that tartan and comes for my throat.’
We follow the river northwards and are delighted to soon find signposts that point in the direction of the Roman Baths. These take us through a series of streets lined with the sandstone-coloured buildings that the city is famous for, and I can’t help thinking that there are certainly worse places in the world to spend a day. Bath really is quite a beautiful city.
It gets pretty damn breathtaking once you reach the baths themselves, I can tell you.
If you wanted to show off the best of British architecture to travellers from distant lands, you could do a lot worse than bring them here to see the Roman Baths, Bath Abbey and the surrounding environs. It’s frankly stunning.
‘You look like you’re enjoying yourself,’ Grace remarks as she looks at me gawking up at the abbey’s Gothic main tower.
‘It’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?’ I reply, still gawking.
I think half the reason I’m so caught up in the place is that I had no idea what I’d be seeing until I actually saw it.
This is very rare for me. Usually, I have thousands of pictures on Google to show me what a landmark looks like, before I get anywhere near it.
But I had no idea just how amazing the centre of Bath looked before I arrived, and therefore I’m all the more impressed by it.
It’s a little hard to take my eyes off it all.
Sometimes, there’s nothing like a pleasant surprise to lift your spirits.
And I do believe that this is probably the first pleasant surprise I can remember having for a very long time.
‘It is very pretty,’ Grace agrees, ‘but unless they decided to open a jeweller’s in the belfry, I think we’d better start looking a bit closer to the ground.’
‘Sorry,’ I reply sheepishly. ‘Eyes on the prize, eh?’ I look around. ‘Where do you think we should start?’
Grace shrugs. ‘No idea. Perhaps we should just wander around here for a bit. See what pops up. You never know, we might stumble upon this Union Passage while we’re doing it.’
‘All right. Let’s have a meander, then,’ I say, feeling a bit light-headed.
Maybe it’s just that I stared up at the abbey for too long – or maybe it’s that I’m feeling in an extremely good mood all of a sudden, thanks to the joy of discovery.
The idea of just ambling around at random, hoping to stumble across the right street, is something that should fill me with unease. But it doesn’t. In fact, I’m relishing the prospect.
And that thrill of discovery certainly doesn’t end with the magnificence of Bath Abbey. Not by a long shot.
Bath is full of fun little surprises around almost every corner. Most of them containing fudge.
I love fudge.
I mean, who doesn’t?
And if you want fudge, then come to Bath. Because there is fudge everywhere. More fudge shops than you can shake a fudgy stick at.
And teacakes.
Lots of those too.
Basically, if you have a sweet tooth, then Bath is the place for you. You don’t have to go far to find a purveyor of things fudgy and teacakey. You can even have both at the same time, if you’re young, healthy and in no danger of having a coronary episode.
With bags of fudge in hand (mine a nice toffee and chocolate; Grace’s a strange minty thing I won’t be going anywhere near), we start to explore the streets around us, hoping to find the one where Hackett & Mostrum used to ply their trade in the finest of jewellery.
Needless to say, this does not come about quickly.
While it’s a refreshing change to just bimble about a bit with no clear plan, it does mean taking an inordinately long amount of time to actually get anywhere.
Years of apps and Internet search engines have put everything I need at my fingertips, and it’s made me ever so impatient. I’m not used to things taking a long time to sort themselves out.
So, while I start our search for Union Passage with a smile on my face and a full bag of fudge in my hand, by the time the small cellophane bag is emptied of its fudgy contents, I am becoming quite annoyed.
‘Bloody hell,’ I snap under my breath as our progress down another small side street is held up by a gaggle of Asian tourists.
The poor sightseers are doing absolutely nothing wrong. But there are an awful lot of them, and none of them seem to want to get out of my way.
‘Excuse