Thank you very much for the World Wide Web

Twenty-five years. Is it really that long since Tim Berners-Lee jumped out of bed one fine morning with a figurative light bulb over his head?

Looking back at that momentous day in March 1989, Berners-Lee (now Sir Tim), explained things very simply: “I just had to take the hypertext idea and connect it to the Transmission Control Protocol and domain name system ideas and – ta-da! – the World Wide Web!”

Obvious, when you come to think of it. What’s amazing is that no one had thought of the World Wide Web before.

And what’s even more incredible is that Sir Tim later confessed that those two forward slashes we’ve been meticulously typing at the beginning of every web address are totally unnecessary. He put them in, he said, because “it seemed like a good idea at the time”.

Well, we’ve all done things like that, from painting our bedrooms mauve to sliding down a hill on a tea-tray.

But looking back over 25 years of trying to remember which computer key is a forward slash and which one’s a backslash, it’s hard to forgive Sir Tim for that particular boo-boo.

Let’s look on the bright side, though. Much has changed since Sir Tim wrote in his WWW User Guide: “When color [sic] comes along, we can use colour...”

Imagine a world in which you couldn’t click your mouse on the words Click Here! and find that nothing happens because the web designer meant you to click some graphic down at the bottom of the page.

Imagine a world in which you couldn’t find out, with another mouse click, why Dermatologists Hate This Woman For One Weird Trick. What weird trick could it possibly be? Laying the poor out dermatologists with a bunch of daffs? Creeping up behind them and giving them a wedgie? Must... just... click... that... link...

Imagine, too,  a world where you couldn’t watch videos of kittens doing cute, stupid or downright dangerous things when you should be concentrating on work.

Yes, dear reader. For those of us old enough to remember it, that was the World before Sir Tim stuck those two extra Ws on the end. Not to mention the /s. Or possibly the \s.

It was a dark and dreary place. A world without Facebook. A world without Twitter. A world where you didn’t have  to remember a 12-character password and the second, fourth and tenth characters of a nine-character phrase if you wanted to find out how much money you haven’t got.

A world in which casually mentioning your mother’s maiden name to some friendly stranger down the pub wasn’t a catastrophic breach of data security.

A world in which you had to use a proper encyclopaedia, with paper pages, to settle family arguments.

And a world in which you couldn’t check up on the progress of Lydia the great white shark, whose solitary meanderings have taken her across the Atlantic in the general direction of the UK where, we can exclusively reveal, she will swim up the Avon to Bath and take part in the Jane Austen Centre's  forthcoming all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the Bennet family.  

So anyway, thank WWW, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. The world would be a lot less fun without you.

Four more candidates for Greatest Bathonian

The votes are flooding in for Bath law firm Mogers’ online poll to find the Greatest Bathonian.

As reported in last week’s Bath Chronicle, the sometimes controversial contenders are Jane Austen (obv), Uranus-discoverer William Herschel, painter Thomas Gainsborough, proto-postman Ralph Allen, four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister, singer Peter Gabriel, architect John Wood the Elder, and Georgian fashionista Beau Nash.

Now, whether or not these worthies were or are true Bathonians (born within the sound of the Abbey bells, or in the Princess Anne Wing of the RUH at a pinch) is open to endless and ultimately fruitless debate.

But there are certainly quite a few important historical heroes who are missing from the list. 

In no particular order:

• Doctor William Oliver. The inventor of a very classy cheese biscuit. Bequeathed the recipe to his coachman, who got very rich on the proceeds. The  biscuit-making machine was purportedly moved from Bath to Reading in the 60s. Or the 70s. Or the 80s. The Bath Oliver has never tasted as good since.

• Saint Alphege. Purportedly born in Weston Village, Bath. Saint Ælfheah to his Anglo-Saxon chums. Or Elphege, or Alfege, or Godwine. They weren’t that hot on spelling in 1006, when he became Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1012 he was clubbed to death with animal bones by a band of marauding Vikings. Most famous for having a school named after him in Whitstable, where Mrs D did her first teaching practice. There’s a spring in the hills above Weston called Saint Alphege’s Well, and tradition holds that if anyone attempts to build houses on it, the holy roller will rise from the ground and whack them round the head with a ham hock. If only.

• Bladud. Legendary King of the Britons and early animal welfare activist, he purportedly drove his leprous swine into the Avon (as you do) and discovered the hot springs, thus accidentally founding Bath’s medical tourism industry. His name is honoured to this day by the stag and hen parties who visit the city every weekend and end up getting bladdered.

• Queen Victoria. It’s all about the obelisks. Early in her reign, she pitched up in Bath and purportedly had a Hanoverian hissy fit when she discovered that Queen Square was named after her great-grandmother, Queen Caroline, rather than herself, and that the obelisk had been erected in honour of her grandfather. (Frederick, Prince of Wales, if you’re interested. Frederick, Prince of Wales, if you’re not.) The citizens tried to appease her by naming a park after her and building therein a second obelisk, guarded by three of the dopiest-looking lions ever to be rejected for service in Trafalgar Square. She was not amused.

Observant readers will have noticed four uses of the word “purportedly” in the above romp through Bath’s murky past. (Five including that last one.) Which goes to show that history is very much in the eye of the beholder.

But all claims for Greatest Bathonianhood for such luminaries as Napoleon Bonaparte, Catherine of Braganza, Albert Einstein,  Attila the Hun or Elvis Presley should be treated with the greatest suspicion.

And as for that Ronnie Wood...  

Striking back at Bath's tourists

A curious factoid plonks onto the desk at Chronicle Towers: Bath’s digital creative industry, valued at £350m per year, is worth three times more to the city than tourism (a mere bagatelle at an annual £106m).

This raises a number of rather uncomfortable – and probably unanswerable – questions. 

First off, what exactly is a digital creative industry, and how would you know one if you saw one?

Second, given that this very blog is both digital (as in  typed with the fingers) and creative (as in made up on the spur of the moment) then where’s its share of the £350m?

Third and most important, though, is the question of what to do with all the tourists, now that they don’t matter nearly as much as they used to, finance-wise.

Just think of the fun we can have. We can stand on the pavement of the Circus as the coaches trundle round and round, their occupants soaking up the Georgian architectural splendours through smoked-glass windows from the comfort of their air-conditioned recliners.

We can peer back at them in a vaguely authoritarian manner, waving placards with slogans like “Get Out And Walk!”

And then when they do, we can wave another placard that says “Get Back On The Coach, You’re Bunging Up The Pavement!”

In seven different languages.

We can stand at the back of a walking tour, point at the guide and whisper subversively into the ear of an unsuspecting grockle: “She’s making it all up, you know.”

Or we can try to grab our own slice of that rather tempting £106m by setting up our own tourist trap.

Here’s an idea: why not find an historical figure and work out their Bath connection? Set up a museum in their honour, hire out pre-recorded audio guides, sell classy-looking souvenirs and generally rake it in.

It can’t be anyone literary: the market is already saturated by the bonneted, frilled and furbelowed spectre of Jane Austen.

Scientists are out too: William Herschel, the 18th century’s answer to Peter Higgs of boson fame, got there first.

(Little-known fact about William Herschel: he originally named his newly-discovered planet, Uranus, after King George III, thereby earning himself an entry in the first edition of Ye Guinneffe Booke of Recordes as the Biggest Creep in the Entire Universe. Try telling that to a tourist.)

Moor your frigate here

(Little-known fact about bosons: they’re named after Indian mathematician Satyendra Nath Bose, who apparently never got the recognition he truly deserved.)

Where were we? Ah yes, trying to get rich off the holidaymakers.

This is how. Find an obscure naval officer who convalesced in Bath after Trafalgar. Build a replica of his three-masted frigate, sail it up the Avon and moor it off Pulteney Bridge. Dress up in midshipman’s gear, stand by the gangplank and leer nautically at the approaching coachloads. Regale them with tales of rum and floggings. Sell them funny hats, feed them ship’s biscuits.

Ker-ching. Job’s a good’un!

Secrets from the Man Drawer

It’s funny how you can walk around Bath and get the feeling you’re in a parallel universe.

Whenever you step outside your front door, a bizarre distortion field catches you unawares and makes you start to question what is real and what isn’t.

Hordes of Jane Austen fans stroll elegantly down Milsom Street in their Regency costumes, making the casual visitor think for a moment that they’ve been spirited back 200 years to a simpler and more graceful age.

The illusion is broken, though, when the assembled Janeites start glugging bottled water and nattering into mobile phones.

“I have missed the post chaise and shall not be home for luncheon,” they say to whoever it is they’re talking to. “Pray keep the roast goose a-warming until my return.”

Things get even weirder as you go further out from the city centre. For reasons too complicated to go into here, you’re waiting to get into town from the far pavilions of Kelston Road when a ghastly realisation creeps up on you – you’ve entered an alternative reality in which they’ve invented bus stops, but not the buses to stop at them. No wonder everyone else is driving.

And even in the safety of your own home, things are not quite what they seem. Instead of birthday presents, you get cards from DHL telling you to collect your goodies from an industrial estate on the other side of Almondsbury.

Is Almondsbury even a real place? Given its close proximity to another purportedly real place called Catbrain, we venture to suggest not.

At the centre of this whirlpool of unreality, though, is a force of nature so disruptive to the peace and tranquility of normal life that we shudder to mention it within the pages of a family newspaper.

Yes, dear reader, we are talking about the Man Drawer.

What, you may ask, is one of them? Well, in a bygone age, young ladies had Bottom Drawers in which to collect necessities for their future married life. Maybe they still do.

In a similar way, us middle-aged chaps have Man Drawers, in which we gather all we need to cope with our current life.

The trouble is, though, that Man Drawers tend to be affected by the reality distortion field we were discussing earlier. Yes, we were.

When you consider things from a rational perspective, you do not actually need a diary (unused) from 2010. Or one from 2009. Or indeed one from 2007. But there they are, clogging up the Man Drawer.

Even less do you need the headphones from a mobile phone you recycled two years ago. But there they are in the Man Drawer, entwined with the USB cable from the iPod that stopped working just before you happened to buy a brand new one (convenient or what?)

Clamps from the garage; old bars of chocolate; six kinds of propelling pencil lead; a bulging tube of glue: all are there because you thought they Might Come In Useful.

None of them ever will. But the Man Drawer takes them and twists them into a new and frightening reality. Ignore it at your peril.

Jane Austen spreads her tentacles

Jane Austen’s back. Sunday nights, on your telly. And you miss Emma at your peril, because on Monday morning when you get to work you’ll very likely be probed on the details of the inconsequential plot and the jaw-droppingly lush production values.

Probed. Mmmmm. Now there’s a word. It’s quite a Jane Austen word, actually. She’d probably have found a way of slipping it in somewhere, mistress as she was of the double entendre. For it was the sainted Jane who describes, in Emma, Mrs Goddard’s school, “where young ladies for enormous pay might be screwed out of health and into vanity”.

And it was the same Jane, at the beginning of Northanger Abbey, who wrote: “Such was Catherine Morland at ten. At fifteen, appearances were mending; she began to curl her hair and long for balls.”

She was a bit of a naughty one on the side, was Jane. And if you were made to study her works at school, trying to spot those fnarr-fnarr moments was probably one of the few things that kept you going (oo-er missus) among all the fie-ing and wherefore-ing and for shame-ing.

And while we’re on about it, can anyone explain, in words of fewer than three syllables, what’s the difference between Sense and Sensibility?

From the aforegoing you may have picked up a certain ambivalence in this writer’s feelings towards Miss Austen and her works.

The problem is that everything in her world seems just a bit too perfect. Especially, it must be said, in the new TV adaptation of Emma.

Just look at the job titles in the credits at the end of each episode. They don’t just have Gaffers and Best Boys (stop it, Jane). They have Lawn Manicurists. They have Daffodil Wranglers. They have Electric Fan Operators to blow the clouds away from the sun so that early 19th-century England looks spick and span for the American market.

All right, you say. Behind the romantic escapism there’s acerbic social commentary, incisive characterisation, a dash of irony thrown in for good measure. And those double entendres. True enough, and there’s not much wrong with that.

But what grates slightly is that these days the escapism has completely overshadowed the wicked wit. The original characters have married and danced a minuet into the sunset, and we’re left with a candy-coated mother lode for TV and film producers to mine repeatedly.

Without having to pay royalties.

Then there’s the Bath connection. True enough, Jane Austen lived here for four or five years. But Bath wasn’t her favourite part of the world, and she had a fairly unhappy time while she was here.

Yet walk up Gay Street on a sunny Saturday and everyone’s toting an “I Heart Mr Darcy” bag or a “Kiss Me Quick I Bear A Passing Resemblance To Keira Knightley” hat. A bit too ironic, perhaps, even for Jane.

Maybe parody is the cure for an Austen overdose. High on the best-seller list at the moment is Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which starts off: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.” And goes on in that vein for two or three hundred pages.

On second thoughts, perhaps you’re better off sticking with the real thing. It’s so much more comforting, really.