The Accidental Suitor: My Jane Austen moment in Bath

In the course of the very limited planning I did for my trip (mostly in the hours before I left for the airport), I faced a critical decision: where should I arrange to be on June 27^th, my 21^st birthday? Ideally, I suppose, I’d be at home, in a country where I’d get IDed, with people who knew it was my birthday, where people even thought a 21^st birthday remarkable. Failing that, I chose Bath.

Bath has what I’ve come to think of as the three criteria of cities worth visiting: history, beauty, and literary connections (Larry McMurtry, it should be noted, is the only person who keeps Houston from failing this test completely). The city centre lies in a valley through which is River Avon winds and from which seven rather steep hills arise. As my hostel and apparently every secondary school in Bath lie in these hills, I spent a great deal more time looking down at Bath than I did actually in it. The first day of hiking around (going up and down those hills definitely felt much more like hiking than walking) I was snapping pictures left and right, but by the end of my six days there, I was almost as blasé as the natives: to find a break in the houses or trees that afforded a break-taking panorama of the city seemed nothing so remarkable at all.

 I spent my birthday walking ten miles down the Kennet & Avon Canal to the nearest town, and when I got back to the hostel, sweaty, tired, and hungry, it was to find that all of my stuff – my books, my backpack, even my drying socks and underwear – had disappeared from my room. It was in the process of getting my things back that I met Graham, the unfortunate hostel worker who happened to be at the desk when I came to retrieve my things (they realized they had put me in the wrong room, so they confiscated all my belongings?? Hostels...). Graham was older than me, shorter than me, and his buzz-cut hair was grayer than mine, but he was helpful and friendly and when he offered to give me some travel tips over a couple of drinks, I thought nothing of it. This is the classic mistake of any heroine: allow yourself to be caught completely by surprise.

The next night after Graham got off of work, I was waiting for him by the hostel mini-bar, guidebook in hand, ready to learn all about the Lake District. But he’d been in the hostel all day – would I mind going somewhere else? Acquiescence being another classic heroine trait, I agreed, and a few minutes later we were headed off to Bristol, a nearby port city. Once there, Graham showed me some of the sights (check out my Bath pictures to see the giant disco ball in a fountain!), until we realized that, as it was a Sunday night and things closed early, we needed to run to get to the bar on time. It was a great little jazz place that boasted live music every night: that night, a one-man blues band was jamming away. Afterwards, he drove me to see the city’s suspension bridge, lit up over the Avon River Gorge. It was all lovely. We did not talk about the Lake District.

We were walking up to the proverbial doorstep (in this case, the doorway to the hostel’s reception) when Graham asked: “Would it be too forward if I asked to kiss you?” My mind was flooded with so many objections clothed in so many clichés that all I could manage to say was an awkward “Yes” (as in, “no”). And finally I’d broken the mold, because while heroines might very well find themselves in awkward positions at the end of accidental dates, I doubt any of them could manage to end the evening quite as ungracefully as I did :-)