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A trip to Bath Thermae Spa

I’m not over-keen on spas, and was rather underwhelmed with the one in Malvern. But since I was in Bath last week, staying just a few minutes walk away from the new Thermae Spa complex, I took the opportunity to pay a visit. Partly, I was curious to see the new spa, having spent a fascinating morning pottering around the ruins of the Roman Baths. But the deciding factor was that the stress of the end of the financial year had led to my shoulders and neck seizing up again, and I was desperately in need of a massage to get them mobile once more.

The business model the Thermae Spa operates is somewhat unusual. You can’t just book a massage, which is all I actually wanted, and nor can you pre-book treatments other than on the day. Instead, you have to buy a minimum of a two-hour pass to the entire spa complex, including the pools and steam rooms, and then book individual 50-minute treatments on top of that. Which works out rather expensive if all you want is your shoulders sorted out! I pointed this out to the staff at the front desk and opened some serious negotiations with them. They then “remembered” that they did actually offer a 20-minute “express massage” – which I couldn’t find mentioned in the printed literature nor on-line – which did what I wanted at a much more reasonable price. I still had to buy a two-hour pass to the spa complex as well, but decided that would be an interesting experience.

The changing rooms were the first surprise. They were mixed, rather basic, and very reminiscent of a municipal swimming pool. The lockers for your clothes were opened and closed with an electronic wrist-band, colour-coded to show what package you had bought, which also acted as electronic money in the cafe. I dithered about whether to put my glasses in the locker, but decided I’d have to keep them on as I wouldn’t be able to see the direction signs without them, nor would I be able to see a clock to know when it was time for my treatment.

The roof-top pool was very pleasant. It’s  filled with naturally-hot water from a bore-hole next to the old (Roman) thermal springs, and has delightful views over the city. It wasn’t a “swimming pool” as such – it was too crowded for a start and I was never out of my depth – but was much more a “bobbing-around” pool. Which was great as it meant I could hold my head out of the water and  keep my glasses on to enjoy the long-distance views. Indeed I noticed several people in the pool trying to look cool in sunglasses. The drawback of being able to see clearly was having to avert my gaze from the several couples who had obviously found the atmosphere extremely romantic and were more than snogging in the pool! Heavy-petting would be a more accurate description of what some of them were up to…..

I was less keen on the basement thermal pool. It was bigger, and had a jacuzzi/whirlpool area and currents that swept you around the pool. But it was more claustrophobic and smelled more like a traditional swimming pool, and the whirlpool made me feel seasick!

So next I tried the steam rooms. These are on the middle floor and are overpoweringly scented with eucalyptus, frankincense, and I think lavender. I opened the door and the smell was completely overpowering and made me feel nauseous. Plus my glasses immediately steamed up completely. I decided the steam rooms weren’t for me and went to while away the remaining 20 minutes before my treatment in the cafe.

The shoulder massage itself was very competent and professional. The therapist listened to what I wanted done and acted on it, and I felt much better afterwards. But I have confirmed my opinion that I’m not really a “Spa” sort of person. The roof-top thermal bath was pleasant, and might be good fun with a group of friends. But on my own it was a bit dull frankly.  I’m pleased to have tried it once but don’t expect to go back.

04 05 2011 Gillian Day out Comments (1) Permalink

A trip to Bath

I thought I’d take advantage of the run of Bank Holidays and have a few days away. So I booked three nights in a two-bedroom self-catering apartment in Bath, and invited my parents to join me.

The flat was in Laura Place, which (if I remember my Jane Austen correctly) was where the snobbish cousin, Lady Dalrymple, was staying in Persuasion. She, of course, would have been in the principal rooms on the ground and upper floors. We were staying in what was euphemistically called the “Garden Flat”, i.e. the lower-ground floor and basement – or what would have been back then the kitchen and cellars. In fact, I’m pretty sure that my bedroom was once the coal hole – though now a very comfortable and surprisingly spacious en-suite ex-coal-hole! The flat was behind the railings at the far left of the picture. We could sit in the living room and look up at the feet of the people passing by the post-box outside.

The location was superb – within just a few minutes walking over Pulteney Bridge to the Abbey, Roman Baths and Pump Room – and, just as importantly, very close to Waitrose too. The three of us all explored Bath independently, meeting up at the flat for meals. I spent one whole morning pottering around the Roman Baths – somewhere which Chris and I had loved to visit. (In fact the gravatar which accompanies my name when I reply to comments on this blog is a picture which Chris took there last time we visited)

All-in-all it was a very enjoyable few days.

30 04 2011 Gillian Day out Comments Off on A trip to Bath Permalink

Perhaps not as lazy as I’d hoped…..

I had planned to have a nice lazy week before Easter. It didn’t quite turn out that way, as the “maintenance” on the house turned out to be more extensive than I’d hoped.

On Monday I had a landscape gardener and a structural engineer come round to look at my back garden and suck their teeth. Chris and I had a long-term plan to sort it out, which I’m considering putting into practice. That is likely to be an ongoing saga, so is worth a blog post or several in its own right.

It took several attempts to get the locksmith to come out – his wife was ill, so he had to rearrange. Even so, he’s still not fixed the locks, but has at least sized up the problem and knows what needs to be done. He’ll be back next week I hope to sort it out.

After he’d left again, on Thursday morning, I went to have a shower, only to discover that I had no electricity whatsoever in the extension. The rest of the house was fine, but not the shower-room, nor (crucially) the utility area with the washing machine….  The symptoms indicated that something had tripped, but all of the little trip-switches in the consumer unit were fine. I couldn’t see anything wrong, so thought I’d better call out an electrician. It took a while to track down one who would come out over the Easter Bank Holidays and not charge an absolute fortune for doing so, but I did find someone who would come out on Good Friday. He turned out to be an ex-scientist from the place I work at, who was made redundant a month before Chris was, and used his pay-off to retrain as an electrician. He spent several hours up in the loft tracing the wiring before he found the source of the problem and fixed it. And while he was up there he said “You do know you’ve got a wasps’ nest up here, don’t you?”.

Yikes! I hate wasps. Fortunately, I’m on first-name terms with the local pest-controller, and have him on an annual retainer and speed-dial. He agreed to come out first thing on Saturday morning to deal with the nest. On further enquiry, it became apparent that his idea of “first thing” on a Saturday morning and mine were several hours different, so we had to negotiate a compromise. But at least the wasps nest is now dealt with. And for good measure he removed a dead mouse from the loft as well.

I’m hoping that this week coming I can spend more on “me” and less on chores, so that I can go back to work next week with re-charged batteries.

25 04 2011 Gillian status Comments Off on Perhaps not as lazy as I’d hoped….. Permalink

Wedding Anniversary

Today would have been our eighteenth wedding anniversary. It gave me quite a jolt when I realised this morning what the date was.

We usually marked our anniversary with a good meal, which Chris would cook. So I decided that it would be appropriate to commemorate the date by making a big effort with dinner tonight – far better than sitting on my backside moping.

I made Pomegranate Chicken with couscous, followed by an Eton Mess. The chicken dish was one of Christopher’s particular favourites, though I’d never cooked it before. We first had it at the British Museum, of all places, years ago. We’d gone to see an exhibition about Agatha Christie and her husband the archaeologist Sir Max Mallowan. I remember there was a railway carriage outside the museum from the original Venice-Simplon Orient Express – as in Murder on the Orient Express. Even the museum restaurant had got into the spirit of the exhibition, with a Persian-themed menu. We rather gingerly tried the pomegranate chicken, and loved it. Chris spent ages back home trying to recreate the recipe, which includes nutmeg, cinnamon, pomegranate juice and seeds. I felt very adventurous tackiling it myself this evening, as it’s way outside my comfort zone, but it was delicious. And better still, I made two portions of it, so I can have the other half at the weekend 🙂

21 04 2011 Gillian food Comments (2) Permalink

A lazy week

I’ve taken this week and next off work – making maximum use of the cluster of bank holidays. I’ve deliberately not planned much for this week – I’m mostly tying to catch up on my sleep, and have been doing some of the chores around the house which have stacked up. I took a whole load of junk to the tip on Monday, having finally felt strong enough to “declutter” some of Christopher’s stuff which has been lurking in the living room and bedroom for the past eight months. That was a bit grim, but fortunately I’d arranged to meet a friend for coffee afterwards, which helped cheer me up again.

It’s funny how trivial things can seem like major milestones. Christopher was always in charge of everything to do with the car, so I never bothered having anything to do with the running / taxing / maintaining of it. It even came as quite a shock the week after he died when I realised that I’d have to fill it up with petrol!  This week I took it to the car wash for the first time – it was absolutely filthy, and it dawned on me that nothing was going to change unless I did something about it…..  It felt very odd indeed going to the car wash without Christopher.  But at least the car is looking presentable once more.

20 04 2011 Gillian status Comments (4) Permalink

On a scale of one to ten

Christopher’s favourite webcomic was xkcd.com.  Randall Munroe, who writes it, is an ex-NASA physicist, and the website comes with a warning “This comic occasionally contains strong language (which may be unsuitable for children), unusual humor (which may be unsuitable for adults), and advanced mathematics (which may be unsuitable for liberal-arts majors).”  A recent comic strip made me chuckle and reminded me strongly of Chris.

We had a tried-and-tested scale of pain which we used for many years,  mostly to quantify how bad a headache was  (five and upwards was reserved for the special hell that is a migraine). The scale came into its own in the hospice, when Chris was able to communicate to me quite easily if he was in pain, even when he found speaking a struggle due to his brain tumour. I noticed though that when I translated the scale for the benefit of the nurses, they doubled our score to fit their notion of a one-to-ten scale.  So if he told me the pain was a three, they marked that as a six, and immediately gave him some more morphine.

So it’s no wonder that I find that paracetamol barely touches a level-three headache!

18 04 2011 Gillian cancer Comments (1) Permalink

Bits keep seizing up and dropping off

In this case, I am in fact talking about the perils of living in a Victorian cottage, which requires ongoing maintenance. But I could equally well be talking about myself at the moment – I feel about ten years older than I did before Chris was taken ill.

At least it’s moderately easy to do something about the house, though it does take more time and effort than I can spare at the moment. So I’ve “got a man in” again to sort things out. Rob the painter has been here for the past two days, repainting the porch door. It got very heavily weathered during all the snow last winter, the paint was peeling off it in large patches, and the woodwork was starting to rot. So I thought that it was worth getting it fixed before it goes too far and becomes really expensive. It’s been beautiful weather for the past week, but as soon as Rob turned up on Wednesday morning, it started raining…….

The locks on the garage doors and the summer house have well and truly seized up, and neither WD40 nor 3-in-1 will shift them. My sister’s boyfriend put a huge bolt on the garage doors last time they visited, which was a big help, as I can at least now open the garage. But although the house is secure, I would like to be able to get into the garage without going outside and getting wet. So I’ve arranged for a locksmith to come early next week and see what he can do to get things working again, particularly the internal door between the house and garage.

14 04 2011 Gillian status Comments Off on Bits keep seizing up and dropping off Permalink

Yes Prime Minister

After the last play I went to turned out to be a “comedy” about the effects that someone dying of cancer has on their wife and friends, I was a bit cautious about going back to the theatre. But this week, Malvern Theatres was showing Yes Prime Minister, and I really enjoyed the TV series years ago, so I was keen to go. I read the online reviews carefully before booking – once bitten and all that – and was pleased to see that there was no cancer, or indeed terminal illness of any sort involved in the plot. So I booked myself a ticket to the Saturday matinée, which was a complete sell-out.

In fact, the writers have completely updated the Yes Prime Minister that I remembered. It’s now set in the age of a minority/coalition government, with a plot about getting a huge loan from a dodgy oil-rich ex-soviet republic, but with some very sleazy preconditions attached.  It was very funny indeed in places, and the actors had to keep pausing so that they could be heard above the howls of laughter. I was pleased to see that the main characters were still the same – and Sir Humphrey was just as silver-tongued and manipulative as I had expected.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And the added bonus of going to the matinée was that I was home in time to spend the evening watching Mamma Mia on the box. Yes, it’s a load of rubbish, but a load of rubbish starring Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, both trying to sing……… There are times when it’s good to be self-indulgent for a change, and I reckon that was a good excuse!

10 04 2011 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Yes Prime Minister Permalink

His poems/Librivox recordings live on

I posted last week about the Greek poem which had been haunting me as I tried to get to sleep, and about how Christopher’s Librivox recordings were living on even after his death, I suppose giving him some kind of immortality, like Heraclitus’ poems.  Today I got a blog comment from a teacher:

“For the past three years I have used Chris’ recording of the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” on librivox.org to teach my literature students World War I poetry. I clicked on his contact link on the site because I wanted to thank him for recording such a powerful reading of the poem; my students are always moved by his voice. I was saddened to read that Chris died, but I wanted to let his family and friends know that his voice has held the attention of hundreds of my students thus far.”

I think that makes the point very eloquently! Chris would have been so pleased to know that he was helping to introduce a new generation of students to first world war poetry, and indeed his Librivox poems are living on.

08 04 2011 Gillian cancer
poem Comments (1) Permalink

Boringly Normal

I went back to the doctor today to get the results of last week’s blood tests. And on the whole they were absolutely fine. I’m not diabetic; my thyroid and liver functions are normal; my campaign to eat more broccoli and spinach has worked as I’m no longer anaemic. Even my blood pressure is boringly normal. The only thing that was out of nominal bounds was my calcium level, which was slightly too low. I’ve been told to eat more cheese & drink more milk (I’m thinking in the form of a pre-bedtime hot chocolate……..) and to get the blood tests run again in a few weeks to see if that’s made a difference.

So no answers there as to why I’m feeling so exhausted. On the one hand I’m pleased that there is nothing organically wrong. On the other, I was hoping that a simple iron supplement would be enough to restore my energy levels, and it doesn’t look as though there will be a quick fix like that.

04 04 2011 Gillian status Comments (5) Permalink