Seeing Bath through the eyes of artists

When you live or work in an area you sometimes become a bit blase about its attractions.

If you walk past the same buildings – however beautiful – day in day out it is easy just to take it all in your stride and not fully appreciate it. It sometimes takes an outsider to remind you of the beauty in front of your eyes.

That was certainly the case for me last week when I had the pleasure, for the second year running, to be one of the judges for The Bath Prize, an art competition designed to get people to capture in art form the spirit of the city as they see it.

Although only in its second year, the competition has already established itself as a major artistic event and more than 400 entries were submitted for this year’s prizes. As judges, we got to see the shortlisted top 200 or so and I was genuinely taken aback at the quality of the works we had to view. It was of a very high standard indeed.

What the selection also showed me is the way people – the vast majority of whom come from outside our area – view Bath and its many attractions. As such we saw plenty of excellent works featuring the weir, Pulteney Bridge, Bath Abbey, The Circus and of course the Royal Crescent which produced the runner-up picture. Beyond that, however, artists found beauty in all manner of other areas of Bath life.

I was particularly impressed that in a rugby-dominated city one of the very best pictures features Bath City Football Club and I also admired the bravery of the artist who, with all Bath’s obvious attractions, chose to paint the gasworks towers at Windsor Bridge. In addition, it was also fascinating to see how many people had been impressed enough by the Bath Lions to make them the centrepiece of their work. Proof, if ever it was needed, of what a successful and admired project this has been.

So, once again I left The Bath Prize judging very impressed with what I’d seen – and, crucially I started to look around me again with renewed appreciation of this city’s beauty.

How I learned how to....walk

There is not much to be said for hitting the ripe old age of 46. However, you do at least think you’ve learnt a few basic life lessons on the way to your ‘half century’.

It was, therefore, something of a shock last Friday afternoon to realise that I didn’t actually know how to walk.

This shock discovery came when I began ‘training’ for the Bath Chronicle Donor Run which is part of the British Transplant Games which is coming to the city next weekend. This fantastic competition will be bringing hundreds of people to Bath who have had many different forms of transplants and we, as a community, can join in the fun by taking part in a 3k or 5k run/walk to raise awareness of the need for people to donate their organs for future transplants.

Not being one of life’s, ahem, natural runners, I had elected to walk alongside the chairman of the local organising committee of the Transplant Games, the irrepressibly bubbly Loraine Morgan-Brinkhurst. With the daunting prospect of having to walk all of three or five kilometres we obviously needed a training session – and step forward Zoe Jackson, who runs Plan Be (see http://www.plan-be.co.uk/). Zoe is a bundle of pure energy and enthusiasm and so she seemed the ideal person to give us tips on how to walk on the not-very-wild side.

Loraine and I, resplendent in our unmissable yellow Bath Chronicle Donor Run t-shirts, decided to go to Royal Crescent/Royal Victoria Park for our hour-long training session. It seemed like a bit of a jolly jaunt for a Friday afternoon to be honest – but what we were to learn in the next 60 minutes was fascinating and when I woke on Saturday morning with one or two aches and twinges, I realised it had done me some good as well.

Zoe’s basic belief is that if you walk right, not only can you increase your fitness levels and your posture but you will instantly look and feel better and start losing inches in the places where you want to lose inches. She looked at our walks before the session – which as you can see from the pictures here were hardly what you would call ‘power walks’ – and then proceeded to give us some tips which I’m happy to pass on now so we can get the whole city ‘walking back to happiness’.

First of all you should walk through your ‘whole foot’. You should aim to walk through the pad of the heels and push off your toes so you are floating rather than putting pressure on the ground. This, apparently, is very good for something I didn’t know I had – my ‘glutes’ (or buttock muscles for those of you not in the know).

Secondly you should stabilise your hips. According to Zoe the best way to achieve this is to imagine you have a glass of water on each hip and you have to keep them full as you walk. This improves your posture and flattens your stomach. Also good for those glutes too.

Thirdly, lengthen your neck. Try to create as much distance as possible between your shoulders and earlobes. This puts your spine in the right position and reduces stiffness. And finally – possibly the visibly tricky one I think – we should use our arms when we walk to vastly increase our speed.

By the time we’d spent an hour together – and as these are two of the most spirited and fun women in Bath it was a pretty enjoyable hour! – there was no doubt about it, I was walking better and my glutes were in fine fettle. Apparently if we can keep this up we should be able to complete our walk next week with no problems at all so if you are in Bath next week and see a strange man extending his neck and using his arms like a robot walking by, give me a wave as I glide on by.

Right, I am now off to learn how to breathe.