This is going to sound like a joke because it should be one, but it isn’t. That photo above is of me standing outside 25 Gay Street, Bath, in the UK. It’s a dentist’s.<\/p>\n
You can’t just go inside without an appointment and I did try. Too much of a wimp to punch myself in the mouth, I did still do my very best to eat all the chocolate in the city. I tell you, I was diligent. Yet nothing worked and so the outside was as far as I could get.<\/p>\n
And I was still starstruck.<\/p>\n
Because 25 Gay Street, Bath, is one of the few surviving places where Jane Austen lived. I can’t tell you what a thrill it was to stand there, nor really can I explain why it was such a thrill. By chance I have just started re-reading Austen, so the trip to Bath was well-timed, and she is a favourite writer for a dozen reasons including how swiftly vicious she can be, introducing a character and entirely destroying them in six words or so. But, still, I am rarely that starstruck and even more rarely by a building.<\/p>\n
The problem is that you’d never know she lived there.<\/p>\n
You have to already know and fortunately there is help. Just down the road at 40 Gay Street there is the Jane Austen Centre<\/a>. Skip the oddly Benny Hill-like video that plays in one downstairs room and instead talk with the staff. There’s something incongruous about chatting away with a woman whose Regency costume only just covers her tattoo, but it’s a happy incongruity and all the nattering with the staff was my favourite part of the exhibition.<\/p>\n Not quite true. I knew nothing at all about Cassandra Austen, Jane’s mother, and now I know all I need from a poem of hers on display where three lines about a party she went to are enough to paint a picture of someone you’d like.<\/p>\n They came from Mr Bramston’s house, It was funny hearing a laugh at intervals and knowing someone had just read to that point.<\/p>\n But, so, and. Here’s this Jane Austen Centre, set up in a house that is a minute away from where she actually lived and is presumably very like her place. Pop up the road to hers, though, and as I say, you will find a dentist’s.<\/p>\n You just won’t find anything else.<\/p>\n Not a sign, not a thing. Well, obviously there’s one sign or you wouldn’t know it was a dentist’s. And okay, there’s also “25” or you wouldn’t know which house was which. But there is not one single pixel celebrating, boasting or even vaguely acknowledging that Austen lived there.<\/p>\n It’s just wrong. I think of all the wit in her novels and this dentist’s office couldn’t manage one line. They presumably talk about plaque in that office, but they don\u2019t have a blue one outside.<\/p>\n And they don\u2019t even have a sign saying: “It is a tooth universally acknowledged…”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is going to sound like a joke because it should be one, but it isn’t. That photo above is … Continue reading
\nWith Madam, & her maiden Sister;
\n(Had she been absent who’d have missed her?)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n