A cheery post

This photo (taken a few months ago) is to cheer up Cro. It is like a Breughel painting don't you think?

The wealthy folk who live on the banks of the Bosphorus in Istanbul have been waiting for a rusting super-tanker to lose its steering gear on one of the many tight bends and plough into their houses. It will happen one day.

Similarly, I have been waiting for a boy-racer to lose it on this bend, break through the flimsy stone balustrade and fall thirty feet to the River Avon below. A few years ago, a car lost it on the next bridge down river and smashed through the stonework, killing a tourist who was sent plunging into the water with his fiancé looking on from above. They eventually found his body wedged under a tour boat moored a few feet away.

Just round the corner from this picture, a friend of mine was walking home on his first day of retirement, having celebrated by spending most of the day in the pub. He drunkenly tripped on the pavement, fell into the road and was killed by a tour bus going over his head.

On the same spot a couple of years ago, a young (presumably drunk) woman got run over by a lorry but survived with what the police called 'life-changing' injuries. They had to crane the truck off her.

That parapet you can see in the photo used to be a jumping-off point for people diving into the river below. In the Summer, young men would clamber up on the wall and jump in quick succession. I was watching them do this one day when a slightly older man with what they now call 'learning difficulties' stood on the wall and dived head first. His head hit rocks which lie in the shallow water close to the bank and he was killed instantly.

One day, down on the river by the weir, some young people were canoeing with an older instructor, when a young girl deliberately capsized her canoe in practice for righting it again. The instructor did not see her struggling to make this manoeuvre and she drowned in full view of everyone on the bank.

This was the wall which they filmed Russell Crowe jumping into the Seine for the film, 'Les Miserables'. The only thing was that it was not Russell Crowe and it was not the Seine. It was a stunt diver and a stunt river.

In the last seven years, seven drunken students have slipped into this short stretch of the river Avon and drowned. I make that one a year.

All this in a few feet of this photo and a few years apart, and all in one patch of sleepy old Bath. Maybe this has the makings of another walking tour? Maybe not.