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For the last four years, Verity and Marchionni worked and rested side by side, standing on a narrow, flimsy wood plank, only 18 inches wide and some 30 feet above ground.

"Our view point of the street from the scaffolding is the best in the world, the most pluralist collection of races: the rich, the poor. There is a connection with every other cathedral in the world that is a pilgrimage site and a connection with medieval stories. The poverty, the beggars: the girl who abandons her baby in the Cathedral and runs away; the young man who watches us work for four days without moving from the steps and is later found dead. The distractions of tourists, the bone-chilling feel of a chisel in your hand in December, the dust and pigeon dung blowing endlessly in your eyes in the fall winds -- all these stonecutters have known from time immemorial.

We hammer away with discipline and patience, and slowly the work comes together. But it is not straightforward. A little taken from a drapery by the shin affects the balance, perhaps a deeper hollow by the other shoulder. Balancing shadows, connections of lines, keeping an angle that will "read" from below; you search for a musical harmonic.... Squaring a block, making it true, each step measured and with no shortcuts, gives a logic to the turn of the mind. It is no surprise to me that Socrates was a stonecutter.

Jean-Claude and I are a fragile link in a chain that will include some extraordinary stone-cutters as yet unborn as well as those past. We scratch away on the doorway to this great leviathan of a building, connected to its life through the bond with the body of men needed to construct it, and to the wider world of bishops, deans, financiers, pilgrims." - Simon Verity

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