Observations from a Hill

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...

OK - yet another throwaway food post, as I'm completely fashed and this laptop seems to want to keel over at any moment. Pictured is tonight's pork and potato sort of Goan curry. I was going to be creative and do something from scratch, but laziness kicked in and I bought one of those semi-fancy curry kits. Now I have to say that the basic premise of these particular kits is pretty sound: a dry masala to temper in the oil or ghee to produce the bedrock flavours; a base sauce in which to flavour the meat and/or vegetables and a final sauce to complete the cooking with. The issue I've always had with these kits is the instructions, which parallels most of the issues I've had with South Asian cookbook recipes aimed at the British [non-Asian] cook: timings. They, of a piece, try to conflate cooking times to suit a modern, fast-food attitude to producing food. In the case of South Asian food, for the most part, this is almost always a recipe for raw-tasting and frankly disa...

  I was watching a really wonderful documentary earlier, on YouTube, from a series of TV programmes titled 'Parts Unknown' by Anthony Bourdain, which culminates in his eating at the table of Paul Bocuse, in the latter's hunting lodge after they had spent the day duck-hunting for the pot. Bocuse was one of France's fêted Chefs de Cuisine, and a culinary hero of Bourdain's personally. It's a wonderful programme overall, but the final, informal setting is one of plain good cooking and eating in the company of friends: good food, good wine and good company. Over the last half century I've spent many an hour similarly, and cooked and eaten thousands of such meals in good company, accompanied by much quaffing of drink. Anyway, what did I cook for myself this evening, as I'm flying solo for a few days? The above pictured cheese and streaky bacon toastie with HP Sauce. Not quite wild duck spit-roast over an open fire, but a damn sight easier to prepare and not ...

The world is arguably, and some of us would assert demonstrably, in the most perilous state that it has been since mankind evolved. Hyperbole? I really don't think so: climate change is now accelerating at a pace predicted by climatologists just a few years ago; a rate of change so fast that extreme weather events normally restricted to Africa and the Indian subcontinent are now commonplace across northern Europe. This year has seen catastrophic wildfires taking hold across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and the UK. Drought has been declared similarly widely across the continent, making fighting these fires increasingly difficult. Is there any significant rainfall in the offing for us? Not as far as the meteorologists can foresee: we're looking at similar conditions for the next month or so at least. On the international politics front, how many wars are being waged at present and for what reasons? The Middle East, Ukraine, what next? And what will the antagonists party to and in...