A Weekend in Bath

I’ve just spend a great weekend catching up with some old friends and enjoying an afternoon at the thermae spa in Bath.

Bath is a great city to visit with or without the relatively new addition of the modern Thermae Spa,  and of course people have been coming to Bath to ‘take the waters’ since Roman times.

It’s a relatively compact, slightly hilly city, easy to walk round, and of course a complete tourist trap.  Even my friends in the US had heard of Bath. The city centre is full of  bustling speciality shops and boutiques as well as the usual high street department stores, a multitude of cafes, tea rooms, bars and restaurants.  It is one of those quintessentially British places, eclectic, bohemian and rather posh.  

I was meeting up with old friends from the Tech college I had attended over 30 years ago, two of whom I hadn’t seen for 20 odd years. We had a lot of catching up to do.

The Thermae Spa was a real treat.  Two hours sat in bubbling hot water in a roof top pool overlooking Bath’s glorious Georgian  rooftops and the surrounding countryside. So what if it was raining, we were wet anyway.

There are two large spa pools and four differently aromatic steam rooms available on a two hour ‘open’ ticket at the  Spa.  As all we wanted to do was sit and talk, it was great.  It was only the fact that we were turning (more) wrinkly that made us want to get out.

When I first met these friends, I was a teenager, just like the one I have at home now. Partying, drinking, and desperately trying to squeeze college work into a busy social life.  We all got married within a few years of each other and all have children approximately the same age. Obviously there have been some major life changes and everyone has had their ups and downs, but it was a great reunion, reminiscing about college days and discovering what we’d all been up to in the last thirty  years.  

In my head I’m nowhere near as old as my birth certificate insists, and by the end of the weekend  it really did feel like we had only walked out of that college refectory twenty minutes or so ago.  The wonders of modern technology make it so much easier to keep in touch - the odd like or comment on facebook really does a go a long way to preserve or re-new a friendship.

Naturally after a night of heavy drinking, and a weekend climbing up and down three flights of stairs to our attic room in a B&B, the soothing effects of the Thermae Spa had totally worn off. My body was definitely telling me I was nearer that birth certificate age than I would ever care to admit, but if I have to grow old, at least I'm going to do it disgracefully in a very posh place.

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