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Ac Yfory, Ac Yfory...

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Day two of our break down here in South Shropshire. Spent a couple of hours in Church Stretton scanning the charity shops and the antiques emporium that are our usual stamping ground there. Back to Clun and out for an early evening meal at The White Horse [blog posts passim], where I had a very creditable chicken curry with boiled rice and naan bread [double carbs, I know] and a couple of pints of their home-brewed and inestimable Clun Pale Ale [also blog posts passim]. Jack was on top form as mine host, and who features in my top four or five landlords - probably, no, actually occupying the top spot of my top five - it has been my pleasure to have been served good ale and banter by in my over fifty years of drinking in the more traditional ale houses of these lands. I also rank The White Horse as close as it's possible to get to the absolute ideal public house, something George Orwell could only fantasise about with his fictional alehouse 'The Moon Under Water' in his 1946...
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First of The Year!

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Here we are again in Clun for a few days break, and the sun has broken through the gloom and precipitation, with blue skies and a slight breeze; albeit starting to chill down a bit this evening. Pictured the Hospital Gardens around the corner, the old almshouses, which I've mentioned before in these despatches. The last time we were here was at the tail end of last summer, when hot weather had given way to autumn winds and rain, and the place looked more blasted heath than cottage garden. Spring bulbs are blooming everywhere and the place has been nicely tidied up after the winter ravages. Anyhow, we're off to The White Horse [blog posts passim] soon for a couple of pints and hopefully a live band. Keep you posted...
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Always Take The Weather With You...

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If I hear yet another Tory quack on about issuing new licences for new North Sea Gas exploration as the panacea for our energy woes, or some twonk spouting utter guff about deploying new nuclear developments to stem the tide of our increasing energy insecurity, I'll scream and start hitting things. There is one simple reality behind these follies: too, late, too damaging, too expensive. The only possible beneficiaries from any such developments are the corporates who are vested in these obsolescent technologies, their shareholders, and the speculator vultures who constantly circle the markets looking for carrion from the fallout. If I hear yet another vested pundit shrieking hysterically that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, I'll equally start screaming and hitting things. Anyone who lives in the British Isles knows full well that both of these meteorological phenomena actually occur with regularity, often in - surprise, surprise - a synchr...
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You Know You Know

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I'm still searching for a referencing methodology that suits my scattergun approach to learning and organising the accumulated data that I amass daily; and as I prefer to work mostly in analogue, enhanced by digital aids, I decided I'd go back to basics and give the old heuristic approach a go once again, and throw in my old college favourite, the slightly unhinged collage approach: pulling together references between articles, papers, books and images using photocopies, scissors, Pritt Stick and highlighters, as well as hand-written scribbles, to cross-reference from one to many and back again. As you can imagine, this will have no actual formal structure, but it will include URLs, Dewey Decimal classifications, i.p numbers and just about anything that seems appropriate at any given moment. The idea - vague though it is - is roughly to 'organise' my stuff in such a form as suits me, but which might give others a glimpse into my world of thought at some point in the fut...
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It's Strange, Love

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  I was going to mention that I have a new [in fact, actually very old] strategy for hyperlinking documents in my ever-increasing collection of references and oddments, but more of that tomorrow. To be frank, it's now impossible to gloss over, skirt around or ignore the fact that Donald J. Trump, 'leader' of the free world and the man with the nuclear codes at hand that could most certainly be used to reduce the known world to ashes, is utterly and completely bonkers. Barking. Certifiable. Ready for straitjacket and padded cell. Delusional doesn't even come close as a description of this man: he has literally identified himself, in order of posts on his own social media platform as a) The Pope, b) A King in a fighter jet, and most recently as c) Jesus Christ himself. In days past, pronouncements such as these would have seen him burnt at the stake for heresy, blasphemy, or probably for just plain lunacy. The man is clearly deranged; but the most disturbing thing about h...
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Inherit The Truth

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  Pictured is Jane Hilton's wonderful portrait of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in yesterday's Observer Review. The subject of the photograph is one hundred years old. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen, coming to the UK after the Second World War to settle in north-west London, where she still lives. Without knowledge of context and her life story, we would simply be looking at a beautiful woman and gazing into strong intelligent eyes that speak of myriad, unfathomable depths of personal experience: a century of life and all which that implies and entails. What the image does not speak of is victim-hood or even, perversely, survival of the terrors that she experienced at the hands of the Nazis during her incarceration in the Second World War as a German Jew. Her gaze is defiantly of the present, a person very much in the now, and quietly reminding the world that true horror was once visited on the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and so many others that didn't fit within the st...
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That's Yer Lot...

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I've mentioned before how apparently trivial moments of choice and decision made without much thought can radically alter the course of one's life for the better - or if you're unlucky - for worse. I was thumbing through this week's House & Home section of the Weekend FT whilst half-watching one of those daft property reality TV shows and eating my lunchtime baguette of cheddar and pepperoni - yummy - when I saw a house for sale in the always maddeningly and ludicrously expensive property section of the paper. The place in question was in Bergerac, France [pictured]. The price? €1,250,000, which of course is so far outwith my reach and scope as to be entirely discountable, particularly at my stage of life. But it made me think: that kind of money was of the order that the property programme was talking about for very modestly-sized 1930s houses in Surrey. The French place featured in the FT plonked into the same county would currently fetch at least ten times as m...
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