The Essay: Let Me Take You There

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Let Me Take You There: Aida Edemariam

Aida Edemariam

Let Me Take You There

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Leading writers share the secret of an internal place of refuge in times of crisis.

Leading writers share the secrets of an interior  place of refuge to which they travel in times of crisis. Aida Edemariam on swimming pools in England and Ethiopia.

Where can we go when we feel cooped up, shut in, locked down?  To mark and alleviate these strange times, Radio 3 has commissioned leading writers to share the secrets of a place of refuge, real or imaginary, to which they escape in times of crisis. 

10. Aida Edemariam's father is Ethiopian, her mother Canadian and she lives now in the Oxford, but it is to  Addis Ababa that she returns at the start of an evocative celebration of swimming and water; 

"A honeycomb of rooms, filled with steam. Tiled steps up to long low baths that in their gracious lines still held remnants of luxury and ease. Stripping, wallowing in water that arrived so hot out of the ground the main job was to cool it, splashing, shouting, setting off echoes. Here where nearly a hundred years before an empress had pitched her tent on a lush plain and turning to her rheumatic husband asked, may I build a house, here? Another, there, under that mimosa tree? And a palace, too? Bathing, here where the city began, because while there was plenty of rain, and the hot springs seeped from the earth as they always had, in the taps in our houses there was no water."

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