Observations from a Hill

Some institutions die in the full glare of the public eye with fanfares and encomia befitting their stature and importance to society and to the history of mankind; their mark ensured for future generations to commemorate and contemplate. The common man's history seldom leaves such particular remembrance beyond their family, very often in spite of their uncommon achievements. Such is generally the fate of we, the hoi polloi. However, 'tis not such a deep thing as this that I seek to offer in the following regretful, rather rueful, remembrance. I only heard today - entirely peripherally, and God knows how I missed the news in the first place [April of this year] - that Gentlemen's Relish had been discontinued by its current owners. Alas they simply could not see further profit in the product, despite its history. Short-sighted bastards if you ask me. I first discovered this most pungent of fishy accompaniments in 1980 and was blown away by the airlift that it could give to m...

It's been a great couple of wildlife days up here in Fairview Heights. The weather's been a tad cooler and we think that might just have encouraged the fauna to get a bit more active than during the very hot weather of late. The day before yesterday saw a juvenile Red Kite [Y Barcud Coch in Welsh] hovering very low over our patio, being harassed by a couple of gulls. We know that there are Kites nesting a few miles away around Tal Y Bont, and they increasingly stray towards us [very welcome, too, as they're one of our favourite birds] in search of carrion and small mammals. Today, though, has seen an enormous influx of butterflies and bees into the garden as the buddleias [apart from the Black Knight, which is over by now] are in full bloom. And joy of joys, a couple of Hummingbird Hawk Moths feeding right in front of us to top it all off. Bendigedig iawn, iawn...

Growth. What is 'growth', aside from being a gloriously Old English word in nature, with its qualifying noun suffix '...th' added to the verb 'grow'. Well, applied to ourselves and our offspring it can relate to both our physical and mental growth: we start out physically small and grow into adults before we start to shrink again somewhat as we get past a certain age. It relates to a our intellectual growth from childhood, through adolescence into adulthood. Any subsequent shrinkage obviously being subject to any number of factors, if at all: but ultimately one's ceasing will put a stop to that growth, either way. By definition, personal growth is limited by mortality; in itself variable, but generally limited to the low hundred-plus years at its upper bound. As far as shared human knowledge is concerned, the limit to its growth is theoretically bound to the lifespan of our species, which is unknowable, but which is predictable statistically from within that...

I was just watching the opening scenes from the 1987 film RoboCop, and saw the future now, writ large in Technicolor. This film, alongside many other dystopian fictions of the era, actually seem to have been a playbook for capitalism and rogue politics for this first quarter of the twenty-first century, with megalomaniac billionaires foisting crackpot visions of the 'benefits' of blind technological advance, despite little empirical evidence as to its actual, societal efficacy. It is a vision of conquest and control in the service of profit. We used to take this kind of movie with large pinches of salt tempered with small twinges of 'what-if? Looking at the corporate structures and mega-vanity projects currently extant, I think we should have taken more heed of these 'entertaining' narratives with a good deal more perspicacity than we did at the time. We are living in the future we were watching in fiction back then. Robots are a thing. Artificial Intelligence is a ...

OK, here's a thing. I thought I'd mentioned the very shortest of short-form cricket - 'The Hundred' - here before, but I can't find a reference to it on searching. Anyhow, I have changed my opinion of the game in the last few weeks, from one of outright dismissal of the form as a rather crass gimmick when it was first introduced, to now enjoying the game very much indeed. I'll never give up my love for first class cricket and the five-day test format, but I honestly think that they've actually got this one right. And it is bringing new blood into both playing and watching the game of cricket, which was so desperately needed. I don't think the IPL had anywhere the kind of impact here in the UK that it has had elsewhere, and added to the  the fact that first-class cricket is still hidden behind a bloody paywall - a total disgrace in my book - The Hundred strikes me as the democratic alternative form of the game which is inevitably reaching an audience that...

The truly unique thing about the written and printed word is its persistence, resilience and resistance to tampering. Unlike the digital domain, which is subject to failure at all of these points. A book or journal can be damaged - by fire, water, insects, fungi or very often just rodents - granted, but text in the digital realm has an especially tenuous, often evanescent existence by comparison to more corporeal forms of storage. The very language of the text itself is actually key to its resilience. Written or printed language is the direct analogue of the spoken word expressed at one, very slight remove, for storage and later retrieval. In more recent history, analogue audio recordings have provided us with a slightly less removed analogue of human communication. The same applies to film and video. But with the digitisation of either text or speech, film or video, we enter a realm of total abstraction where the medium of storage is essentially disconnected from the content being tra...