What Ho! Westward Ho!

Dawn breaks over Bath; only the bin men are up and about.

The Hilton offers fine views of the city which still has enough Georgian content to make it a magnet for tourists. The hotel, while welcoming the latter does not attempt to imitate the former; it is an eyesore.

Rooms have kettles and coffee bags sealed in plastic pouches easily opened with scissors. Not having scissors I am using an iron. I am embued with the spirit of Boy Scout, Edwin Craye (Florence’s young brother) and may set the Hilton ablaze.

Two years ago the first Wodehouse Society away-day was in Harrogate and continuing the spa theme we are in Bath today for a series of talks on a variety of Wodehousean topics. One not covered is rays of sunshine, Scotsmen and Jonathan Swift. When Plum wrote that much quoted simile I wonder if he was remembering Gulliver’s Travels?

“(The author permitted to see the grand academy of Lagado. The academy largely described. The arts wherein the professors employ themselves.)

This academy is not an entire single building, but a continuation of several houses on both sides of a street, which growing waste, was purchased and applied to that use.

I was received very kindly by the warden, and went for many days to the academy. Every room has in it one or more projectors; and I believe I could not be in fewer than five hundred rooms.

The first man I saw was of a meagre aspect, with sooty hands and face, his hair and beard long, ragged, and singed in several places. His clothes, shirt, and skin, were all of the same colour. He has been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in phials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt, that, in eight years more, he should be able to supply the governor’s gardens with sunshine, at a reasonable rate: but he complained that his stock was low, and entreated me “to give him something as an encouragement to ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.” I made him a small present, for my lord had furnished me with money on purpose, because he knew their practice of begging from all who go to see them.” (Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift)

I am not only reminded of Lord Emsworth’s gardener. What Swift wrote in 1726 seems relevant nearly three hundred years later in the context of electric cars and other interventions to save the planet. Swift was thinking more of alchemists, I surmise.