Natalie Downe

This year has started pretty nicely, we have just returned from a lovely weekend away in our University town of Bath, meeting up with old friends, haunting old haunts. Organised by Laura, most of our old gang were there, it really was great to see people again.

We finally made the time to go to the Roman Baths, despite being free to visit for residents, we lived in Bath for three years and never went. I wasn’t sure what to expect, I had seen the usual picture postcards but they always looked a bit photoshopped, an ancient bathhouse couldn’t possibly look that well preserved.

Surprisingly, it looks just like the postcards. The tour starts by going through the interesting museum of Roman and Victorian items and excavation sites of parts of the baths and temple. Included in your £10.50 entrance fee is a rather excessive audio guide that should you listen to all the numbers may well take you all day! In addition to the standard commentary numbers there are narratives from 7 different actors portraying to be of different ages and social statures, Bill Bryson also has added extra notes and observations.

Luckily for our combined short museum attention spans, you can still gleam a lot of insightful information by forgetting the audio-guide entirely and reading the notices.

Entering the main bath area it really is like going back in time, green mineral-rich slowly smoking waters, limestone pillars and alcoves, statues of Romans atop the walls and a view of the Abbey peaking from outside. For effect it also helped the sky was a glorious blue. After your visit a free glass of the hot spring water is included (50p without a ticket) which other than being lukewarm and slightly odd tasting, is not all that bad.

I would definitely recommend a trip to the Roman baths early on a Sunday Morning as we did, I doubt it would have felt so magical with a surrounding tour group!

Currently, Simon and I are busily planing ourselves a trip to New Zealand for Kiwi Foo, Webstock and general adventuring, coming home via San Francisco, LA and South by South West in Texas, I am very excited about it!

In other news, yesterday was my first day working full time as a Senior Client-side Engineer for Clearleft. I was contracting here for the few months before Christmas, which meant I was familiar with the people and the working environment before this week, so it’s not as scary as starting totally afresh :)

Clearleft are a great bunch, the projects are interesting and there is plenty of intelligent discussion and friendly debate. I am really enjoying being part of the team.

So in general, my hopes for this year are that it will be full of exciting new challenges, traveling and adventuring, making new friends, catching up with and getting to know current friends better. As for resolutions for 2008, I plan to spend more quality time with Simon, get fitter, perfect the poached egg and learn to bake a souffle.