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I knew it was coming up to the 200th anniversary of the birth of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson........ I had heard it announced on BBC Radio 4...... I knew they were having a series of programs to commemorate this occasion........ so I decided to go up on the Tennyson Moor... up to the memorial built in his memory by his 'friends in Britain and America' .... up on the cliffs looking out to sea...... close to where he had lived most of his life ...... right here on the Isle of Wight.
As i rolled out to go off alone the light was just beginning to fade my father was quoting the bits of Tennyson he could still recall from his school days........ "Charge of the Light Brigade"..... "Half a League... Half a League... Half a League Onwards"..........."'Charge for the Guns' he said"....... "Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred"....... "theirs' not to make reply"..... "their's not to reason why"........ "their's is but to do and die"...... "Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred".........
You know what Im like........ I'm a trifle obsessed........ is it possible to be a trifle obsessed ?....... Obsessed by trifle sure......... but a trifle obsessed? Surely you either are obsessed or you are not......... ? Anyway I digress....... Where was I ?
Oh yeah....... You know me..... I get into my pictures and forget what's happening around me while Im shooting......... this has caused me the odd problem......... like getting run over by a police horse in a riot situation........ and when i was working in the New York Subways....... man...... I was so close to stepping on the third rail over and over again....... Anyway this Cliff at the edge of Tenneyson Down below the Tenneyson Memorial was kind of freaking me..... because I knew I kept forgetting about the totally sheer drop while photographing........ that would be the ultimate in suffering for your art........... or maybe the ultimate in suffering to commemorate someone else's art....... to casually and totally unnecessarily fall over a huge fatal drop while concentrating on producing pictures of the Tennyson Memorial...... anyway I managed to avoid that fate but of course I stayed up on the cliff till the last bit of usable light had faded....... then it was pretty dark and cos Im on holiday I even didn't have all my usual junk which does normally include a small flashlight in my jacket pockets......... so I had to be pretty careful getting down from memorial in darkness without getting lost and falling over the cliff.
Sometimes I am struck by how photography forces you to live an interesting life...... who.. but a photographer would deliberately put them self on the edge of a cliff in darkness?....... The nutty adventures are not integral to the act of photography....... I find they just come along as part of the package..... in truth I had not really considered how I was going to get down in the dark....... I was just obsessing over watching the changing intricacies of the light in the sunset and its relationship to the memorial..... right up until all the light was gone.
When I finally made it back to the car........ all the other cars had left the car park hours before....... er...... lets face it..... no one else was going to be walking along the cliff tops in darkness........ I put on the car engine and the radio immediately began speaking in a gloomy weird trail of what.. I ... at first .... assumed was modern poetry......... in the voice of the corpse not buried deeply enough to get rest in his grave........ it was pretty weird stuff...... but as it went on as it seemed to gain a patriotic momentum....... then I thought this has one of those Tennyson programs ....... and so it turned out ....... I drove back in the little lanes...... listening to the latter part of the Tennyson poem 'Maud' being read.
Cheers Jez XXXXXXX
PS....... the actual 200th Anniversary of the birth of Alfred Lord Tennyson in on the 6th of August
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