Secret Squirrel

It was Tina Turner who proclaimed to the world "I'm your private dancer, a dancer for money, [I'll] do what you want me to do." Having recently been near water (as is my native wont) and having seen the sights I have seen (suggested by the photograph above), the logical question becomes: what is a secret squirrel? And can this creature be made to do things for acorns or, perhaps, half-eaten sandwiches?

As you contemplate those pointed questions, Old Ken would like to apologize for his absence from the bloggin' scene of late: "a lotta ins, lotta outs, a lotta 'what have yous,'" seem to have obstructed the possibility of consistent attention to our friend Nice Bird but not, I would dare say, the larger project that is LearningQuest 2005.



From the photographs scattered here and there, you may be able to surmise that Old Ken has been on the move. Indeed, like an itinerant peddlar in days of yore, Old Ken has recently had a rucksack on his back, a sturdy walking stick in his hand and a song in his heart as he set off to find the true England. And where better to look than in Bath?



Do you bathe? Well, let me rephrase that question as it might sound a bit personal: do you enjoy bathing? Evidently, the Romans did, as they built bathing complexes throughout the distant reaches of their empire. Ruins of such now survive from Britain to Turkey. As you may readily discern from our photographs, the Roman baths at Bath in England became a serious object of local appreciation in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. For, the Enlightenment—a period to which Old Ken has always felt something of an affinity—privileged the "water cure" for its ailments, only to be replaced by the "talking cure" and more recently, I lament to say, "retail therapy" as favored panacea.



Now, there are many sights of interest in Bath and one needs to look (and think, more challengingly) beyond the famous, eponymous "hot spots." I muster in support of this claim the rather fabulous Bath Abbey with its twin angelic ladders, which flank the massive late medieval wooden door.



The going story about these angelic ladders is that they were the materialization in stone of the contents of a dream by a patron-bishop. His sleeping dream, so this story goes, became a waking dream of builing an impressive abbey with an idiosyncratic facade design that testified to his architectural inspiration.



Now, Old Ken has always been a big advocate of the phrase "dare to dream," which indeed I have had emblazoned on my familial crest (replacing the prior motto "snack attack!"). All this talk of dreamy bishops and their desire to build stone testimonials to night-time visitations sounds a little Romantic (in the nineteenth century sense), but I leave such questions to be adjudicated by ye who study all things medieval.



Well, so maybe this virtual trip to Bath has not gotten us any closer to puzzling out what makes a secret squirrel. But, take heart. After all, Roman baths weren't built in a day.