Deckchairs

There’s something about seeing deckchairs in pairs looking out to the sea. Often, especially in English seaside towns, I see old couples sitting in silence staring out towards the horizon and I always wonder what they were like when they were young, when they were first in love with each other, when romance was something new. They have spent so much time together and they have been so lucky to have that. I hope they know.

Empty pairs of deckchairs bring this to mind but they also carry the melancholy of loss.

That said, this was taken on a wet windy day in Bournemouth, 2006 – couples of all ages had more sense than to reward their romance with a cold, wet behind.

love | landscape

Rock On

I just have a minute or two, but had to put this together and post it – took it a while before Christmas and loved it even in the camera. Have a feeling the heart is a little soft-focus, but it was taken in the dark…

This is at Winspit, which is a very cool place. It was a quarry, a desolate planet in Destiny of the Daleks with no less than Tom Baker as Doctor Who, and now and then there’s an illegal rave there. It’s also something of a toilet, for ravers, climbers and Daleks I imagine. Watch where you step. Dalek poo is nasty.

What I like about it is that it needs no dressing up to be a sci-fi film set. Walk into the quarry-caves and stand in silence. It’s like being on the surface of the moon, only with the surface reflected on the ceiling. Actually, it’s nothing like the surface of the moon, clearly. It has stone pillars and graffiti. But it’s an alien place for sure.

It’s here – on the planet Skaro.

 

love | landscape

Persons Anxious To Write Their Names…

…will please do so on this stone only. Jodie Forbes, and all the many others who relieved their anxiety by writing their names on this stone, I salute you.

This stone has been relieving anxiety since 1887, and it’s fascinating to think of the countless names that have been written on it and worn away in all that time, and wonderful to think that Victorian England had a problem with graffiti that could only be solved by the use of two large slabs of stone set into the ground. Tilly Whim Caves nearby, locked to the public since 1976 and now home only to bats and Willy Tim the dragon (or so I tell my children), is also home to walls of graffiti, carved into the Purbeck stone near the entrances. I’ll get in there one day.

Ever since I started photographing graffiti I’ve wondered what it means to write your name in a public place? There’s a lovely answer at WikiAnswers to this question: “They think that writing their name all over will make other people know who they are. All it does is make other people see their name, of course, and not understand anything about them.”

Personally I think it’s about our anxiety with being so small and so temporary. We are tiny insignificant beings and here for such a short time, and we want to be noticed and then remembered. Some people seek this through fame and celebrity, maybe notoriety, some through creativity (and maybe fame through creativity). To some it gives them a sense of identity – think of taggers, whose mark is largely illegible to most of us, but which identifies them to their peers. And some resort to writing their name repeatedly all over the place. Jodie Forbes wrote her name on this same stone at least three times, in the same pen on presumably the same day.

May she be anxious no more.

The Great Globe at Durlston is here.

love | landscape