An important bath

Rather a dull number of NYRB (Vol. 61 No. 3) last week, but there was a piece about a chap who spends a lot of time trying to recover the ancient journey of Heracles from Gibraltar to Turin. All rather odd, but along the way we get to know about the famous Bath of Bibracte, in the middle of the important Celtic town of the same name and quite near the site of an important battle which marked the beginning of the end of the Celts as a major power.

The bath, roughly 10m by 3m, despite being flatter at one end than the other, has been carefully constructed on Pythagorean lines, to a rather higher standard than might be expected of Celts and with the additional property that the short axis is aimed, to within a degree or so, at the Winter Solstice sunrise. It seems that the Celts got very windy about the time of Winter Solstice, windy that the sun might carry on south leaving them in an everlasting winter, a windiness no doubt exploited by the priests of the day. In any event, the turnaround was celebrated in fine style.

Sadly, we do not know exactly what part the bath played in these celebrations, although given the central heating arrangements of the time, it would have been rather a cold bath at the time of the winter solstice.

The other important event of the day is the closure of TB in Manor green Road for some kind of refurbishment, perhaps the fourth in the 25 or so years we have known the place. In that time there has been little change in the clientèle beyond the natural turnover one would expect over that sort of period and one wonders whether all the money spent on paint - it must be a million or more at today's prices - might have been better spent on keeping better beer at better prices - real ale not being one of the establishment's strong points, although, to be fair, things on that front have got better over the last year or so.

My own view, probably aired here before, is that the considerable building and site should be cleared to make way for a tasteful block of much needed flats, with a bar on the ground floor. A bar of a size better suited to the the size of any likely clientèle than the rather large building we have now, dating as it does from the long gone hey-day of suburban pubs. All of which might have been nicely incorporated into the recent redevelopment of the next door parade of shops, but with at least two and probably three players involved, that was too much to hope for. Partly also because town planners, who probably never use the places, seem to be very against the redevelopment of unprofitable pubs.