Back to Bath

A fortnight after our brief break in Bath, I was there again yesterday. It was wet, not a day for photography, but in a lull on my way back to the station I spotted this sign: is it soliciting customers or warning them of the presence of a latter-day Demon Barber?

The purpose of my visit was another lunchtime meeting and talk. Turkey was on the agenda, but not on the menu. David Logan, formerly our ambassador in Istanbul, speaks with beguiling lack of emphasis, but no wasted words. He mapped out for us the complex, not to say intractable, set of relationships between Turks and four sorts of Kurds: we also glimpsed behind the scenes within Turkey itself, a country clearly not to be ignored.

19 of us attended, one of the ancillary pleasures being meeting people of differing backgrounds: I sat next to another former ambassador (to Chile), who also worked for many years in Geneva on arms control. He argues strongly now against all armed intervention in either Iraq or Syria.

With Caroline away in France this week, I was given supper by friends on Tuesday: for Trishe's birthday, Christopher was getting her Gerry Hughes' new book, Cry of Wonder, so I thought I'd have a look at it in Bath's elegant Waterstones. I couldn't find it, and on the train home I saw in the paper that its author had just died. RIP.

He was a gentle, shy man. 29 years ago this month we had him to stay for a Winchcombe Action for Peace meeting - in the Methodist church, as the Catholic priest said No to it being in St Nicholas'. On our way down the hill into Winchcombe, Gerry realised he'd left his Jerusalem Bible in our spare room - he needed it for his talk. "No problem," I said. "We have to pay a courtesy visit to the Catholic priest, and we can ask to borrow one from him." But, "The Jerusalem Bible!" exclaimed Canon Morrissey. "I don't have that."

Arriving at the door of the Methodist church, we were greeted warmly by the Minister. I told him about Gerry's Jerusalem Bible oversight. "Just a moment," he said, "I'll get Fr. Hughes my copy."

The Royal Court's new play about the climate crisis, 2071 has just begun a short run (till 15th). It "is better than good: it is necessary", concludes Michael Billington in his 5-star review. The same might be said of Gerry Hughes' God of Surprises.

Belle Vue

Bath signage is worth a study: walking back from tea at Sally Lunn's, we saw one on a house near to our hotel last evening - an elegant "Spencers Belle Vue" above the door, and that turns out to be the name of the road too: we look down on it from our third floor bay window.

I thought the steep climb would be a slog after our long day out, but there's so much to observe, and we even went further and revisited our favourite place of all here: in contrast to Royal Crescent below (and the still more ornate Circus), Lansdown Crescent's facade is plain, its only concession to frivolity being the ironwork - assuming you don't count the sheep that safely graze below. Not that you would normally call sheep frivolous, but here they seem it, miles from any proper farmland.

Bath

As the unexpected beneficiaries of our friends' cancelled holiday, we are in Bath for two nights, staying at the Lansdown Grove Hotel. On a windy but sunny morning, we walked down to the River Avon passing majestic trees (in their Autumn colours) and buildings to correspond: you can only glimpse them from a car.

Ahead of the first shuttle bus up the other side of the valley to Claverton and the American Museum (where we happily spent most of the day), there was time to explore Bath's wonderful Victoria Art Gallery: neither of us had been in before.

There and back

This morning I went to Bath, catching the train from Cheltenham, and changing at Bristol Temple Meads. Having climbed onto the London-bound train and sat down, I realised that most of my newspaper (and a couple of magazines I'd brought along too) were still where I had left them, tucked behind my table on the earlier train and now on their way to Plymouth. Bother. So while waiting on Bath Station to return this afternoon, I bought another copy of the paper, not wanting trouble when I got home. At Bristol, I boarded an Edinburgh-bound train, and entered a carriage with a couple of screaming children. Going right down to the end, I found an empty seat.

And yes, it was the same seat on the same train as I'd caught this morning, my "lost" papers still all there behind the table.

Sadly, I can't say anything about the really interesting part of the day - a talk and discussion 20 of us had over lunch on the subject of the Ukraine: Chatham House Rules applied. But we ate well, my third lunch out in a row. And Vladimir Putin was said, with some confidence, to be the richest man on the Planet.

Visiting Bath

Reynolds may or may not have painted this portrait of the grandmother of the Bath Holburne Museum's founder, tucked away high on one of the Museum's walls. The Museum's website records a cleaning in 1992, which included the removal of "a rosebud which had been added to the sitter's décolletage at some point".

The sitter was born Frances Ball in 1719, and brought up in Barbados. Aged 12, she was married off to a man 17 years her senior, and bore him - esides four other children - two sons. On her husband's early death, she married Admiral Holburne by whom she had more children, before dying in her early forties.

The younger son of the first marriage, Francis had a granddaughter, Frances, who in turn had a son Francis: his posthumous daughter, another Frances, has a great-granddaughter Ida Frances, who was looking up at her ancestor's portrait with me yesterday afternoon.