Observations from a Hill

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...

Stranger. Someone hitherto unknown. An outlier from outwith one's social zone, marking a space of unfamiliarity and unknowingness. Threat or no threat? This is the deep-rooted psychological dichotomy vested in our subconscious by our visceral and ancient instinct for survival. Fight or flight? Argue or parlez? The stranger in fiction and particularly in Hollywood movies is often characterised and read merely as threat or at least someone to be held cautiously at arms-length for fear of some dire personal outcome, narrative permitting. Yes, we've all experienced that nape of the neck feeling with the sound of ever closer footsteps behind us on walking alone on a dark night; waiting for whomever those footfalls belong to pass harmlessly ahead of of us. When I was growing up in the city, this was not an uncommon sensation, and it was only on moving to shall we say, a far less populous environment, that these feelings, though still there, were much attenuated and more manageable. B...

  A couple of things that I read at lunch today kind of gelled into some form of weird gestalt. In this week's New Statesman, the disturbing if unsurprising fact that in 2024, internal documents from Meta '... suggested it was serving fraudulent ads to it's users 15 billion times a day, accounting for more than 10% of [Meta's] global revenue. Press Gazette reported that Meta appeared to be making more from publicising online scams than the entire news media makes from legitimate marketing...' The other piece was in today's Financial Times about Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and PayPal co-founder [the other being Elon Musk] and the man behind Palantir Technologies, and his trip to Rome to lecture on the antichrist, challenging Pope Leo XIV and the papacy itself in the very seat of world Catholicism. As weird a confluence of images as all of this represents, especially in the light of the fact that this is supposed to be the modern era - remember progress and ...

Gratuitous food post tonight: pictured, Rhug Estate organic shoulder of lamb, potatoes and tenderstem broccoli, with a gravy of the pan juices, plain flour roux, deglazed with sauvignon blanc, and let down slightly with the broccoli water. The lamb and potatoes were cooked with lemon, garlic, sea salt and black pepper, with rosemary and fresh bay leaves from the garden: not half bad, if I say so myself. I even made crisps from the potatoes skins, with a hefty dose of chilli and sea salt, as an appetiser. All in all, a reasonable end to a day's dog-sitting duties here at Fairview Heights...