The last time I had been to Bath was to appear in court. I had driven there through the morning rain to account for an early hours misdemeanour in a contraflow system on the nearby M4. Faced with 6 points to add to the 6 I had already accumulated, disqualification was staring me in the face - a miserable prospect on an ugly day.  Somehow I avoided a ban, it was the 23rd December, I thanked the spirit of Christmas and left the damp grey city in as much of a hurry as 11 points on your license allows.

Last week I was back there for some filming and most of the time the sky was clear, the late autumn sun shone and the light was razor sharp.  Magnificent, shining shades of gold everywhere, Bath Stone, flaming trees and the River Avon burnished brown in the late afternoon -  all week it seemed that beauty was everywhere I turned, some of it the type that can change you forever.

Architecturally, it was The Circus that captured my heart, three long curving Georgian terraces that come together to form an amphitheatre around a little garden of plane trees. Just a few yards away there’s a restaurant that’s borrowed the name. I’ve been to a few restaurants over the years that you could say were run by clowns but this wasn’t one of those. They serve terrific, generous, deceptively simple food at ridiculously good prices.  I ate pig’s cheeks with green sauce and then slow cooked shoulder of lamb. Like I said, beauty was following me around.