Observations from a Hill

We live in a crumbling collection of connected cottages housed in a plot of land of around a quarter of an acre - more than sufficient to manage by ourselves - which, at our time of life seem's a tad counter-intuitive, and which raises the question why stick with it, especially as we're situated at the top of a steep hill that gets steeper and steeper toward the very top, where we live. Frankly, that question has never really entered my mind as I am still counting my lucky what-sits that we found and managed to buy this house in the first place, well into middle-age. Why am I so particularly appreciative of the fact of living up here in Fairview Heights? I think to answer that, you have to revisit my childhood and the house that I grew up in and only left at the age of twenty-three. I can't nay-say those twenty-three years in any way, as number 16, Winson Street in Winson Green, Birmingham was, in it's day the legendary locus of 'The Lads' [blog posts passim]; a...

It's been a perfectly foul day here today; in fact it was perfectly foul all last night, as it is perfectly foul now, at gone seven in the evening; the awful winds having given way to torrential rain in their wake. We were dog-sitting today, and even Lady, a Black Lab Collie cross not given to reticence about the weather, decided that curling up and sleeping was by far the best option to take. So, apart from a short morning trip to the council recycling centre to offload more stuff from our over-burdened estate, we've also spent the day closeted in Fairview Heights with little inclination to venture forth. Given this extended break from garden clearance and general property maintenance, I've been starting in on my latest OCD-backed project of trying to organise and catalogue my modest library of a couple of thousand or so books and my accumulation of loosely-filed documents and pulled references; all of which help to feed the maw of this blog, and serve as a pre-internet [m...

Online commerce, de facto, has to operate on a system of mutual trust with a financial locking mechanism to gently enforce the otherwise ad hoc nature of the transaction in question. Fine; and in the current world of eBay, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB et al, this system is largely structurally sound, even given the sometimes labyrinthine procedures it is necessary to endure if something goes wrong in the process. Having said that, close to all transactions processed online essentially work fine. The online payment paradigm of pay, lock, supply, unlock has logical merit given the usually remote nature of transactions thus made, and follows basic database methodology in the process [something the Post Office and their software goons most certainly did not respect, but I digress], ensuring the best continuity of flow of cash and goods to complete the distant transaction. All well and good, and now that the dust of the Wild West of the early days of the likes of eBay - a Dodge City of minor crime ...

As the Crown Prince of fantasy politics calms the markets - why on earth would anyone listen to him in the first place? - by insisting the Iranian War will be over in short order, so nothing further to worry about folks; the rest of us are looking at the price of fuel at the pumps with wonder at the alacrity with which prices rise when the 'cost' of crude rockets in the heat of a Middle-Eastern conflict, and how slowly they return to 'normal' when the reversal happens just as quickly, as the markets wipe their metaphorical brows in relief. Its just like marvelling at the speed at which daily outgoing financial transactions leave one's bank account compared with credits back into the same. Funny that, ain't it? Anyhow, not wishing to dwell on the barely fathomable nature of the larger world of politics and economics this evening, I'd like to offer the observation that we discovered a rather fine eatery that has been staring us in the face for years, unwittin...

I can't imagine what it must be like for the millions of sane, right-thinking Americans living in Trump's Truman Show version of their country right now. I wrote last night of the cohort of mad, bad, old 'strong men', of whom Donald Trump is the 'daddy' and archetype. Mere hours ago, the president of the most powerful nation in the world decided it would be perfectly acceptable to oversee the repatriation of the bodies of six US soldiers returning from their deaths in Iran wearing a white USA baseball cap from his own campaign merchandising store to the ceremony. Even Fox News couldn't countenance being responsible for broadcasting images or footage of this insult, preferring instead to use stock footage from his first term of office. When tasked as to why they did this, however, they asserted that it had been inadvertently done, rather than admit that even they were outraged by their president's comportment on such a solemn occasion, or more likely that...

Even disregarding the immediate human impact [which we can't and shouldn't] of the current wars being waged in the Middle East by what is becoming an axis of the most hawkish of nations in the West, the US and Israel, we can't avoid the wider geopolitical issue of energy supply and what will become in the coming months and possibly for years hence a major factor in economic decline across the globe, most particularly in the West itself. Waging war in the Middle East has always carried with it the intrinsic threat of systemic economic damage: energy supply lines in the form of crude oil are directly impacted by the geographical vice that the Middle East holds over the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. Whilst we are still stupidly over-dependent on fossil fuels arriving at our refineries to supply industry and domestic fuel needs, we are beholden to those countries that surround that narrow sea passage trading normally and without duress of conflict. When that narrow line ...