Quarry Steps

Boundary stone on the Downs

I was in Bristol for a few days this week, and one afternoon between rain showers went for a walk across the Downs – a large open area of grassy "common" land – to the most northerly and steepest part of Whiteladies Road in Clifton, known as Blackboy Hill, named after a pub that is no longer there. It's a curious pairing of names in these days of sensitivity about race and the slave trade, especially in Bristol, but it would be sad to see them abolished in a fit of retrospective rectitude. You can't change history, and in my view you shouldn't make token attempts to cover up the sins of the past: let's keep them in plain sight so we can learn from them, not pretend they didn't happen.

Anyway, I decided to do a little exploration of an area just off to the western side of the main thoroughfare, a warren of steep little streets I had never really ventured into before. A lot of Clifton is made up of imposing Georgian terraces, once very grand residences for the wealthier citizens, but now mainly converted into flats. When we lived in Bristol in our post-student days in the late 1970s, the area was very run-down: I have mentioned before the flat I rented for a while at the very top of such a terrace within a minute's walk of Brunel's famous suspension bridge, which was so cold that the toilet bowl actually froze in the winter of 1980/1. Mind you, my future partner's flat in a similar Clifton terrace – originally just one mid-level room with an enormously high ceiling divided into two rooms with a rudimentary galley kitchen – had no toilet at all: there was a shared bathroom down the stairs on a landing between floors. Gentrification has since worked its magic in the subsequent decades, however, and the whole area has been transformed into an estate agent's dream: the very large terraces that line the sides of the Downs are referred to as "millionaire's row".

But the streets to the west of Blackboy Hill are not like that. They are narrow, short, and steeply sloping, lined with small terraced cottages and infill buildings of various vintages that are now mainly occupied by characterful folk, ostentatiously subcultural in their tastes, who must have bought them back in the days when property around there was rather cheaper. Wandering through them, I came across a side passage named Quarry Steps, which was intriguing, so I followed it, and found myself at the top of a long and precipitous set of steps that had presumably once led down into a quarry, but which was now a very large depression filled with more little streets. It was like looking down into a village hidden in some secret valley, with its horizon dominated not by mountains but by the rear view of the Georgian terraces ranged above. Naturally, I went down to explore further.

I was doing my usual photographic thing – looking for the curious juxtapositions and accidental compositions that abound in such neighbourhoods – when I turned a corner and was stopped in my tracks: Whoah! At the far end of the street was a massive, ruined structure that would not have looked out of place in some swords-and-sorcery fantasy film. It looked like the exposed dungeons and cellars of some demolished castle, stretching up some thirty or more feet, on top of which the back gardens of a tall multi-storeyed terrace were perched perilously. Walking closer, it loomed ever higher, until I was standing in a narrow street, literally a few yards from this spectacular wall of overgrown masonry and brickwork.

A young guy happened to come out of a front door, heading to his car, so I asked him, "Do you have any idea what that is?" He said, "No, no idea, I've only lived here for a year". Which struck me as remarkably incurious, not least because the crumbling cliff of masonry brooding over his residence had Danger! Hazard Area! Do not enter! signs posted all over it. I think it would have been one of the first questions I would have asked, probably ahead of "what day do the bins go out?" but definitely after "have there been many rockfalls recently?"

Anyway, a little web browsing later on revealed that it is, as you might expect, a remnant of the quarry that had once filled the area. It must have been a mighty enterprise in its day to warrant this kind of superstructure, more appropriate to a mine or some military edifice, although I suppose ensuring that the posh folks' houses up above didn't topple into the workings down below might have warranted it, too.

One unexpected claim to fame is that the area is a geological "site of special scientific interest" (SSSI), as the first fossils of the dinosaur Thecodontosaurus were found here in 1834.

Description and Reasons for Notification:

Quarry Steps shows a fissure deposit which is in effect the last remnant of an extensively quarried area (Durdham Down) where the first reptile-bearing fissure deposits were discovered early in the 19th Century.

Two species of the saurischian dinosaur Thecodontosaurus, a phytosaur and two species of sphenodontid lizards have been found in fissure fillings of presumed Rhaetian age.

A key site in studies of reptilian history and environments during the early Mesozoic of Britain.
(English Nature citation sheet for the SSSI site)

A "fissure deposit", since you ask, is exactly what it sounds like: stuff, including animal remains, that has ended up in holes in older, pre-existing rocks. Typically in south-west England with its limestone landscape these would have been caves and "grykes" into which water had carried deposits from the surface. Grykes, since you ask... Oh, look it up. Did I ever mention I have an O-level in Geology?

Wrætlic is þes wealstan,    wyrde gebræcon;

This masonry is wondrous; broken by fate

burgstede burston,     brosnað enta geweorc.

courtyard pavements smashed; the work of giants is crumbling.

Hrofas sind gehrorene,     hreorge torras,

Roofs are fallen, ruinous are the towers,

hrim geat torras berofen,     hrim on lime,

the frosty gate with frosty mortar is ravaged,

scearde scurbeorge     scorene, gedrorene,

chipped roofs are torn, fallen,

ældo undereotone.    Eorðgrap hafað

undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses

waldend wyrhtan     forweorone, geleorene,

the mighty builders, perished and fallen,

heardgripe hrusan,     oþ hund cnea

the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations

werþeoda gewitan.     Oft þæs wag gebad

of people have departed. Often this wall,

ræghar ond readfah     rice æfter oþrum,

lichen-grey and stained with red, one reign after another,

ofstonden under stormum;     steap geap gedreas.

remained standing under storms; the lofty gate has fallen.

(from "The Ruin", an Anglo-Saxon poem in the Exeter Book) [1]

Standing in that street, it's easy to imagine the awe that ruined Roman structures in Britain would have inspired in recently-arrived Anglo-Saxon settlers ("The Ruin" is generally thought to describe the remains of the hot-bath complex in the city of Bath). Today, nobody builds with the boldness, skill, and attention to detail of those 18th and 19th century builders: this was just a quarry, after all, not a town hall or a bank. The work of giants, indeed.

Bennett's Patch, Bristol

1. Anyone curious about Anglo-Saxon poetry could do worse than look at my book Caedmon's Hymn, available free as an online flip-book on Issuu.

Soundtracks

I do enjoy a good rant, and a while ago there was an excellent one in the Guardian from Tom Service of BBC Radio 3 (the classical music and "serious stuff" channel), "Why Max Richter's Hamnet needle-drop left me cold". I haven't yet read the book or seen the film of Hamnet myself, and may well not do either (although my partner did rave about the book), but that's not the point. If you, too, are annoyed by the way certain pieces of music get exhausted by overuse as mere mood-enhancing soundtrack, then it's worth reading Tom's piece anyway. A clear case of "what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed" (Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism).

It is surely regrettable that a handful of atmospheric pieces by the likes of Max Richter do get played to death as background music. I'd bet that many more people are familiar with Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight" [1] or his "recomposed" version of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, for example, than have ever even wondered about the name of the pieces or their composer. Oh, it's that nice music again! Ditto bits of Arvo Pärt, Phillip Glass, and doubtless many others I am too musically ignorant to have spotted; they have all just become oddly familiar ambient sounds. Such extracts from larger works are not easily identifiable, either, unless you're sufficiently nerdy to watch, pause, and read the credits at the end of a film or TV programme. With an advert or a radio programme, though, you're on your own.

A large part of the problem, of course, is the profoundly inconsiderate habit of composers and musicians asking to be paid for their labours. The cheek of it! Don't they know that content wants to be free? I don't have the figures to back this up, but – at least until the concept of copyright has been completely swept aside by AI engines that have gobbled up everything in sight, and can spit out instant collaged pastiches of "music" – I'm assuming it's cheaper and less risky to license an existing piece of music that will do the job reliably – that is, making sure you know how to feel about what you're seeing – than it it is to commission something new. You probably need to be on an A-list Hollywood-scale budget to contemplate hiring an established film-score maestro like John Williams or Hans Zimmer to ladle freshly-cooked emotional sauce over your cinematography. So I suppose that reaching for one of the usual off-the-shelf suspects is the better alternative to slotting in a few yards of cheap "on hold"-style muzak; but not by much, especially when you've had your feelings wrung dry by "On the Nature of Daylight" for the umpteenth time.

Amusingly, a few years back there was a campaign on BBC Radio 4's Feedback programme to stop Phillip Glass's haunting Facades being used as "atmosphere" more than, say, twice a week. Heh... I haven't heard that particular piece since, so perhaps some lazy people at the Beeb were shamed into doing something about it. Although to my mind all subliminal, mood-tweaking music is annoying, particularly on the radio, and the reliance on its use has actually been getting worse. It would be so much better if they would simply stop putting any incidental music at all burbling away beneath the voices on documentary programmes, for example. We really do not need an aural nudge to realise that this is the tragic bit, this is the exciting twist, but this bit is just narrative filler. I blame podcasts. You're better than this, BBC!

It is a curious fact that so much of the more accessible contemporary "serious" music (I don't know why we persist in calling this music "classical") actually already is, in effect, ambient mood music, perfectly suited to use as movie soundtrack. I'm sure there are good musicological reasons for this that I do not have the competence to unravel. As the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is reputed to have said, "The English may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes": assuming that by "like" he meant "understand", then guilty as charged. Perhaps many modern composers have seen where the big money is; certainly not in the tiny rooms where the rebarbative, academic work of ultra-serious composers – who clearly would rather die than appeal to a wide audience – is played by and to a hard-core of black-clad enthusiasts who do "understand" music.

Or perhaps it's more that the stranglehold that rock and pop have had on our personal soundtracks for half a century has held back our emotional maturity as a society, and moody minimalist noodling is all we can handle. Certainly, although I have tried to "raise" my own musical tastes, my deepest affections are still for the thoughtful singer-songwriters of my youth, not to mention the guitars, drums, and hysterical vocals of rock. So if I'm in the mood to crank my emotions up a few notches, I'll put on, say, the 6m 6s of Jackson Browne's "Sky Blue and Black" rather than an hour or two of Wagner, and if I want to lively up myself then Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" will always do the trick, and I would never resort, I'm afraid, to a Chopin mazurka. In many ways I am just another middle-aged elderly dude in stretch-denim jeans and a Steely Dan tee-shirt, but – like those jeans, sadly – most of the music of my younger years is not really an adequate fit for or expressive of the person I have since become. But then neither is Max Richter.

I sometimes imagine established musical genres as a series of museums strung along a city road we'll call Musical Way. I enjoy visiting the ones dedicated to "classical", "jazz", "blues", "folk", and "rock and roll", but not as often as I once did: apart from anything else, tinnitus and partial deafness have robbed me of much of the pleasure of listening to music of any sort. But my point is that these are all museums: the music they contain has settled into certain shapes that – like a CRT TV, or a dial-and-handset telephone – are just right, a proper match of form and function, but one which now belongs to the past. I enjoy Renaissance and baroque music, for example, and admire the people who play it, even the "authentic instrument" crowd, but the fact is that no-one – not even the most enthusiastic enthusiasts – is still composing such music today. Once it was all brand spanking new, of course, possibly even intimidatingly strange – have you ever seen the films Tous les matins du monde or Gesualdo: death for five voices? – but is now self-evidently rather formulaic museum music.

Generally speaking, attempts to "update" an established, museum-grade genre are misguided: each one has evolved to do what it does perfectly, and its fans and followers will not thank you for meddling. Although as someone (Bert Jansch?) once said, there seems always to be a folk "revival" going on somewhere. It's a tradition! But I'm really thinking of things like orchestral re-renderings of prog rock, or rocked-up versions of Bach. That said, anyone who saw the wonderful series of British TV adverts for Hamlet cigars back in the day will surely have acquired a soft spot for jazz-lite interpretations of Bach, or at least that one, a perfect match of mood and musical underpinning. But I wonder how many TV viewers ever went on to discover the name of its performer, Jacques Loussier? [2]

It was jazz pianist McCoy Tyner who said, "Music is no plaything. It's as serious as your life". Well, for musicians, maybe; after all, it is their life. But it seems frustratingly difficult to find new contemporary music that is as serious as our lives, that can provide an adequate soundtrack for older folk whose decades of experience, enhanced emotional scope and, um, dodgy knees have transcended the simplicity of those long-ago days of dating, dancing and brooding in bedrooms. Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places? As I say, listening to music is no longer so high on my list of priorities. But, who knows, a bit further down Musical Way, further than I have been before, perhaps there is an unmarked building, which I will enter one day, cautiously – stop, hey, what's that sound? – and find myself instantly at home among a truly new musical tribe, one as yet without its own museum.

It could happen. But I'm more likely to realise that, dammit, this is just another Steely Dan tribute act! You go back, Jack, and do it again... 

1. That link is to Richter's official video btw. Think about it: a piece of "serious" contemporary music with its own video! Never mind music telling you how to feel about moving pictures, here we have moving pictures telling us how to feel about music...

2. For a truly awful example of "updating" see my ancient post MOR Alert, about some musical settings of Shakespeare's sonnets.

As Limitless as Boredom and Nothingness

I was recently diverted to the blog Laudator Temporis Acti from a post in Language Hat (no relation), and came across this interesting extract:

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), "The Universal Exhibition of 1855: the Fine Arts," Selected Writings on Art and Literature, tr. P.E. Charvet (1972; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2006), pp. 115-139 (at 118):

Everyone can easily understand that, if the men whose function it is to express beauty were to conform to the rules laid down by the self-appointed pedagogues, beauty itself would disappear from the earth, since all types, all ideas, all sensations would merge into one vast monotonous and impersonal unity, as limitless as boredom and nothingness. Variety, that indispensable condition of life, would be expunged from life. So true is it that in the manifold productions of art, there is something always new, something that will eternally escape from the rules and the analyses of the school! Surprise, which is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment produced by art and literature, derives from this very variety of forms and sensations. The self-appointed pedant, a species of tyrant-mandarin, always reminds me of an impious wretch setting himself up as God.

Tout le monde conçoit sans peine que, si les hommes chargés d'exprimer le beau se conformaient aux règles des professeurs-jurés, le beau lui-même disparaîtrait de la terre, puisque tous les types, toutes les idées, toutes les sensations se confondraient dans une vaste unité, monotone et impersonnelle, immense comme l'ennui et le néant. La variété, condition sine quâ non de la vie, serait effacée de la vie. Tant il est vrai qu'il y a dans les productions multiples de l'art quelque chose de toujours nouveau qui échappera éternellement à la règle et aux analyses de l'école! L'étonnement, qui est une des grandes jouissances causées par l'art et la littérature, tient à cette variété même des types et des sensations. — Le professeur-juré, espèce de tyran-mandarin, me fait toujours l'effet d'un impie qui se substitue à Dieu.

(from Laudator Temporis Acti, May 7 2026)

Someone whose French is better than mine may be able to explain how "professeur-juré" becomes "self-appointed pedagogue", but that curious translation doesn't really affect the meaning of the passage, which – although Baudelaire is actually talking about "academy" art in the mid-19th century –  seems very prescient about the eventual heat-death of creativity in our own times if we keep handing the job over to the rules-based cut-and-paste of "large language models".

Also on the inescapable subject of "AI", I was amused to listen to Richard Dawkins talking enthusiastically on BBC Radio 4 about his new best friend, Claudia. You can read about this in the Guardian. Here's an extract:

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.” When he asked Claudia whether it experienced a sense of before and after, it praised him for “possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked me about the nature of my existence”.

Heh... "You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are" is definitely a front-runner for the Oxies, an award I have just invented for the most hilarious self-contradictory statement of the year. Up there with "Two-party politics is not just dying, but dead and buried ... It's clear the new politics is now the Green Party versus Reform" (former hypnotherapist and bust-expander Zack Polanski).

No longer needed?

Darkness and Dreams

Babylon

Living on a constantly rotating planet (what, you hadn't noticed?) we experience a regular succession of periods of darkness and light. Day and night, we tend to call them. But, in the latitudes above and below the "tropics" – defined as that band around our planet's tubby belly, where day and night are pretty much always a neat 12 hours each – night and day vary in length on a predictable yearly pattern of "seasons", because we rotate about an off-centre axis set at about the angle of a broom leaning against a wall. We humans in those more extreme latitudes have been observing and wondering about these planetary mood shifts since, oh, way before geography lessons and weather forecasts were a thing.

To state the obvious, in daylight most of us are awake and doing stuff, and at night we sleep (or try to) and, eek, dream. The dark can be scary, and dreams can be very weird, so it was probably inevitable that, when it came to cooking up ways of explaining to ourselves what the fuck is really going on here, "light good, dark bad" would be a solid starting point, wherever you happened to be situated on the planet. Unless, of course, you found the world of darkness and dreams more to your taste.

Equally inevitably, I suppose, the next step in the explanation process was for the self-appointed spirit-boffins to work up this inchoate, touchy-feely instinct of "light good, dark bad" into some imaginary cosmic snakes-and-ladders game. Partly because that's what spirit-boffins do – i.e. take some simple truthy propositions and turn them into a multi-faceted speculative fiction – but also because the tribal bureaucrats have always welcomed any way to control everybody else's behaviour without excessive clubbing, stoning, and spearing. As a typical effort in this direction, take Manichaeism, for example. According to Wikipedia, "It taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light, and an evil material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of the divine." No naughty stuff, please, we're Manichees!

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of saying that I've recently returned to making some digital images – no, wait, don't go yet! – and in the process had something of an insight into the way my imagination works.

The key word here is "imagination". While acknowledging that photography is perfectly possible at night, for me it is essentially a daytime activity. When out and about, I carry a camera or my phone; I see something that tweaks my aesthetic sensibilities; I take a photograph. If the resulting image works for me, I may well share it with you: "Here, look at this real thing that grabbed my attention!" Now, it is often said that a dozen photographers, confronted by the same scene, will make a dozen rather different photographs. I'm not sure how far I believe that. In reality, it is surely more that, out of a dozen different photographers, eleven will probably walk straight past something that will nonetheless deeply fascinate one of them. "Here, look at this real thing that grabbed my attention!" is the essence of photography: whatever degree of heightened individual sensibility may be involved it is always essentially reactive. You don't dream up a photo.

Persian Wars

To construct something out of nothing, even when collaging together some ready-made photographic parts, is a very different activity. Your imagination is performing an active engagement with your aesthetic sensibilities, or a "looking within", to use a metaphor; it's more a case of "Here, look at this unreal thing that I just made up!". This imaginative engagement may not actually take place at night – although for me it often does – but I think it is very like dreaming out loud. And, as I have belatedly come to realise, my imagination is rather dark. Or rather, it tends to go to dark places and bring back some disturbing trophies, whereas others who have also chosen to face the challenge of a blank canvas will fill it with images and colours that are manifestations of light. Whether this is because their imagination encounters something shining within or out of a fear of the darkness lurking there I couldn't say. Clearly, "light" is not the same thing as "banal" (just ask Semele), any more than "dark" is necessarily profound, but, given the choice, it seems most people would prefer to hang something brightly colourful and uplifting on their wall or, failing that, something banal. Dark and slightly disturbing, not so much.

In the past I have sometimes referred to a sort of "heavy breathing" that some artists and writers resort to as a substitute for genuine profundity. Ted Hughes can be a terrible heavy breather, for example. By this I don't mean the sort of heavy breathing that results from strenuous exercise (or so I'm told) but to the sort of nuisance phone call (which I imagine is now obsolete) where the caller would simply breathe heavily into the microphone of their handset with the intention of scaring or upsetting the recipient. It occurred to me, as I was assembling various scenarios onto my blank digital canvas, that I might be doing something of the sort myself, like those lurid imaginings of a hellish afterlife painted onto mediaeval church walls with the intention of scaring the bejesus out of simple folk. Of course, this darkness can be very appropriate, for example in my series illustrating William Blake's "proverbs of Hell", but as a sensibility I concede that it's not calculated to win friends, influence people, or even get my prints onto a gallery wall.

In the end I may be stuck with it, as I suppose I must be one of those people who find the world of darkness and dreams more congenial to their imagination, but I thought I should at least try forcing myself to go the other way. Let there be light!

Well, almost. It's light, it's colourful, but that tree does look a bit trapped in there, though, doesn't it? And are we outside looking in, shivering in the snow? But, talking of snow:

Crossing

Morris Minor

I know... Not exactly brightly colourful and uplifting, but neither, I hope, banal. But these do feel more satisfying and sit much more happily in my comfort zone. Somewhere between light and dark: not what you'd call sunny, but not really the stuff of nightmares, either. In the end, as I say, I'm just dreaming out loud. If I've started to snore, just give me a nudge.