poliphilo

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"Ai is already becoming boring" says an article in France 24.

The initial thrill, the initial panic are dying down because this always happens with new tech. Look and see how hysterical the opinion makers and authoritiy figures were about the introduction of telegraphy, railways and radio. They prophesied a New Age or the End of Civilisation as we know it. But human beings are adaptable. Give us a new gadget and we'll go "Oh Yeah!" and then we'll test it, try it out, become accustomed to what it can and can't do, accept its limitations, add it to the tool box- and carry on with our working lives.

You may have noticed that I've stopped posting AI pictures. I found my ability to generate them thrilling for a year (or was it two?) and then, quite suddenly, the magic evaporated. I still like the my pixel-pix but I've no wish to make any more. Indeed, I no longer seem able to. I've tried and the results have been at worst awful, at best- well, yes- boring.

Been there, done that, bought the T shirt......

If the urge returns I'll get out my water colours.....

Same thing happens with ideas.....

7.45 am and the garden was still cool and shady but wouldn't be comfortably so for very much longer so I got out my shears and my little low stool and clipped the long coarse grass around the bird bath. The garden has been wonderfully lush but now everything is becoming sere and ragged and untidy and is asking to be seen to.

This heatwave is so unEnglish. Hot days are not so very unusual, even two or three hot days together can happen and are welcome, but week after week of unrelenting sunshine? No, it's not what we're used to.....

We met Edna and Miriam for lunch at the Favolosa on Wednesday. Now normally at midsummer you'd expect a popular seaside cafe to be crowded and noisy but it wasn't at all. We had our pick of tables, and didn't have to queue at the desk to place our order. It's much the same on the streets. People aren't venturing out if they don't have to. They're sitting indoors in the shade with their fars blowing.

The Meeting House stays reasonably cool. There were nine of us there for worship yesterday. Afterwards a couple of women dropped by, one who is going to be using the place to run a meditation group and was happy to join us for coffee and cake and another who was just curious to see what sort of things we get up to. We told her about Quakerism. Her eyes widened. We said we have a faithful attender who is a spiritualist minister. "Why," she said, "She's one of my friends on Facebook." The coincidences and conjunctions piled up. She's a bit of a psychic, she's a bit of a pagan too. Knowing she would know what I was talking about, I said, "Synchronicity!" How nice it would be if she joined us.....

I was very happy yesterday morning. Don't know why. I seem to be more subject to these spells of inner radiance than I can ever remember. And this is in spite of the growing weariness and the increasing arthritic pain....

Ailz tells me that there are people out there in the world who call themselves "male lesbians".

No-one seems to know quite what they mean by it. And I'm not going to offer any guesses or suggestions.

I''m just happy they're causing confusion.

Our route home from the West Country took us so close to Woodhenge it seemed a shame not to drive up the narrow access road and take a look.

Woodhenge was a a structure of wooden posts- as impressive in its day as Stonehenge but not as durable. It was so lacking in durability, in fact, that it wasn't properly identified until a chap flew over it in the 1920s (a former RFC pilot and holder of the Victoria Cross- no less)- and took photographs. The archaeologists dug the site and found the skeleton of a very young child at the centre. When they'd finished their digging they inserted a concrete thingy in each of the postholes- so that the site currently looks like an art installation. I can't decide whether I like it or not.

Here's the pilot who discovered Woodhenge. His name is Gilbert Insall.

Right next to Woodhenge is the neolithic settlement we call Durrington Walls. It's only quite recently that the archaeologists have established how enormous it was. There were houses, there were deep pits. They speculate that it may, for a time, have been the largest city/township/camp in Europe, but I don't see how they can possibly know.....

Because we really know so very little about the neolithic....

Who built these things?

Dunno

Why did they build them?

Dunno.

What were they doing here?

Dunno.

Anyway here's a view of the Durrington henge. It's the second biggest in Britain (so far as we know).

Once upon a time this part of Wiltshire was busy, busy, busy, busy and now it ain't. The tremendous things the people created here have all but faded back into the landscape.

It was very hot, I walked about a bit, but not very much. in the far end of the field next to Woodhenge is a single toppled sarsen known as the cuckoo stone. I would have liked to have seen it but wasn't sure I had the stamina to get there and back .

The sky was temporarily owned by skylarks. They were singing the song that romantic poets used to go doolaly about. "Hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert," says Shelley.

A cairn that has been erected over the site of the child's burial. The bones are no longer there. They were taken to London to be studied and then we fell out with the Germans and they came across and destroyed them with a bomb.

Twits!

The cairn attracts offerings- flowers, coins, trinkets.

I left a pound coin.....

So that wasn't so much a "Farewell" as a "See you shortly".

But I was in a quandary. Feeling myself changing in a changing world. It was a relief when those persons from Porlock turned up. It was a relief to have to stop thinking and just sign off.

The persons were actually family. My daughter and her husband, three kids, two dogs. So much to do and pay attention to on several different levels. It was nice to be distracted.

But yesterday they went home. Last thing we did was go round the tip shop. I had money and no-one else did- and the tip shop ladies don't take plastic (hooray!) so I found myself buying the kids seventeen pounds worth of lovely junk.

And now I'm no longer distracted and find myself spending longer and longer just sitting on the patio or at the bedroom window looking at the view.....

The astrologers say this week (this week!) is the week of weeks. Expect change. Big change. The sort of change that makes it impossible to lapse back into the familiar and quotidian.

Two political deaths. Lindsey Graham, such a war-dancing war monger! There are those who think it suspicious. And over here that very odd, very conservative, very self-promoting former government minister Anne Widdecombe was unmistakeably murdered. I didn't like her but when I ask myself why I can't think of any particular thing she did or said that would have annoyed me. The police are calling it terrorism but I think they're simply making a big noise. Anyway, both deaths seem significant but I'm not at all sure why.....

"Oh good," says Ailz, seeing that I'm blogging. "I've got my husband back."

"Well yes," I say, "But I may be different. The times feel strange. I feel strange."

"We all do." She says.

One last thing. I had this dream last night. I was buying a baguette. When I got to the counter I found it had broken into three pieces. The big bearded guy behind the counter was magisterially contemptuous. " I should charge you a thousand pounds," he said "for breaking it. But as it is, I'm only asking you two hundred." I shoved the baguette at him. "Fuck you!" I said. As I walked away I remarked quite calmly to my companion, "Of course the really stylish thing would have been to have paid him what he asked, but I just didn't have the money."

The world is changing and I seem to be changing too.

I dislike dogs, right? Only today I was left in charge of a dog that doesn't know me and it barked and barked until I got down on the floor beside it and talked to it nicely with the result that by the time the window cleaners turned up and needed dealing with I had it in my arms and was petting it and we were having a lovely time together.....

So maybe the self I now am likes dogs. How strange!

And another thing- I need to blog regularly, yes? Only for several days now I have tried to write and find it's just not coming naturally or flowingly and I've produced a few laboured paragraphs and then scrubbed them.

So maybe the self I now am doesn't need to express itself in words.

Am I saying "farewell? Yes, I rather think I am.

Perhaps in a week or two I'll be saying hello again.

But in case I don't....

Ach, visitors have just arrived, I need to engage with them....

Love you,

Poliphilo......

In Autumn 1703 a travelling meagerie arrived in Malmesbury. It's people took rooms in a local inn and the caged animals were kept in the inn yard. Among the animals was a tiger.

Hannah Twynnoy, a 33 year old servant at the inn, set about teasing the tiger. She was told to stop being so silly but carried on. The tiger got crosser and crosser, broke the lock on the cage door and that was the end of that

She became the first person in Britain ever to be killed by a tiger.

Her grave, the headstone of which has been restored/recut/replaced, is in the Abbey grounds.

The interior of the Abbey is as grand as any cathedral- there just not a whole lot of it

At the east end the arch, which was once the arch that led to the crossing, is filled by a blank stone wall.

"Do you not hang anything on it?" I asked the lady who was greeting visitors. "Well, no" she said, "It's a very thin wall and it lets in the damp and anything we put on it gets ruined. However we have a projector on the balcony at the west end and we project pictures onto it during services."

Not such a bad idea, I thought.

And now for the other thing about the church that's remarkable.

Athelstan is buried here.

Athelstan?

Yes, I didn't know anything about him either, but I should have done because he was was a very good king- a scholar, a lawgiver and a great warrior. At Brunanburh he defeated the king of York, the king of Strathclyde and the king of Dublin and became the first Saxon king to rule the whole of the lands we now call England. His actual burial place is unknown because his bones were moved to a secret location to prevent them being direspected by the Normans but the later mediaevals made up for this by creating a monument for him with a fine effigy. I imagine it would once have had a prominent position- possibly in front of the high altar- but now with the church being so very much reduced in size it's been tucked away in a corner.....

Malmesbury Abbey was wealthy and its church was enormous. When the monasteries were dissolved the town of Malmesbury which was also wealthy took the church over because it could afford to maintain it.

But

A high wind or an earthquake- one or the other- brought down the central tower and it fell east and demolished the choir and the sanctuary.

While a little later the tower at the west also fell down and demolished about a third of the nave.

And so the Abbey now looks rather odd- a fragment of very grand mediaeval architecture with ruins at either end.

The porch is magnificent. Unfortunaely the carvings that surround the entrance are very badly eroded. They look great from a distance but are all but impossible to make sense of up close.

However just inside the porch to right and felt are two very fine romaneque lunettes representing the apostles receiving the Holy Spirit at Pentecost....

And straight ahead is a door with a very fine Romaneque tympanum

"Life is but a dream"

But it's one thing to sing or say this, to affirm it theoretically, intellectually, and quite another to actually feel it- as I now seem to be doing....

People fall out with me and I fall out with them and I find myself thinking, "Oh, lets stop this pretence. You have adopted a set of characteristics and I have adopted another set and we find ourselves arguing and saying hurtful things- but it's just a game, a performance. Let's drop the masks and smile at one another and laugh about how silly we're being.....

I wake up in the morning and it takes me an hour or two to readjust to the "reality" I've agreed to take seriously.....

We drove past Stonehenge. Seen from the road it's oddly unimpressive- like a gift shop model of itself.

When I was a kid you could wander freely among the stones, Now your visit is monetised and regimented and you aren't allowed within touching distance- or so I'm told- because I refuse to go back until the restrictions are lifted.....

Avebury is a different matter. There's a village at the heart of the henge, sheep graze among the stones and so long as you don't let them out you can wander at will. Also there's no receipt of custom. I return as often as I can.

What particularly struck me on this latest visit was the sheer size of the site- the heft of the stones, the height of the bank, the depth of the ditch. And they did all this with wooden spades and antler picks? Hmmmm.....

I dreamed I'd been sent to prison for a month. To my surprise I found I was enjoying myself. In the morning my group was given a flame gun and told to strip paint off something or other. In the afternoon we lounged about in the woods and greated the new intake of prisoners with a rendition of "The Teddy Bears Picnic".

There aren't that many Saxon churches. Later generations wanted bigger, grander, more fashionable- and the Saxon buildings were- accordingly- expanded, rebuilt or entirely replaced. St Laurence, Bradford was one of the ones that got replaced. The new church sits right next door- you can see its spire in the second image. St Laurence was spared demolition and put to other uses.

In 1856 William Jones, rector of All Saints, cast an antiquarian's eye on an unusual looking school house with cottage attached and thought, "I know what that is!". Restoration followed- and now it's a Church again.....

The consensus is that St Laurence dates from the early 11th century, but there are those who think it may have been begun by St Aldhelm in the 8th. The exterior looks like a reliquary and the interior is narrow and dark and tall and holy.

The two angels- now set high on the nave wall- would once have been part of larger composition. Perhaps a crucixion or a Christ in glory. Anglo-Saxon carvings are also rare.

Bradford on Avon is a much smaller dinkier, nicer version of Bath. Bath was a spa town- drawing all the ghastly society people you find in Austen and Dickens- while Bradford was industrial- first wool and then, surprisingly, rubber. Both occupy a valley of the river Avon, climb a steep hill in tiers and are made of lovely buttery (mellow yellow) Bath stone. I avoid Bath because it smells of money whereas Bradford doesn't.

Locals call it BOA.

Bath has an Abbey, a Roman Baths and a bridge. BOA has a bridge too, nothing Roman I'm afraid but its Saxon church is marvel.

Here's the bridge.....

.

The odd little building clinging to the side of the bridge is the lock-up- where they put the drunks and the footpads overnight until justice could be done on them. It may have started out as a chapel

And here's a view of the buildings just a step or two down river from the bridge....

The Saxon church deserves a post all to itself

A final pair of images from Wells.

These panels are from the tomb of Thomas Boleyn, precentor of the cathedral and several times great uncle of Henry VIII's second Queen. They represent the Annunciation and the Holy Trinity. I think from their sheen and translucency that they're carved in alabaster.

English alabaster, more often called- from one of its chief centres of manufacture- Nottingham alabaster- was prized across Europe. These two panels are especially beautiful- and I rate the second as the most convincing image of God the Father that I've ever come across.

Here, have a dead bishop

.

Have another

Go on, you can manage a third.....

And I know this is getting to be a bit much, but you can't miss this one because it's a transi tomb, with the occupant sculpted in all his finery on the top bunk and as a decaying corpse on the bunk below....

Mmmm. I do love a transi tomb......

You climb those stairs, you take the right fork and you find yourself in one of the loveliest built spaces in England.

As I was walking back down a newly-married couple were coming up towards me with their photographer. Well, of course they were.....

Generations of photographers have admired the way the stairs from the chapter house at Wells just seem to flow down into the cathedral.

All you have to do is point your camera and- bingo- 1st prize at the local photography club's exhibition.

At the bottom of the stairs this cheery little fellow is there to encourage you in your climb. With one hand he casually upholds a pillar while with the other he skewers a satanic serpent with his crutch. "Take it easy," he's saying, "It's not nearly as hard as it looks, and if you're harbouring evil thoughts, put them down before you enter the bishop's council...."

By the beginning of the 14th century the structure of Wells cathedral was suffering overload- with cracks appearing in the fabric and the possibility that the central tower might come tumbling down. The cathedral's architect/master mason, William Joy, had already solved similar problems at Salisbury and came up with a plan to brace the crossing on all four sides with internal strainer or scissor arches. Joy was not only an artisan but an artist and his design didn't disguise the remedial work but made it look both fully intended and spectacular. So far as I'm aware there's nothing quite like it anywhere else in Christendom. I think of Wells and the two things that immediately spring to mind are the West Front (see previous post)) and the scissor arches.

I look at Joy's scissor arches and I see owls.

Here's the one at the eastern end of the nave.

And here's a view from the north to the south transept....

On the afternoon of the day I climbed the Tor we drove up the road to Wells- Englands prettiest cathedral city.

At the far end of the Market Square are two gatehouses- one leading to the bishop's palace....