A Day in the Rain, in Bath

I spent most of Tuesday in Bath, in the rain. I was due to speak that evening in a debate about religion, and decided to make a day of it.  I’ve never especially liked Bath, finding it dispiriting and soggy. And while I enjoy this sort of architecture in small doses in the countryside (see below) , this great concentration of it in long, crumbling terraces always feels to me like some vast mausoleum. Here was a chance to try again, and perhaps persuade myself to like it. But I still don't. How odd it has always seemed to me that Bath of all places is the only English town that has been classified as a World Heritage Site. 

 

Not York? Not Durham? Not Oxford, Not Cambridge? How strange. 

 

What is it that I don't like, apart from the feeling of being in a large and well-ordered cemetery full of tourist shops and cafes?

Is it that it is, unlike the rest of unplanned England, it is so concentrated, uniform and orderly? It is by far the most concentrated outcrop of Regency architecture in England? I can't really like this era of dandies, boozers and politicians such as Charles James Fox, so terribly fooled by the French Revolution. Classical architecture, though pleasing in a mathematical sort of way, somehow makes my heart sink, unless it's softened by a woodland setting.  

 

In the end, I suppose, its fundamentally pagan character is intensified when you see so much of it, over and over again. Also it was originally conceived for Mediterranean landscapes, cypress trees , vineyards and olive groves. Recreated amid the soggy wooded hills of Somerset, it is even more melancholy – the final years of paganism must, I think have been full of weariness, cynicism and disappointment, all those pointless mysteries, those temple basements full of the rotting offal from thousands of useless animal sacrifices, the beautiful but ultimately lifeless idols  (Eyes, that see not, ears that hear not, mouths that speak not, hands that handle not - They that worship them, as the psalm sneers, are like unto them)  or why did Christianity sweep all before it so easily?  

 

As I roamed around I had the usual odd experiences which minor celebrity brings. People think they know you, but can’t remember how or why. At the Abbey a nice lady half-recognized me and said she was sure she had once known me in Hong Kong (she certainly hadn’t, but this made a change from the gentlemen of a certain age who are sure they know me from the Golf Club, a claim so impossible that it is hard to know how to reply, except gently).

 

The main lesson I take from such encounters is that  ‘More know Tom Fool, than Tom Fool knows’, and that it is wise to behave very well indeed, for any misbehaviour will quickly become public. This is actually quite good for me, and  I suppose I am no more constrained by it than any dweller in a village or small town (where nobody needs to be well-known to be recognized) would have been in the days when we were a smaller and more settled society. Vain as I am, it’s not vanity that makes me assume that there’s a good chance I’ll be recognized. It’s caution.

 

Then I walked up to the University, up a long, steep hill with occasional superb views of the town below. As usual, one enters a another world when one arrives on any British University campus, a kingdom of youth where even quite recent events and ideas are alien, and the modern is completely triumphant. Some of the buildings looked to me as if they were survivors from the 1970s, or even possibly the 1960s, that heavy waterlogged look that really old concrete has.

 

But even that era (still very much alive in my memory) was impossibly long ago in the bustling world of new things, where I couldn’t even get full-fat whole milk to put in my tea. One of the strangest features of modern life is the absurd misconception that fat is bad for you, and the insistence on serving skimmed milk (once reserved for convicts and workhouse inmates who had no choice) as a health benefit. Hilariously, it is usually accompanied by vast quantities of sugar and starch, which are very bad for you,  and consumed by people whose lives are deprived of exercise by motor cars,  lifts and all the other anti-exercise devices which fill our lives.

 

I also noticed (and filed for a possible jest later) that the Student Union lavatories resembled those of a maximum security prison, solid stainless steel without any movable parts. I am fascinated by the assumption in so much modern design that people no longer know how to behave -  the public loos of my youth were ornate affairs of porcelain, glass, brass and wood, now they are increasingly Spartan, armour-plated, unbreakable and unadorned. It’s the same trend that has led many pubs to serve drinks in plastic containers rather than glasses, and that has installed CCTV cameras, those symbols of mistrust and surveillance, everywhere I go (except, interestingly, former East Berlin, where the people have already experienced what happens when we get the balance between privacy and security wrong).

 

We cannot be trusted to behave in a civilized fashion, so we must have our hands kept away from dangerous materials, we cannot be allowed to have breakable or delicate facilities in public places and we must be watched and recorded. What’s more , our testimony cannot be trusted any more unless it is backed up by filmed records. One of the most unexpected effects of CCTV is that it has now set a standard of evidence far higher than the one which previously existed, and the absence of any CCTV records of an alleged crime will usually cause the police to lose what interest they had in the first place (not much, you will rightly say, but you see what I mean).

 

Weary of the standard fare of religion debates, I thought I might as well make this collapse of trust and self-restraint a central part of my necessarily brief attempt to defend faith and absolute  morality against those who argue that we would be better off without it.

 

The first speaker for the anti-religious position astonished me by fully conceding Christianity’s role in the foundation of literacy, science and society as a whole, perhaps putting me off my stroke. I felt the need to point out that my side’s principal point had been made, but I suspect it didn’t have the effect I’d hoped for. If this is so, and I think it demonstrable, it’s surely absurd to say that society would be better off without religion, for without religion, a society capable of discussing this issue wouldn’t exist in the first place.

 

But the real argument is of course always about something else, whatever the formal wording of the motion. I suspect that many of those present care little about how society came to be as it is. What they are interested in is ensuring that it ceases to pay any attention to, or give any authority to religious absolute morality. The desire for total autonomy in their own bodies is the strongest driving force in their lives, and religious rues about sex and drugs are infuriating and absurd to them.

 

Even so, they suffer from a fear that there might just be something in the claims of religion, which is why – whenever I got to universities to discuss the subject - the audiences are bigger and more engaged than they are for debates about any other subject.  As I so often say, believers and unbelievers both fear that God exists. Believers also hope He does. Unbelievers hope He doesn’t.  

 

***Note to religious bores. Comments directly relevant to the above are of course welcome,. But attempts to turn this into a Bible-quoting esoteric row will be frowned upon, and severely discouraged.