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spring contained the healing power of the goddess Sulis. So to them this was a holy place. Then the Romans came along and they were no end impressed, I can tell you. Now the Romans recognised a good idea when they saw it...’
    Oh, God, Sara thought, exchanging a look with Sue, we’re going to get the works.
    ‘...and so there was a bit of a hostile takeover – harhar – and so generations of Romans also came to know this place as holy. Only this time the chap in charge, or chappess rather, was the
Roman
goddess Minerva. And by the eighteenth century...’
    That’s more like it, skip two thousand years or so, get to the point, Sara thought approvingly.
    ‘...people were a little more prosaic and they flocked here in their droves. Now this was all on the basis of quasiscientific ideas about the benefits of the waters...’
    Then it started.
    ‘...and it goes to show, doesn’t it, that we never really learn! It’s all a question of faith, isn’t it? For here all you dear ladies are today, in the dying years of the second millennium, to tell us that with a drop of vegetable extract here and little massage there, we’ll all be “cured” of whatever ails us! Extraordinary, isn’t it? Just clutch your healing crystal – that’ll be twenty pounds, please – and breathe deeply! And large numbers of us believe you, much in the way that people have believed in the power of the waters here, and a whole host of other quackery, for the past two thousand and something years! And it’s just as good for business as it ever was, isn’t it? I don’t need to tell you that it’s
faith
you need, even today! And where, ladies, does faith end and superstition begin? I put it to you that superstition is simply the name we give to all those familiar articles of faith that have stood the test of time. Just look at today’s date if you need convincing. Friday the thirteenth! We consider it unlucky, don’t we? And we consider the spa waters to be beneficial to health. Two articles of faith, you see, of which we are equally fond and which are equally unsupported by fact – har-har!’
    His laugh was inane and nasal. Sara, although in broad agreement with most of this, was aghast at his clumsiness. Could he really think that this was the time and place to outline such a robustly sceptical analysis of the nature of belief? The audience was not laughing, but staring back at him in silence. Sensing perhaps that all was not well, Matthew Sawyer attempted to lighten the message with humour.
    ‘So, do venture out and see Bath’s unique Roman Baths in the course of this weekend. That’s if you’re not too busy stirring your cauldrons and cooking up cures for all those little afflictions that we all suffer from! Actually, I have a little wart on my finger here – any suggestions?’
    Sara heard Sue smother a snort and felt a panicky need to laugh. She looked at the ceiling. Had his audience consisted of less deeply relaxed and psychically healed people they would by this stage have been transformed into an insurgent, seething and disaffected mob. But, being broadminded and non-violent to a woman, this mob was doing little to convey its discomfiture to Matthew Sawyer. And he had not yet finished.
    ‘Actually, I don’t have any particular regard for the established medical profession myself and that is another reason why I am grateful to you, as representatives of the alternative healing lobby. The more active you are, the more full the GPs’ waiting rooms will be! Personally I like the idea of keeping our doctors off the golf course with a few cases of prune juice overdose!’
    He actually said ‘
orff
. Sara brought her eyes down from the ceiling. She had been staring in apparent admiration of the swags of laurels and berries which transversed its vast area, intersected with stuccoed garlands of palms and flowers, and after eight relentlessly appalling minutes of Matthew Sawyer, she knew every leaf. She had resolutely avoided