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?)