Observations from a Hill

Once again, we approach All Hallow's Eve; and you might say tonight is All Hallow's Eve Eve. Whatever. If I never see another bloody carved pumpkin again, I don't think I'll be sorely aggrieved at the loss: Halloween was never part of my cultural upbringing in any case. As to the spook-fest commercial jamboree that now infests these isles on an annual basis, all I can say is, frankly, bollocks to it all, and I don't mean that in an Ebenezer Scrooge kind of way. But then I'm not a person that grew up in an era when this relatively new invention and 'tradition' was extant. Halloween to us was not any particular thing: as children, we were getting ourselves tooled up for Bonfire Night at this end of October and looking forward to Christmas beyond that little milestone. I'm not going to humbug the whole thing, but in truth one can only be sceptical about the pecuniary motivations that fuel these re-invented traditions: children have long been targeted by...

OK, budget week here in Blighty: what do I make of it? Well, I certainly didn't think it was as bad - read indifferent - as most of the pundits who immediately piled in to characterise it as a smudget. The reason I say it was not bad is that we all know from past experience that Labour governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't; and usually inherit a totally poisoned chalice after the exit of the previous Tory government. Blair got a relatively easy ride of it, riding an economic uptick and following a bland Tory outing within the relative safety of an EU cocoon. This time around, Labour have faced the legacy of fourteen years of complete Tory ineptitude, greed, lobbyist self-interest and frankly utter bloody lunacy, culminating in the most febrile half decade in world politics since the Cold War. To say that the current government has little fabric to work with is understatement on a grandiose scale: they have fuck-all resources to work with in the economic vac...

OK - pictured is a rather poor self-portrait I painted in 1987, sat on our landing floor - randomly for the purposes of this post - which we've recently freed from the hegemony [the floor that is] of the hideous inherited fitted carpets that we've put up with for the last twenty-odd years. My point in this juxtaposition of disparates is that of uncovering the past. In the case of the picture, it is one of the few remaining pieces of my work I have, and certainly not a piece I would exhibit, flawed as it is [and not in a good way]. It was an attempt to emulate historical oil technique - glazing - in modern acrylic paints, and was not entirely successful, although I still think the basic likeness was passable to this day. In the case of the floorboards, the one on which the picture lies is a nineteenth century nine-inch board that runs the complete depth of the house, examples of which are a joy to find. We'll repaint the boards over the next few weeks in perhaps a dark blue,...

We were watching a film this afternoon that we were aware of but which neither of us had seen, despite it being twenty years old now: 'Children of Men', a dystopian view of a world of universal human infertility set in the UK of 2027. The riots and violent state oppression, the subtext of refugee migration; the destruction of property outside of the gated community occupied by the protected elite and the rule of martial law seemed to us as a an entirely plausible but a [maybe not too] distant reality here in the UK; but by coincidence, this afternoon I had taken delivery of this month's New Internationalist, which served to remind us that these violent dystopian situations are the norm for millions of people around the globe. Ukraine, Syria, Sudan, Gaza, and so many more countries and regions, whose people are estranged from normality by the violence and war imposed on them either by outside forces or by their own people for whatever twisted purpose they see fit. And the re...

Following on from my recent vaguely philosophical musings on time, I find myself thinking about metrical time, rather than the more general, temporal sort. Rhythm, and in particular, musical rhythm. What started this chain of thought was watching a short YouTube by a creator I'd not come across before - he currently has only a relative handful of subscribers - playing the bass alongside a Jack Bruce song, allowing the bass part to stand out from the rest of the piece whilst leaving enough context for the bass line to make sense musically, rather than hearing it in isolation. It was a later Bruce composition that I'd not heard before, which meant I was hearing 'his' playing with fresh ears, as opposed to simply nodding along to and enjoying a familiar gestalt. What I realised for the first time in nearly sixty years of being a Jack Bruce fan, was that he never really stopped being the upright bass jazz player that he started out as. I'll probably revisit his loudest ...

Well, here we are again at the turn of yet another Autumn Equinox, with its attendant mild jet-lag and confuzzlement in tow. I like the equinoxes more than I like the solstices as they seem more sudden in the change they bring [and I'm not referring to the artifice of British or anybody else's Summertime constructs], with a sharper dip into Winter and the subsequent shout of Spring. The equinoxes feel physical, with the solstices being broader signposts to the changing seasons. Again this modus mentis of mine harks back to a post I made some time ago about one's internal visualisation of time and its passage as a virtual physical space; I've forgotten when I posted it and I've just failed to come up with the link to that post in these pages, despite using all the obvious search terms, but it's the one about my internal time-spiral visualisation, which I hasten to add is a known psychological phenomenon - cf the post I can't find - although everyone that vis...