Observations from a Hill

I'm a kind of glass-half-full sort of bloke: an eternal optimist, and a believer in the basic humanity of our species. I'm also a realist with a keen sense of historical context: as a species, aside from great art, music and literature - the good stuff - we've also inflicted great harms on ourselves as humans, and on the home planet we all share, rent-free, from the Universe itself. The ultimate social housing project. Except that socialism has never been good enough for the more selfish and venal amongst us. So we continue to tread a path that will ultimately destroy us all. This is the currently-trending parallel narrative of the 'threat' of A.I to the our species and death by the 'others'. By the the way, it's interesting to note that this dystopian narrative arc includes only us and our creation; Artificial Intelligence. It ignores the vast majority of creation that exponentially outnumbers us here on Earth, and which almost certainly would be better...

  Just a quick one tonight, literally - at least that is in terms of food: what else could I possibly be referring to at my age? - I've been assembling a raft of inspirational recipe ideas to try recently in my on-going grail quest to recreate a good, old-school, British-Indian, West Midlands curry-house Madras at home, and I've parsed out a number of techniques that I think I can assemble into a decent simulacrum of said dish from. I think a few days in the kitchen might suffice to secure my ultimate goal, now so armed. However, in the meantime I would like to offer a word of praise to a homegrown [Welsh] brand of readymade south-asian-food-alikes. Pictured is the wrapper from a particularly decent butter chicken that has formed the last two evening's repast for me. I have to say that I would have passed it by on the shelves of the local Tesco Express were it not for the price reduction. I have to give it its due and say that for the money and convenience it was pretty dam...

To anyone who has studied Fine Art - properly, and at a practical level - there are two species of art-related persons that provoke a righteous animus amongst our number. Critics and dealers. I am struggling to [re?]watch the programme about a lost Leonardo that could [have been?] be worth gazillions of dollars on the market if proven 'genuine'. Two things spring to mind about this: one, was Leonardo da Vinci, as he is widely credited, 'the greatest painter of all time'? Two, does this painting have anything to offer to the history of art, apart from its putative connection to Leonardo? Firstly, Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath - admittedly of genius - and his principal focus was on the natural sciences. His painting, although highly accomplished, was effectively a sideline, and he was as experimental in its physical execution as he was in other areas of his endeavours. One of the reasons his paintings have survived in such small numbers is that he experimented wildly w...

There's design and then there's design: some design is timeless in its purity, some is just of its time and will go through the cycle of good v.s bad, fashionable v.s unfashionable, liked v.s vilified as bad taste. Some things last, others simply are in the moment until their revival at a later date. I'm motivated in this thought by a repeat of a Grand Designs episode tonight of a Thames-side build that caused a lot of ruffled feathers amongst the neighbours of the designers/builders of their new home there. I've no particular beef against the final outcome of the build, but will it endure as design? Probably not, but then again, the 'traditional buildings' surrounding their home are to be fair a motley lot themselves, some even exhibiting between-the-wars mock-Tudor half-timbering, not exactly authentic in itself, and which I can imagine Pevsner or Betjeman in their day coruscating the very existence of in both prose and poetry. What I would criticise about the...

What a news week for shock, horror! stories. And I'm not talking about proper news such as the Middle East or Ukraine, either. On the one hand you've got Reform's £72,000,000 windfall, courtesy of two people with more money than sense, who are both in the business of making even more money out of non-money: ain't Crypto wonderful? And Haaland's wrongly-allowed goal by the VAR in the Manchester derby this weekend. Whilst neither are now undo-able retrospectively, there are to be frank, quite simple solutions available to prevent either from occurring again. On the political donation front, just cap donations and electoral spending for parties across the board: level the playing field, and secondly ensure the rigorous nationality/residency rules to cut out stupid loopholes. As to the footie; fit GPS trackers to all players, officials and the ball, and track the lot in real time; use the data to assess automatically the validity or otherwise of decisions made under thi...

  We've had a very full day here today. We went over to Nantlle Vale to have a look at the old quarries there and walked miles through the ruins and jungle-like tramways and tunnels. To paraphrase our visiting friend Sarah: an Angkor Wat for the Industrial Era; nature reclaiming its own from the spoils and spoil-heaps of the decades of mineral extraction that enriched the land-owning classes in this, our country of Cymru: Tir Ni [Our Land]. The place is at once magical and a tad intimidating: danger lurks everywhere in the precarious slate tips and derelict buildings, and as I've mentioned before, no more so than in the flooded quarry hole of Twll Balast, a toxic waste dump simply waiting to become a major environmental issue, and already a suspect in issues affecting bodies of water adjacent to it. Anyway, that's another subject which demands closer scrutiny and another day on which to address it. We went from there to the Cwellyn Arms at Rhud Ddu for a drink and drove Num...