Observations from a Hill

Just been watching - for the umpteenth time - "The Day After Tomorrow", which is a narrative both prescient and ironic in equal measure. Prescient in its affirmation of the the damage we've incurred on the world's climate and its concomitant effects on the flora and fauna of this world - ourselves included - and ironic on so many damn levels regarding pundit's and politician's views past and present. However, despite the underlying seriousness of the message that the film sought to portray, I was randomly drawn to the brief scene where the preppy rich boy takes the newly-assembled gang of high-school students to his father's pied-à-terre in Manhattan to take stock as the global weather anomaly approaches. His compatriots are somewhat taken aback by the opulence of his father's - very occasional - residence; and I was minded of the time when we, as young teenagers visited a schoolfriend's house in Harborne for the the first time. The house was, for ...

I'm currently revisiting a novel that I bought, secondhand, six years ago, but which got sidelined at some point, and I'm not sure why, as it's a compelling narrative told well, and it's got all the elements which I like: libraries, classification and the curious word of the curiosity; collected, shelved and cabinetted; cloistered, dark and musty rooms of books, shelves, spiral staircases and leather-topped desks. Most of all its central, inanimate but mechanical protagonist is a watch. To be specific, the watch: the Breguet 'Marie Antoinette', 'The Queen', 'The Grand Complication' [the English title of this book], which was stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute For Islamic Art in 1983. Thought lost, this masterpiece of horology, completed in 1802, nine years after Marie Antoinette's death, and which features every possible watch function known at the time, comprises 802 individual components. It finally resurfaced in 2007, when the widow of ...

We were over at the boy's place for sausage-rolls and a cup of tea this lunchtime, and as usual we had a general family rant about the state of the world/country/politics/economics/religion/morality/ethics - delete as appropriate - when someone mentioned that they had heard that the state of the roads and their potholes was largely a function of changes of repair methodology and materials: ie. repairing less often, with cheaper, inferior materials. Mention was made of the overall increase in size and number of private vehicles in recent years causing more damage to road surfaces than the much smaller, lighter and fewer numbers of vehicles in the past. As one we opined on the fact that no government has yet addressed that bloody great pachyderm in the room: freight. Freight. Heavy haulage. No UK road was designed to take heavily-laden forty-foot artics, or twenty-ton heavy wagons of stone and ballast, all of which would have been more sensibly transported in the past first by canal,...

I would think everyone of my generation would have had a grandmother whose grave advice "Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." still rings in their ears to this day. We are also old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher's pronouncements on managing the country's economy as if it were a household budget; balancing the books carefully and prudently, saving for a rainy day and avoiding owing money where possible. Even today, we have Rachel Reeves' 'fiscal rules', strictly adhered to - some of the time - governing levels of taxation versus state spending on social services, health and defence, to name but three. Except that is not the way the world works. All countries and their governments are in debt - massively, apart from Macao, apparently - the largest numerical government debt being the United States of America; the most powerful nation on earth, and ultimately, caller of all the shots on just about everything for just about anyone, anywhere. The country...

We went as a family, the other day, to Penrhyn Castle in Llandegai: that grossest of expositions of wealth built by the Barons Penrhyn off the back of fortunes made from slavery, sugar, and most latterly the exploitation of Bethesda slate and off the backs of the working men of this area. Visiting the place is always a slightly bitter-sweet experience but a salutary one: a constant reminder of how far we've come politically and socially in this archipelago, but also of how so very far we still need to travel down that serpentine and rocky road to human equality and fairness. As I've mentioned several times before in these jottings, between 1900 and 1903, there was in Bethesda a Great Strike - Y Streic Fawr - of quarrymen in the employ of Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai over pay and conditions at the Bethesda slate quarry, which employed a great proportion of men in the area. We live in Rachub, a tiny village in the hills above Bethesda itself; specifically in the upper part formerly...

Been watching the re-runs of the 1970s series series "Secret Army" [blog posts passim] yet again - yes we're sticklers for punishment, if you want to frame it that way - but to be honest there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the convoluted and internecine struggles in the occupied countries during WWII. Evaders, resistance, Communists: all with the ultimate common aim of not just surviving Nazi occupation, but through diverse means moving the war effort against the occupying forces forward; but each with their own agenda in how that aim was to be achieved, often in contradiction and to the detriment of the other groups. Within commonality there is always difference: it seems to be an unfortunate human trait that we might appear to be aiming for the same goal, but for numerous and diverse reasons that place us in conflict with each other. We all want the best, but in general, we seem to be destined to forever seek a zero-sum result of whatever game we play, rather ...