more note: never ever order a salad at a pub. I don't know what I was thinking, but that was not really a salad. It was some shredded lettuce drowning in dressing. I was still hungry after the Bad Salad, so I got some cookies at the grocery store and went down the street to the pub where the Bizarre Bath tour is supposed to meet. It was almost 8 pm, and the sun was setting. Bath at dusk is very beautiful: the sky was a combination of blue and of the light and dark grey clouds, the hills were bright green with the yellow houses catching the sunlight and the windows sparkling-- everything was in bright shades of purple and gold and green and blue. It was breathtaking. The air was very cold and everything was clean from the rain, and the bells in the Abbey were chiming almost constantly.

I waited until five minutes of 8 pm and no one was there for the Bizarre Bath tour yet. I didn't want to be the only one there to go on the tour, so I went across the city centre to the pub where the ghost tour was meeting. But the only one there for that was the tour guide, a shady-looking man with a dark, slouched hat on. I pretended to be looking at some posters at the theatre next door while I waited for someone else to show up, but no one did. Something about going on a ghost tour alone with a man who looks like the Shadow did not appeal to me, so I went home. I watched the premiere episode of "Casanova" on the BBC, and went to bed. That was my day.

Today I'm going to go to the Roman Baths Museum and have a Sally Lunn bun for lunch. I think I'll try my luck again with the tours tonight at 8 pm. Other than that, I'm not sure-- I'm saving high tea at the Pump-Room for tomorrow, and I think I want to save a walk into the hills for then as well. There are some museums around town, but they are in things like American Art and Victorian Art-- although normally I wouldn't mind going, they don't really apply to my project, and besides, I could see good examples of those kinds of art in the United States. Or in London. The ghost tour and Bizarre Bath tour apply to the idea of what makes Bath special-- why one would choose to write about it in Georgian times and today-- but looking at art in a museum doesn't really do that. The art could be in any museum. (Whereas the Museum of Costume is special for Bath, particularly because of the Jane Austen exhibit.)