How delicious, to hear the swish of a corrective hand from the first, to cringe from a clip behind the ear from the second, and to start from a nose tweak from the third, along with some collective shrieking reprimands from the plump ladies upon our arms, the slatterns, or, as I have sometimes found myself calling them before, meretrices. It was 'Jane Austen Festival' in Bath last weekend, did you know?
Do you want a good time then?
No, it certainly isn’t goodness with a capital ‘G’, but only some fragments or crumbs, still amounting to a provocation, like a jab in the ribs at the sight of an improbability as one might describe listening to Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate on BBC Radio 4.
Or coming upon the extension to The Holburne Museum in Bath which I did last Saturday morning while strolling the city streets. “Where Art Meets Park”, it said in one of the publicity posters inside which showed a picture of a composite man, top half bewigged Regency gent, bottom half football shorts and boots and hairy legs.
Improbable meeting place. The Garden Café on the ground floor was open on three sides through floor to ceiling glass plated windows, and seemed to hold up the museum spaces on the floors above without visible support, open doorways also leading from front to back, and back to front.
Mirroring the inside and outside, as well as the old and new, strength and softness, classical and modern, backward looking and forward, a green wine bottle was brought to my table when I asked for some water to have with my coffee in the Garden Café. It was absinthe.
Outside, the surrounding plane trees had begun to show some autumn colours, and the large green rectangular tiles hung to the walls also appeared to have no means of support, their surfaces crazed with bronze undulating lines.
Controversial according to the press, some people do not like it, flying in a green light, light, open, accessible – free (no entry charge!) – and transparent.
The online images don’t do it real justice at all.