Observations from a Hill

My eye was drawn to a piece in today's Financial Times - yes, I'm still buying analogue print media: use it or lose it, folks, the alternatives don't bear thinking about in my book - by Rana Foroohar, on the repetition of history that the current, war-induced global financial panic represents. Stating at the outset that the current conflict has exposed the vulnerability of the U.S at sea, she points out out rightly that the world and particularly Trump's America has been wrong-footed by the scale of the economic domino tumble that ensued from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. How can this be, when we have effectively been rehearsing these same conditions for, in her words, almost the last thirty years? Forgive me if I choke a little on that rather youthful overview of political and economic history, but only thirty years? Oh, how were are destined to think only a generation deep, if we're not careful or mindful enough: Many of us are still alive that remember, a...

OK, despite it being Sunday and even given that I've constructed the usual Sunday roast dinner which would normally precipitate a 'Lazy Sunday Food Post™', I've decided instead that I would share instead a fragment of the progress in my reorganisation of the chaotic clutter that is my material existence. I have been busily constructing shelving and re-jigging my library of books, files and vinyl records, some of which are pictured above; in an attempt to keep up with my ever-increasing consumption of such stuff. I've decided that my vinyl collection will stay pretty much static in its present state from now on; but books, I can't resist adding to my collection weekly [daily?]. It's a thing, but there you are. What is visible here is but a portion of the household library, most of which is randomly spread throughout the house and the cottage next door. I've mentioned it before, but the importance of the presence of books in my life was given to me by the ...

I love treading the shoreline between analogue and digital, that liminal space between human and machine interaction, each informing the other in beneficial positive feedback. It reflects the absolute need for us to engage with the world in as broadly-formed a manner as possible, obviating source bias and echo chamber reinforcement. We were talking earlier over lunch about actual, personal and group knowledge of historical events versus the unfounded suppositions and associations of the more conspiracy-minded of our world. How some of our number are old enough to remember events now having doubt cast upon them by the 'C-Theorists', whose views are propagated digitally and further reinforced, digitally , by reward algorithms via 'social' media, until the resultant epistemological soup resembles less the reality that pre-digitised minds can actually remember first-hand, and more the output of rogue feedback loops [see blog posts passim for more on those ]. The beauty of h...

I've always had a penchant for a Gothic arch. Not for me the homely, stolid stoutness of the Norman, decorated though it might be: the plainness of their semicircular geometry is reassuring but somehow lacks the aesthetic finesse of the more nuanced construction of the Goth. However, given that of the classical era, I would always favour the Greek over Roman architects' fancies, and within that subset, the homely, stolid stoutness of the Doric over the far fussier Ionic or Corinthian; my preferences might seem a little at odds with each other to the casual observer. However, there it is. There is a brutalist subtlety to the plainer Gothic arch forms, such as the Lancet, Equilateral or Obtuse. Having said that I'm also not averse either to the prissier formulations of the Trefoils, the Perpendicular or the vaguely Oriental in nature Ogee;  although, to be frank, the Flat Trefoil simply leaves me, well, a tad flat . Of all of these, given choice however, I would take the Equ...

Time and memory: recurring themes in my scribblings in these pages. One might argue that at my age, this pairing are the natural focus of an old person running out of the former and struggling to retain the latter; but not so. I have been obsessed with their nexus as long as I can remember: the elasticity of perceived time; the encapsulated and frozen time of photographs, time and memory as linear spoken or written narrative: and how these impact on memory itself; remembered, cellular, folk, false or otherwise. We are memory. We are our collected, collective and entwined past; our futures merely pasts-in-waiting: potentialities, possibilities and probabilistic: no more than that until time ensnares them in its flow, encapsulating the now into the past; always one step ahead of us, controlling the arc of our lives. We are born tabula rasa. We grow, learn, experience and become some-thing, some-one: we carve our narratives out of time itself, forming our own past narratives alongside th...

It's been a central question to me in my quest for a better understanding of my family's many and various migrations in and out of Wales and The Marches over the past couple of centuries: how did they move around with such apparent ease, given their backgrounds and circumstances? Practically all of my forebears were from poor stock, insofar as I understand, and most originated in sparsely-populated rural communities, very often with populations as few as a hundred or so individuals. That they ranged as far and wide as they did, whilst frequently returning to their homeland as they often did, has taxed me in  wondering about the mechanics of it all. The other night, the penny dropped. The railways. I'd quite forgotten that this archipelago, including quite isolated rural areas, was once well served with a railway system that allowed easy and often cheap transport to pretty much anywhere else. It goes some considerable way to explaining how - the why is self-evident: the need...