Midweek Musings

Greetings gentle readers.
As I wandered around this morning, wondering why Katla hasn't blown her top yet, I started considering the relationships people have with the stones beneath them.  In Canada, we don't really care all that much - we care more about the soil, or the oil in the tarsands than we do about bedrock.  The stuff beneath our feet are just potential natural resources, or foundations for building things to move natural resources.  In Nashville, the solid granite bedrock that heaves out of the ground makes for perfect acoustic spaces for sound studios.  In Iceland, the rock is almost organic.  It occasionally turns liquid and flows to the sea in rivers of lava.  It heats the water for drinking and bathing. (note that the translation of Katla is 'kettle")  It melts the glaciers and sculpts canyons and creeks.  It's like a helpful, yet volatile friend.  We've all got one.
Liverpool is a bit odd, though.  The rock here is hard, thousands of years post-glacier, and usually a blonde colour, fading to grey as you move closer to the granite towards the south and Wales.
In 1207, the rock was a necessity.  In order to gain all the political and economic rights of a city under King John, the place needed a castle and a monastery.  A bunch of merchants and fishermen really didn't have the wherewithal, so the King's Charter gave them enough of a kick start that they started quarrying and building.  That meant more people.  In 1709, Thomas Steers designed the world's first commercial wet dock.  It took six years to build.  That meant more builders, more quarries, more rock, more bricks, more mortar, more people.  That many laborourers living in the city for that amount of time created something that would become useful later - a lot of pubs.
When the wet dock opened, it offered something no other dock in the world could - they could offload a ship's cargo and have it stored or carted in 36 hours.  The fastest docks in the world at that time could manage in about 10-12 days.  The economy exploded overnight.  To prevent literal explosions, fires were not permitted on ships docked in the wet dock.  That meant that sailors wanting a hot meal had to go ashore.  They were also accustomed to spending their money over a two week period in port.  Now that they had a day and a half, binge spending became the order of the day.  Pub owners became fantastically wealthy, and there were a lot of them to go around.
Liverpool Castle was torn down so that they could use its bricks and stones to make the wet dock, and then later to create a flood barrier to stop high tide from flowing too high up the river estuary.  They screwed that part of the project up, but they still needed a lot of stones to do it.  The fame and efficiency of the wet dock spread so quickly that the corporation of the City of Liverpool immediately commissioned more docks - the Queen's Dock, the King's Dock, the Prince's Dock, etc., etc.
Quarrying has always been a big deal in Liverpool.  The granite quarry just down the street from where I'm staying is just a huge artificial pit that it has become Liverpool's largest graveyard.  I have a photo album of the quarry pit/cemetery beneath the Anglican Cathedral that it helped erect here:  https://www.facebook.com/jdsilentio/media_set?set=a.200425130579.257431.521620579&type=3
John Lennon's skiffle band that performed at the now-historic Woolton Village Fête in 1957 was called the Quarrymen.  As the traditional quarries began to run into problems like watershed and cartesian springs in the 19th century, the \corporation of the city began to think bigger.  They began tunnelling and blasting right into the hills around the city, levelling the ground for even-grade train tracks and underground warehousing from the docks.  An underground rail system to move goods from the docks to cavernous warehouses nestled deep beneath the city was eventually abandoned, but not before some of these underground spaces and access tunnels had already begun.
The Cavern Club was a residual side-effect of this attempt to make the rock and stone around the city give way for more transportation and storage, and in so doing, yield more building material to construct greater projects around the surface of the city.  The Mersey Tunnel of the late '20s and early '30s was yet another excavation project that created building material for more docks and cathedrals while creating a link between the Wirral side of the Mersey and the Liverpool side.
In short, Liverpudlians consider rock to be an impediment that can be transformed into structural components, quite wildly different from the Icelandic attitude of quietly accepting all of the things that their underfoot landscape offers.  This might go some way toward the pugnacious attitude that occasionally surfaces here in the North West of England.  We saw it in the Teddy Boys fad of the '50s, the Casual trend of the 70's, and the political upheavals under Thatcher in the 80's.
I reckon that's all I've got in me for tonight, but I'll be back again before you can shake a stick.
Oh, and as for the footy - Liverpool defeated Leeds United 2-0 in a match that was very similar to the Sunderland match.  Same score, similar times of the goals, but Leeds were a bit more "up-for-it."  Just read the Sunderland report and include the fact that Ben Woodburn has now become the youngest player in Liverpool history to score a professional goal, and you're set.
Until later, goodnight England and the colonies.
Cheers,
—mARKUS