Observations from a Hill

  Pictured, the recently-completed and now publicly open Pont Sarnau across Afon Ogwen between the rugby club and Tanysgafell. The old bridge had become a precarious affair and was closed down some time ago. All of the pathways heading up to the back road between Braichmelyn and the village of Tregarth have been similarly upgraded and the place is now a fine and pleasant place to walk again. It now forms part of Lôn Las Ogwen, a foot and cycle path that now stretches from Nant Ffrancon right down into Bangor and Penrhyn Quay. We're starting to feel the benefits of funds raised as a result of the slate valleys' recent elevation to a World Heritage Site [not before bloody time, either], and the new bridge and pathways are just one small part of a growing renewal in recognition of the historical importance of the area to the world. However, as always, something conspired to sour our circular walk to see the new structure today. We parked the car just behind our old house at Brynbe...

I am, to put it mildly, knackered tonight, after a day spent with Jane preparing and eating this evening's meal with the boys, over here from their fastness on Ynys Môn for a Sunday visit.  This morning, I attacked the smaller holly tree afresh with probably too much gusto, after having woken this morning from the kind of mad dreaming that always goes with having dropped back off to sleep after dawn: in this case three times in succession. This always leaves me feeling wiped out on rising, and usually the only way to shake the feeling off is to get outside and do something real. Nevertheless, the cumulative effects of the foregoing added to the pollen being very high up here today, have left me in a state of itchy torpor with few thoughts to my name and still less inclination to write about them. Anyhow, beneath all the clamour over the world's first trillionaire, huge data centres, Japanese nuclear reactors, tens of thousands of satellites cluttering up our near-earth orbit s...

The principal defining characteristic of the human race is natural language, and the diversity of its languages defines the manifest variety of human culture. Across time, however, and particularly during the last half of the twentieth century and into the present one, English has experienced somewhat of an explosion in currency across the globe, mostly through fast moving changes in geo-politics driven principally through global trade and networking via the internet. This is both good - more people can communicate through the common knowledge of one language than ever before - and bad, as minority language after minority language withers and dies along with their speakers, through lack of use and inherently limited dissemination. Most monoglot English speakers would simply say 'so what?'; these are dying languages anyway: why preserve the redundant?'. Which makes about as much sense as asking what's the point of art, literature and culture in general.  The thing that m...

Having so many visitors from all around the world here, one hears accented English of all types and flavours. I often mull over this question of accent, as I'm always reminded of a chap that I knew for a while some forty-some years ago, with whom I worked in the building trade locally. His name was Ian Dickson, and he was educated at a public-school, his parents being wealthy. He spoke in that approximation of an 'unaccented' Standard English commonly referred to as RP; 'Received Pronunciation': the universally and traditionally accepted lingua-phone of the privileged and educated classes. Except that neither linguistically nor sociologically does this make any real sense. Some of those that speak in RP might consider themselves to exist as part of a long and storied familial lineage spanning many decades or centuries, passed down to them ultimately, in many cases, by some divine right of succession. How strange that they choose to converse in a manner not passed do...

You might remember the film "The Flight of The Phoenix" from 1965 - it's been repeated many times on terrestrial TV and is readily available via streaming - and the story was retold in the 2004 remake, "Flight of The Phoenix". For those that don't know the story, its basic premise is that a cargo plane, carrying a small number of passengers from Jaghbub to Benghazi, in Libya, crash lands in the Sahara desert. Anyhow, the central plot line is the building of an aeroplane upon which to escape back to civilisation from the remaining viable pieces of their original, now severely damaged craft. The principal architect of this plan is a German aeronautical engineer,  who comes up with a scheme and plans for a bastardised aircraft based on the one remaining engine and various fragments of wing and airframe. Anyway, one of the dramatic swings of the plot is when the rest of those stranded realise that the German engineer was a model aircraft designer, at which poin...

The last signed and dated piece of artwork I made was in 1989, part of a series of pieces centred around the singer Hank Williams. Most of the pieces are lost, but the triptych of Hanks is still with me, alongside a number of screen prints that never got framed nor saw the light of day, let alone got hung. I did start painting again for a while around ten or so years ago, but the thread of inspiration dried up as quickly as it had arrived. I decided the other day that enough was enough: I'd start working again, and the above will be the genesis of some new series of paintings. As you can see, the base for this will be small: a six-by-six inch canvas [still in its shrink-wrap here], held by the miniature oak studio easel that my dad made many years ago to hold my parents' wedding album on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary. The canvas is one that Ray Keats left behind when she died a couple of years ago; I have several now to get me started. I've determined to ...