Q: Am I boring you? A: Of course not!

Fun and games with a newspaper in the pub ... up...

... and down. He's scary even without the mask.

And one of the few little bits of Bath that escaped the Georgian bulldozers - a nice little row of late 17th century, gabled buildings tucked away in the 'oldest' street in Bath - Green Street. Shame they didn't escape French Connection. It's interesting to see how the street widths have varied over the years - Broad street, which is just around the corner of this photo, has always been very narrow despite it's name. It was called Broad Street because of the predominance of weavers that used to occupy it, and the weavers made 'broad cloth', which was probably only about a yard wide.

Walcot Street - about 200 yards away from here - has a building called Ladymead House, which has just been converted into quite a few unaffordable flats by a property developer. All the elderly folk who were kicked out in the name of Mammon have been found sheltered accommodation elsewhere, in a less trendy and central part of the town.

Ladymead House features on some very old maps indeed as a single mansion with a formal garden leading down to the river Avon. The name 'Avon' also means 'river', so it is called the river River. (There are many confused tourists who believe that the river in Shakespeare's birthplace stretches all the way from Stratford in Warwickshire to Bath, then on to Bristol). Parts of the original house still exist, but have been built around and in front of by the Victorians, who also used the place as some sort of hospice.

The builders who are renovating the house recently discovered the original front wall of the place, which now forms the back wall of the front rooms. This showed that Walcot Street was - in those days - about 20 feet wider at that point, but the very next 18th century building along is right up against the modern pavement, and has a large, inverse set of bay windows as a facade, to allow the coaches and horses to take a wide swing into the yard of the Bell Inn, and that yard is now - for some reason - about 8 feet higher than it used to be, meaning that you have to enter from the garden by a set of steps. This may explain why some customers have seen horses heads wandering around underneath the tables on some dark, October nights.

The name 'Ladymead' comes from the early medieval and Dark Age days after the Romans left (or blended in) when there were no dedicated courts of law in towns outside of London, and itinerant judges travelled the country to hear cases and settle disputes on a rotation basis. Each town had at least one day alloted to it for such hearings, and these took place usually in a meadow by a river - probably because it was convenient to water horses, etc. Runnymead - where the Magna Carta was signed - was one such meadow, and it had probably been used for legal stuff for well over a couple of thousand years. 'Ladymead' is a corruption of the words, 'Law Day Meadow', and used to be the Bath assizes.

So in those days, you had to wait up to a year to see justice done - maybe that is why modern lawyers traditionally drag their feet for months? Or could it be just that they all make about £300 per hour just by turning up to the office? The jury's out on that one.

(I wish I was paid for writing this bollocks - I'd be worth a fortune now. Maybe Bath City Council could chip in with some Lottery funding?)