Observations from a Hill

OK - pictured is tonight's example of the great British culinary standby: the leftovers fry-up. The lamb chops and spuds are from yesterday's early supper with the boys and Irene, fried up with streaky bacon, and served with that most exotic of sauces, HP. After yesterday's marathon of food prep and cooking, today's supper was always going to be a bit of a throwaway, hence the above; however, despite the fact that the lamb chops really didn't survive the second cooking [no surprise there], the real star, as always, was the bacon. I don't eat it overly often and to me it's a treat rather than a staple, and so I really don't care if the bacon I eat from time to time is stuffed full of nitrates. Intuitively I know that slight exposure to such stuff does no real harm; but I realise in retrospect that my maternal grandfather's long-standing gastric problems - which led ultimately to his demise fifty years ago - were probably due in large part to his daily...

We had the the boys and Irene over for afternoon supper to celebrate Irene's upcoming birthday this week, and some of the wide-ranging conversation [as is our usual wont] and the variety of music we were listening to made me think about our collective family relationship with, and attitude to, the utterly dysfunctional world we inhabit alongside the rest of humanity. We as a family, by whatever means or happenstance, have always found our many and various paths in life without straying from some pretty core values, either politically or philosophically; religion not usually scoring very highly on our need-to-address board.  We try to be fair and kind where appropriate; fierce and excoriating of injustices committed by others, and as generous as personal limitations permit with those less fortunate. Our natural instinct is toward basic decency, but eschewing dogma and orthodoxy. I truly believe that this is the natural mindset of the vast majority of the human race. We are all, afte...

I was watching a YouTube of some old climbing footage this afternoon - in particular of a climber called Jimmy Jewell in a 1980s documentary by Alun Hughes - who was most well known for his solo climbing [unroped to the uninitiated] exploits. I never knew Jewell but I did know at least a couple of his close acquaintances from the era. Jimmy died soloing Poor Man's Peuterey, at Tremadoc in North Wales: a relatively easy [graded severe] route for him. What made me think watching the film though, was that, even up until relatively recently, getting decent, editable footage of climbs has not been straightforward.  The interest in filming climbing for a more general audience really only dates back to the 1960s, in particular with the second ascent of The Old Man of Hoy by three parties of climbers. The first, repeating their first ascent of the previous year by their original route; and the second and third opening up two new lines of ascent. The original 1966 party was Chris Bonington,...

My repast tonight: it might not look much, and my presentation falls well short of any known benchmark in the food photography department, but trust me, this is one of the tastiest little treats I know of. Devilled sardines on toast, courtesy of one Fred Whowell, probably now late of this parish: a student dish that he carried with him probably from boarding-school days, wherever he was from or educated; he had a faint northern accent but was decidedly quite posh. Essentially, one takes a tin of sardines in tomato sauce, mashes them up in a bowl with chilli powder, spreads the mixture on toast - it has to be white sliced toast, well buttered - and grills the whole shebang under a hot flame. Tonight's variant on this much personally employed theme involved mixing a good teaspoon of Encona Carolina Reaper sauce with the fish before grilling, then garnishing the finished result with a sprinkling of  Kashmiri Chilli powder. And very good it was too, and to be frank very healthy. Oh, a...

Anyone who has read these pages for any length of time will know that whilst I was a very early adopter of digital technologies, I also cleave to the analogue world that we seem to be leaving behind us at an ever increasing clip. All well and good - I mentioned last night that the invention of the smartphone has pretty much democratised the possession of enormously powerful tech throughout a large part of the globe - when it's all working smoothly and seamlessly, which to be fair it achieves ninety-odd percent of the time. When it does go wrong, however, which it does, this huge basket of metaphorical eggs we carry in our pockets and rely on for just about everything in modern life, suddenly turns into an unmade omelette without pan or flame to cook it. Reliance on digital-only living is precarious and depends on huge interconnected support structures, power supplies and networks simply to function. It is not a chain that can be broken but a huge net easily shredded given the right...

It's a strange thing, but our understanding of and our relationship to computers has passed from one of distant observation in the sixties and seventies: as in the film "Billion Dollar Brain"; via vague familiarity during the eighties, with a mainly business-based association through work and maybe youthful hobbyist tinkering, to now, when computing has pretty much been subsumed by the 'White Goods' ethos, particularly in the realm of the smartphone, which most users would never consider in the same light as a 'computer'. Despite this lack of regard for the depth and complexity or the rich history of the technology that most folks simply and naively take as 'my internet, my socials, my camera', the fact is that current smartphones have more processing power than the first supercomputers, developed in the 1970s, costing the equivalent of billions of dollars, affordable only by governments and the military. Today's iPhone, costing around a grand,...