It wasn't the best weather for visits to Bath, but visit we did.


Even with thunderstorms looming, the buildings of Bath are eerily beautiful.


Ah, where to start? We only had a few hours.


As with all Janeites, a walking tour of the Austen Hot Spots was in order. Luckily we've done this a number of times before, so we scurried off to the best bits for Mother-in-law-on-the-highlights-tour purposes. Here's Bennett Street.


At the end of the circus we stopped to have a picnic with fruit cake ala The Great British Bake Off book. When I watch TV, I watch crime drama like NCIS, Castle, Grimm (my guilty pleasure).

But, The Great British Bake Off.
Oh.
It caught me unawares.

I love it. This Fruit Cake is from last year's book, and it's the easiest and most delicious fruit cake. A bit crumbly, but that only means that it needs to be sliced quite thickly before serving. I'm not complaining.


This is inside Bath Abbey. It is very grand with its leafy vaulted ceilings and intricate stained glass windows. Churches make me uncomfortable, but this one is very interesting - there has been a church on this site since 757 AD! It's also the site of all coronations for the Kings and Queens of England.


Also on display in the Abbey were Sue Symon's rather unusual artworks. They are a series of 35 pairs of framed pieces - the one on the left is a hand-illustrated drawing and lettering bonanza, and the one on the right is an embroidery/fabric piece.  Here's a close-up of my favourite hand-drawn image. There is a lot of pencil in the images which makes me feel uncomfortable (from years of rigorous training in art where pencils under images were absolutely verboden) and the embroidery was quite modern for my tastes, but on the whole, the diptychs are rather quite lovely to look at and added something extra to our little afternoon visit.


The deck chairs were out, despite the bad weather. I particularly love this one! Although, it does seem grossly unjust to sit on The Garden Party deck chair while you're enjoying a holiday at the seaside or in the sun.


.... and no trip to Bath is complete without a visit to the Regency Tea Rooms at the Jane Austen Centre. We shared scones, tea cakes and bath buns with plenty of jam and clotted cream. Afterwards we ambled around the streets of Bath to the Assembly Rooms, down to the Pump Room, and around the shops.


We hastened to the Makery Emporium of Mollie Makes fame for a rummage around buttons, ribbons, spools, fabrics and other haberdashery whatnots.


I love the floral love birds and robot ribbons on giant wooden spools. I could have a shelf like this in my makery.


In the middle of the teeny tiny shop was a table full of cups and bowls and buttons. I particularly love the little chalkboards they have to price the buttons - albeit, priced rather - ahem - generously, I thought.


Tape! Jars! Ribbons! So much to look at. I bought a handful of small wooden spools. All in all, a lovely way to end our little trip.

Today is the end of our week-long holiday. Going back to work is not something I think of with fondness, there's an awful lot of hullaballoo that's going to happen in the next few weeks, but I'm happily looking back on our little sojourn. The universe was conspiring as we were planning it: work happened, our plans to go to Italy fell through because of financial constraints, we still have wedding invitations to make and send out... but we were okay. We hired a car, packed a bag, and headed to Oxfordshire.

I've got so many anecdotes to share with you that I'll have to split them up into bite-sized posts. I'll start with Bath and Sally Lunn's Bath Buns.

If the name isn't enough to sell it to you, we ventured to the beautiful city of Bath on a whim. G's grandparents hadn't yet had the opportunity to see the Bath empire, so it was the perfect day trip - and we were a mere forty-five minutes from the spa resort, established, as Wikipedia tells us, in the wee early days of AD 43.

















There is much to see and do in Bath, but we were there for a few hours and we had a distinct plan of action: have a look at the general architecture, visit Kitchens and Lakeland, walk around the shopping district, see the Royal Crescent, and have tea at Sally Lunn's.

















Sally Lunn's is a rather famous tea house. The last time we were here we dined at Jane Austen's Regency Tea Rooms so G and I thought we'd try out something else. This eatery has a lot of history, a Baked Bun legacy and a secret recipe that is passed down from generation to generation with the deed of the house.

Sally, a French refugee, arrived in Bath in 1680. She found work at what is now Bath's Oldest House, and today her baking legacy lives on in the form of her baked buns - which you can still purchase from her old kitchen gift shop for £1.60, or from the tea shop above her kitchen for around £4. You can see the building in the scanned postcard above; I bought it from the Sally Lunn gift shop, down in the basement of the building amongst the ancient, exposed foundations.

Sally Lunn's is very narrow. The roof is low, the wooden beams of the building are exposed underneath the thickly-applied white paint, and the deep red, maroons and yellows of the Sally Lunn legacy are plastered across the interior decor. There are framed maps and drawings haphazardly hung on the walls, and the tables (of which there are many) are squeezed into Tetris shapes surrounded by (mostly) comfortable chairs.

The buns are rather surprising baked goods. I had expected something like a currant scone, but what I got was something altogether different. You can see from the postcard above that they're more akin to oversized hamburger buns.

















You get half a bun (horizontally sliced) when you order from the menu. There are a lot of different options - sweet and savoury - that vary from clotted cream with strawberry jam to the one I chose: cinnamon butter with clotted cream.






















They heap the topping on to the bun, and top it with a slice of orange. The bun itself might look like a hamburger roll from Woolies, but it had a denser texture that was heavier and sweeter than the ones you might eat for lunch. The cinnamon butter was a bit overpowering, but I scraped some of it off to suit my personal tastes and it was quite enjoyable. My tea companions each opted for scones instead:

















That's clotted cream in the top left, not butter. Clotted cream, as I may have mentioned before in a previous post, is a deliciously butter-thick cream (think: marscapone without the cheese) which you get with scones or other baked goods from tea shops, but which you can quite easily pick up from a supermarket. They really should export this stuff to South Africa, it would do brilliantly.






















This is a flyer I picked up from the gift shop. I'm surprised that they advertise it as 'award winning' - - the service wasn't particularly good (we were served cold coffee by unfriendly women), the atmosphere was quaint and cosy (which is a nice way to say that it was a bit cramped) and we were rushed out because there was a long queue outside. That being said, it was still a good 'Bath Experience', something I'd recommend to anyone who is interested in history (or anyone who is interested in baking, at least!) - just try to go early in the morning or mid-afternoon to avoid the lunch rush. Do pop downstairs and have a quick look around the museum: you can see the exposed foundations which record the various phases of history and Sally Lunn's bricked oven. You can also buy jars of their butters - Maple and Pecan, Cinnamon, Ginger, Chocolate and others - as well as their tasty jams and take-home buns.

It's a great shame of mine that I've only read two of Ms Austen's novels - Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park. So, faced with an ebook reader and so many free ebooks (courtesy of the amazing Project Gutenberg), I found myself diving headlong into Hartfield with Emma.

You can't help but be caught up in the way her characters speak and think; it carries over to your day-to-day conversations, it pulls you in and suddenly - oh so suddenly - it is so very easy to be suddenly finding yourself gasp with horror at Harriet Smith's newest quest, or raise an eyebrow at Frank Churchill's dubious behaviour. And the piano, oh! The piano. Who didn't see that coming?

As this was my first foray into ebook territory, I was denied the pleasure of looking at the cover of the book every time I opened my bag. True, my iPad's new cover is very appealing, but it certainly doesn't hold a light to Regency artworks, neatly-set typeface, and brilliant colours. That being as it is, I've decided to select my own cover from the very many that exist in the Emma collections.





















Yes, I'm quite aware that it's an audio book, but, since we're ignoring that this isn't the version I actually read, I think the discrepancy is allowed. Besides, I rather like this version of Emma, she fits all of my expectations. She's beautiful and well-dressed, young but still rather thoughtful.

The plot was less complex than I had anticipated but it didn't leave me wanting. It is easy to read, easy to follow, engaging enough to make you think of it when you're not reading it yet casual enough for it to not demand every spare moment. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Emma annoyed me terribly when I first began reading the novel, but I soon found her far more entertaining and enthralling than her female contemporaries and it all turned out rather well - by about half-way through the novel I was interested in reading more from her to see how her thoughts and opinions progressed. Knightley,  on whom the irony of his leading male role and name are not lost, is a bit of a drip, but he turns out rather well too. Of course he'll never be a Mr Darcy, but how do you better someone who has a six-hour BBC drama dedicated to his story? Robert Martin was a rather predictable plot element, and I liked how Emma/Austen adapted her prose to reflect the change in her character's insights.

I'm not going to warble about Emma and her Knight(ley) but I thought I might digress briefly to think about Bath (in Emma's case, Highbury, which I think to Ms Austen looks rather the same).

















She conjures up the most amazing dwellings in her writing, and indeed this may very well be a fascinating area of research - buildings that rather come alive as you read them into existence. The estates, cottages, streets, priories - they all seem so very real, described down to the most minor details, outfitted with artworks, chairs in every corner, round tables (chosen by Emma herself) and other furnishings. Perhaps my favourite part of visiting Bath (aside from being a tourist with my mother and aunt, of course) was finally seeing the bustling streets where Jane walked, where she wrote, where she socialised...

















And, of course, the tea. We enjoyed a delicious afternoon tea at the Regency Tea Rooms where we all enjoyed Lady Catherine's Proper Cream Tea and where the pleasure of 'taking tea' really comes to light. You sit around a table sipping your preference of delightfully aromatic tea, politely eating scones with jam and clotted cream, and you have to talk. You must, because that is what you have come to the tea rooms (or in Emma's case, to her neighbour's home) to do. It's really very pleasant.


You could imagine Emma, in her afternoon leisure, sitting at a small table like this with Mr Woodhouse, being served tea and scones (with very little jam, he'd say). Even the staff are dressed to period with their pinnies and caps.

















I daresay even Graeme enjoyed a bit of Regency delights! I rather like the way that Jane, on the far wall, overlooks the tea rooms as we all step into her world for a few moments.

The ebook experience could have gone either way; I feel I need to pace myself through Jane Austen's collection (there are, after all, very few novels to work through) but it was a wise choice to start off my ebook experience with something that was going to be so predictably enjoyable and reassuring. The British Library Treasures App I mentioned in a previous post certainly heightened the experience as well, creating a more tangible reading experience (though paradoxically considerably less tangible, hidden beneath the gloss of the iPad screen!) with photographs, manuscript extracts and tidbits of Janeite history. The ebook certainly won't replace the real book - iPads don't smell nearly as nice - but they're convenient with their compact size and ability to make digital scans of your favourite extracts at the press of a button. Plus, as an added bonus for the ebook team, almost all the books I want to read are already out of copyright so Project Gutenberg provides them all readily and for free. Not yet an ebook convert, but I can appreciate the merits.

The only foreseeable ebook downside for me is that it's oh-so-easy to carry around many books at once (my current ebook library is sitting comfortably at 45) and with that comes the temptation to open up a new book at a new chapter at any given time. The temptation to read isn't so bad; it's the fact that the characters end up meeting each other in my thoughts if I don't give them time to settle down. In fact, Emma very recently met with Viy from Gogol's short stories - 'Viy', Gogol writes, 'is a colossal creation of folk imagination. The name is applied by people in Little Russia to the chief of the gnomes, whose eyelids reach to the ground.' I think they were a bit confused, but got along amiably after a spot of tea.