ROMAN BATHING

Virum lepidum quaero qui Dick, Jock et Snowy meminisse potest, atque cum hilara femina per litteras colloqui. Anglice respondere licet. Imago? *

Apologies for the Latin, but it seems appropriate somehow seeing as I have just been to ‘Thermae’ Bath Spa, the hot springs of the eponymous city, recently renovated as a Millennium project at some vague and improbable cost.

Elder Daughter has been threatening to take me there for ages. She takes all her friends there and I am at least an honorary friend as well as a parent. So there I was, clad in a white towelling robe, wandering about and hopping in and out of the spa waters, crystal clear and the temperature of tepid soup. Two hours of this costs all of £22, including the use of hairdryers.

And very pleasant it is too. Except that when you have nothing to do for a couple of hours you can’t help your mind wandering, and indeed wondering as it wanders. So my immediate thought on seeing my fellow incumbents dressed identically in white towelling robes and drifting about earnestly in pairs or threesomes, was that I had travelled back in time some 2000 years.

Give or take a bare shoulder or two, a towelling robe is, after all, much the same as a toga, a garment that contrives to be elegant and serious at the same time. You can’t really be silly or facetious in a robe and sandals, can you? Which is why perhaps the Romans were rather better known for their baths than their jokes.

Now it seems to me that rather than evolving bathhouse design in the last 2,000 years, we have actually gone backwards. Gone are the great decorations, the floor mosaics, gone is the social intercourse, the gaming tables, the erotic nymphs of both sexes wafting to and fro. Gone are the intricate arrays of hot pools and cold pools of washes and plunges and hot rooms and steam rooms. Gone is the rubbing down and the rubbing up, the oils and the perfumes; the food and drink of every description. Gone is actually the civilisation that was the Roman bathhouse.

Had this been two thousand years ago whoever wrote the personal advertisement with which I started this piece, and placed it with surely more hope than expectation in the London Review of Books, might have scrawled the same words on a clay tablet and left it here. For a denarius or two there may well have been attendants ready to sketch one’s ‘Imago.’

The spa waters, though, haven’t changed. Literally! Apparently ten thousand years elapses between summer rain ruining the local harvest and the same waters bubbling up out of the ground again, having been on a tour of the earth’s hot nether regions in the interim. Floating in these waters is truly therefore an authentically Roman experience.

Indeed pre-Roman for the first baths built around these springs were constructed by the father of King Lear, a figure I have never before associated with the West Country. Was it the cider, perhaps, I wanted to ask as I lay in the warm basement pool, while my bottom was massaged softly by its integral jacuzzi.

Great concrete roof supports rise like mushrooms from the floor of this pool making it more suited to an aquatic game of hide and seek than swimming. Here all is white, curved, clean and light; the chlorine-free water a turquoise blue reflection of the pool tiles.

We climb the spiral stair to the steam room. Here four giant circular cubicles steam the incumbents like suet puddings. The waft of hot essential oils in the steam room would have even have struck a chord with the Romans.

You sit and you sweat and then shower under a cascade from the centre of the ceiling. Elder Daughter, who is impervious to cold finds the steam a bit hot. I, on the other hand, who am very pervious to cold indeed, find it just the right temperature. The sort of place where one could stay all day without needing a pullover.

We climb the stairs again, this time with cold air cascading down the passageway. On the roof we descend gently into the warm waters of the rooftop pool, five stories up above the roof tops of Bath. Here you can lie in the evenings, immersed in warm water, looking up at the stars. Today I look up at the blue sky and the scudding clouds and watch people of all shapes and sizes, wondering who they are and whence they come.

I overhear a number speaking in a Birmingham accent. This is most interesting for we know accents can survive a change of language; moreover, that they endure generation after generation. Which makes me wonder whether those folk of Roman West Mercia spoke in these selfsame nasal tones; were there British centurions who sounded like Jasper Carrot?

On my wrist I wear something like a child’s watch, except that it doesn’t tell the time - at least it doesn’t tell me the time - though it will tell the earnest Australian at reception if I outstay my welcome. It is made of plastic and it opens, and locks, my locker. If I wander into the restaurant I can charge food and drink to it. I think this is a very good idea.

I go to sit in the sun on a lounger on another roof terrace, hoping that a waiter may hove in view willing to charge a glass of Pinot Grigio (Roman, you see, from Italy) to my magic wristband. Elder Daughter does her best to manage my expectations. Though various people drift in and out, they are not waiters. This is self-service says Elder Daughter.

Deprived of my ‘tonic’ I think about writing out a ‘curse’ tablet and dropping it into the pool. (The Romans apparently did a great deal of cursing and scratched their maledictions on lead tablets dropped into the hot spring). Elder Daughter dissuades me - but I am wondering if cursing couldn’t prove as good a source of revenue as glasses of Pinot served on the terrace. There is so much to curse these days.

*(I think this means something like: I am seeking a charming man who is able to remember Dick, Jock and Snowy, to share literary discussions with a funny woman. Please reply in English. Picture?)

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

Our latest play ‘Art’ is ‘coming along.’ It is grinding its way along the bumpy road that leads from the first play reading to the congratulatory theatre supper on the Saturday night after the last performance. In between everyone puts in a lot of work. Frustrations abound, we take a step back or sideways for every two that we go forward, in short we ‘come along.’ The Director (Rosie) has the hard job of keeping sufficient momentum to afford steerage way. Feathers through treacle!

But slowly it is taking shape, as plays always do. The approach of opening night concentrates the mind wonderfully. Lines are learnt (or almost so); the set is built (or almost so); the props and dressing in place (or almost so). We even have a brand new grey sofa from IKEA, very comfortable. It plays its part perfectly; it is the only presence on stage that doesn’t overact.

'Art' is a play that demands strong emotion: not a lot of shouting or anger necessarily, though there is that, but simply emotion. Therein lies my problem. I am finding that, at the moment, I can’t easily successfully act and remember my lines.

I remember Alan Bennett talking once about how much good actors ‘emote.’ He was talking after doing a piece with Maggie Smith, who I suppose emotes more than most: those flashing eyes, the gracious sweeps of the limbs, the whooping voice, that crystal delivery in which you can hear every letter, let alone every syllable.

Emoting on stage is not hard - for me anyway - it seems to flow naturally from the words, but it is easy to get so caught up in the feverish intensity of the moment that suddenly - at the end of a passage - you find yourself like a flushed and stranded fish with mouth open and nothing coming out. The mind mechanisms have crashed and like awaking from a deep sleep in a panic in some strange bed you can’t remember where you are.

Of course this sort of thing is worse if you are tired or stressed or if you feel, as I did earlier this week, that I was incubating swine flu. (I’m not as it happens, but thanks for asking) Mistake followed mistake. I was conflating lines and missing cues with abandon. A toy train coming off the rails, but still bouncing valiantly along the track.

As it happened, the previous night Welsh television had re-transmitted a film about Richard Burton, who grew up not a great many miles from where I live now, the twelfth Welsh-speaking child in a family of thirteen. His father was a coal miner in the Welsh pit village of Pontrhydyfen; his mother, who died when he was two, a teacher.

‘Adopted’ by his English master in the grammar school in English-speaking Port Talbot, Philip Burton set about training him as an actor, transforming his high and strongly accented Welsh voice into the deep growl that became so famous.

I loved that voice, so strong, sonorous, resonating. Burton developed it by reciting large chunks of Shakespeare to the sheep high on the windy mountainsides of South Wales. Once this ability to speak in the open air was common among actors and politicians - Lloyd George, once addressed 10,000 people on a Caernarvon mountainside while Queen Victoria used to complain that Prime Minister William Gladstone addressed her as though she were a public meeting, so penetrating was his voice. But that’s all something of the past, diction today is a forgotten art.

Back to my own sad performance. Stumbling in the middle of yet another passage I found myself thinking of the Burton film. And suddenly to the blackness of the ether I transmitted a silent cry for help: “I’m in the s***t down here, Richard, what can I do?”

In an instant I had an answer. Like a text message to the head; a text that growled and burnt into my brain.

“Concentrate on the delivery of the words.”

I knew instantly what that meant. Instead of trying to focus on a line or on an emotion, I should instead concentrate on the delivery of each word, rolling the key ones around and spitting them out with particular stress, enjoying the tone of a word and the pattern of its syllables and making the audience appreciate it too. Not line by line, but word by word.

Did it work? Well, yes, strangely, it did. I became calmer, the lines more focused. But like much of such advice it is easier said than done. It is not simple to concentrate on the delivery of the words in a fast moving dialogue when you have to take in and react to the facial expressions of others.

But, as a technique for projecting Shakespeare to startled sheep on a mountainside it is, I am sure, infallible. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends..........”

BEANS

Well - for the moment at least - here comes summer. Or, perhaps more accurately, here comes summer again. For I seem to remember the first month of summer being quite respectable. Indeed the enamelled reproduction of a French nineteenth century thermometre recorded about 30 degrees against the cool shady wall of our front door - as high as that late summer of a few years ago when the good people in Gravesend found themselves privileged to melt, in a record temperature of over 100ºF.

At any rate I was watering the garden then virtually everyday so the last month of almost continuous rain has provided some relief, if only to my water bill.

Now with the re-arrival of the sunshine I shall have to start watering again! Not that I completely ever stopped watering, even in the rain, for I have a tub full of runner beans growing against a wooden fence and close to the north-east facing gable wall of the house. Hardly a propitious position, I thought, when I decided this was the only spot I had left to put them, but then you never really know until you try.

This peculiar location is sheltered from the south-westerly rains by the house and from anything else by an enormous flowering currant bush. Nevertheless the bean tendrils have crept skywards, first up poles and then up odd pieces of string and are now busy cropping furiously all over the roof of the shed. They lie though in a rain shadow so the leaves are perpetually curling up and sagging and I have to go out incongruously in the pouring rain to water them.

You can, according to the 1970s self-sufficiency guru John Seymour, feed a family of four for a year on an acre of beans. I always find this a useful thing to know and regularly retail the information at parties when the conversation turns yet again to house prices or the prospects for the next football season. Nor do I imagine that were you an inventive cook your family would ever be bored, so many and varied are the different types of the family leguminosae.

But, seriously, a pea, eaten fresh from its pod, ripe and succulent, is one of the great tastes of nature; then there’s houmous and dahl, made from wonderful lentils and chick peas. These are at least honorary beans. Soy beans, of course, keep you young, containing as they do all sorts of phyto-hormones to keep you healthy and stop your hair and teeth falling out.

And even without their accompaniment of white sauce young broad beans are so tender and tasty as to make you feel you could live on them forever. But why deprive yourself of white sauce when beans will give you both flour and an acceptable range of dairy substitutes if you speak to them nicely?

Although I have had the fortune to be a quarter of a fine family of four I have never, fortunately or unfortunately, possessed an acre of land and so have never been able to put the John Seymour theory to the test. For the last 18 years I have indeed possessed only something the size of a large pocket handkerchief and therefore my bean production has been accordingly curtailed.

I do though produce sufficient beans to provide for a dish that has become a semi-signature; one that I first learned to cook one French summer in a rather bohemian establishment (the police where always turning up in Inspector Clouseau-like wagons with corrugated sides; while on the hall table stood a handy bowl of condoms in the sort of position where other residential establishments might have offered Imperial mints). It tastes particularly good outdoors on a summer evening, the cooked beans now appropriately watered by a light crisp or sparkling wine.

Once I cooked this dish for 80 students at another bohemian establishment this time in Norway, where Younger Daughter was undertaking some species of charitable training prior to being sent to build latrines in darkest Mozambique, where she caught but thankfully survived malaria. She came home safely, though minus her hair, sacrificed to the mosquitoes presumably.

Indeed so bohemian was this establishment that I ended up playing competitive hockey for Denmark (against the United Kingdom), something that I don’t think I ever did before, or since. I blame it on a £5 Ryanair ticket to Aarhus.

But you have, I know, even less interest than I do in hockey. You are waiting for the recipe. So here we go! The dish is called ‘Madame Martin’s Beans’, she being the eponymous patronne of the establishment the police were so interested in. When she was not catering for her visitors her métier was that of a family planning counsellor so her bowl of condoms were merely a sign of her stock-in trade.

The dish should be a big dish, big as you like. Imagine a heaped and steaming bowl, like a paella but without the mussels and crayfish entrails. It's mainly potatoes - par-boiled and then cut small and sautéed in butter. You can use any old potatoes, you don’t have to use your best quality, waxy Charlottes. It doesn’t matter if they crumble. Anyway you sauté the potatoes in a big hot pan with a lot of garlic (the key word is lot) and other herbs like rosemary and majoram. Add plenty of sea salt, of course, and black pepper. Don’t add the herbs or garlic too early or they will just burn up.

Now add your beans, about a quarter or a third by weight compared with the potatoes. They should be green beans - runners, or sliced haricots verts. These cook quickly and can be cooked by stirring them into the sauté-ing potatoes. Don’t over cook them. Al-dente is excellent, but this is a most forgiving dish that absolutely anyone can cook.

And then serve. That’s all! Hot filling and tasty - what more could you want. And you still don’t want to live for a year on an acre of beans?

SEVEN ADJECTIVES

Like others, and somewhat to my consternation, I have been tagged by Little Brown Dog to name seven adjectives with which to describe myself. Goodness! But where to start?

My first thought was simply to borrow the seven that LBD had chosen for herself. Most seemed to apply to me and had the advantage of being rather less negative than the ones I would otherwise tend to choose for myself and which would undoubtedly have been the same severe condemnations that generations of authority figures have left ringing in my ears: lazy, unfocused, sad, vain, delusional, could do better, and so forth.

Left to its own devices my self-image does have a tendency to drift off into the realms of outer darkness. In this it resembles the family silver which also turns black without a regular polish. One of the advantages of blogging is that it allows you to remind yourself who you really are. I am constantly surprised.

Still, plagiarising LBD’s eclectic crop of adjectival matter wouldn’t have made very interesting reading so, having a flash of inspiration, I telephoned to Elder Daughter, to ask her opinion. “Give me seven adjectives,” I said, “ to describe myself, straight off the top of your head.”

Having worked for The Body Shop, having indeed trained Gok Wan in his younger days, she is used to coping with all eventualities. Without breaking step she reeled off the following seven:

Fun
Intelligent
Happy (most of the time)
Eccentric
Funny (in the sense of having a capacity to amuse)
Young at heart
Sensitive

“There, is that seven?” she asked.

“They’re all very positive,” I said, hesitantly.

“Well, what do you expect?” she replied.

“Isn’t ‘Fun’ the same as ‘Funny’?”

“No! ‘Fun’ means you are playful, you’re not stuffy, you join in, you let your hair down, you participate, you don’t shrink into a corner. Whereas ‘Funny’ means that you amuse - you tell stories, make jokes, invent, make us laugh.

“Oh!”

At this point either she or I had to run away to make supper so I shall have to fill in her take on the other adjectives.

Intelligent - well, yes, I suppose so. I had a ‘good’ education (courtesy of the grants that were available in those days) and I like intellectual things. The house is full of books and papers. I enjoy writing. I enjoy learning about things - history, geography, climate, people, language. I am fascinated by politics and debate. I like to think I have made some original findings in the field of Neolithic Archeology. I am grateful that I have the opportunity (and some minor talent) for acting and occasional opportunities to travel.

Happy - of all seven adjectives on her list ‘Happy’ is the one that I am least comfortable with though she did qualify it by saying ‘most of the time.’ I am uncomfortable because I prefer to think of myself as irrepressibly sad, driven by some distant longing for another world - but that, I tell myself, is really just a Byronic impulse; I am still a lost teenager at heart. While maybe I would like to be sad and wistful, in reality I am, as she says, ‘Happy,’ whether I like it or not.

Eccentric - I can trace a gene in my family from my great aunt, through my father, through me and my eldest half-sister and on to Younger Daughter, which causes our eccentricity. This is a charming madness that makes us just slightly different to others: square pegs in round holes all. This is both a curse and a blessing. A blessing because it makes us original (and therefore not boring) but a curse, too, because there are so many times when all you want to do is to belong, to be unobtrusive, to sink into the anonymous background. And yet whatever we do, wherever we go, we are condemned to being somehow different.

When her natal friendies are having coffee mornings, supporting each other in each others houses, what is Younger Daughter doing? Taking young Theo (born February ‘09) on tour with the circus, spending four months in an elderly caravan and even more elderly transit van traipsing the highways and byways of Europe.

Funny - I suppose I do have some minor capacity to amuse. Maybe that is because I find it so tedious to be seriousness. Mild facetiousness enlivens every conversation. I do tell stories, invent, make things up. I create fantasies. At parties I enjoy telling jokes badly (for jokes are actually much funnier when told badly for the joke is then you struggling to tell the joke rather than the joke itself). I enjoy nonsense verse and children’s stories and retailing these on inappropriate occasions. But I am also a shy person and I suppose being funny is a defence against timidity.

Young at Heart - and head and body and legs and arms and face and hair! Actually I am very proud of my hair which still retains its natural colour, though not, sadly, its original volume. I can still run faster than Elder Daughter (and probably Younger Daughter too). But yes, I have no difficulty in adjusting my mental age downwards from where it seemed to get stuck at the age of about 17 so that I can play easily with small children, or, at the other end of the spectrum, with the very old. I find the techniques are exactly the same. Its adults that I always have difficulty with.

Sensitive. Yes, I have to confess to a weak and febrile nature. I am horribly sensitive - I hate violence and aggression of any sort. I cry in films at anything remotely heroic or romantic. I am constantly ‘saving’ animals even pests. I will spend ten minutes chasing a fly out of the window rather than simply swatting it. I hate upsetting people and am always thinking that I am in the wrong. But I am also sensitive in other ways - to colours and tones, to textures, to shapes and sizes, to touch, to an ambiance, to the wonder of the natural world.

So that’s my seven. I’ve ‘come clean’ How about you? I see Preseli Mags has tagged everyone. So, there’s no escape.