4 and a half feet from the window of this Skoda

The small engine hums on red light.

Small dots, and bigger dots

Of colours between grey and black.

Sit Capitalist effluence on Soviet glass,

In the middle of Bath

Would Gorbachev giggle?

On the street, is England.

Or for Jane anyway.

5″1 on a raised step

In a bountiful baby blue number

And a jet-black bonnet,

One wonders how she’d feel,

Being kept outside in the Wiltshire wind.

Her face is cracked,

Cream paint betraying a weather-worried temple.

Hands clutched,

She fixes a Thatcher stare,

Into Queens square

To when in her day she saw

The Obelisk bolt-blunted.

Here she lodged in Gay street

To ‘Sir Walter’s satisfaction’.

And is now kept by the Trust,

With trinkets, fans

Pens and tea-towels

And City of Bath bears

Here she lives

A BBC dream

In the sinewy eyes of smitten pilgrims

Making dollars.

Then, with a yellow light below the red,

We pull away round the corner

 To the Odeon,

Where the pilgrimage continues;

Anne Hathaway in Becoming Jane.