Observations from a Hill

It's very much a time of Hello, Goodbye, to echo the Beatles' song from 1967's Magical Mystery Tour EP and film; in particular, hello to the incoming Prime Minister in the person of Andy Burnham, which feels positive indeed, as he represents the kind of values that I hold to be true: a balanced world-view that sees further than pure state socialism and into the real world of small business and the High Street, whilst maintaining the core values of socialism itself. There have been many goodbyes to well-known public figures of late, but today's news of the death of Sir Garfield Sobers is the one of note for me. A true cricketing legend and personal hero of mine from the sixties and seventies, he elevated the role of the all-rounder to almost mythical status; along with Kallis, et al, he was one of the very best cricketers of all time, and formed part of the backbone, the very sinew, as captain, of the greatest West Indies test side of all time during the golden era of th...

As I said last night, I'm keeping posts short and sweet due to my current optical challenges - wearing two pairs of stacked spectacles to replace my knackered readers is not exactly conducive to writing much more than a shopping list at best. Just finished watching 1979's 'Zulu Dawn', one of those Cinemascope epics featuring a - literal - cast of thousands in the making. It's interesting to note that we now don't tend to step outside of the narrative bubble whilst considering films of this nature and wonder just how these cinematic scenes of mass hand-to-hand human conflict or whatever else is being depicted were created. We simply now automatically assume the intervention of CGI and don't trouble to marvel at the epic played out before us. It strikes me that our blasé acceptance of this layer of technological fictivity has somehow numbed the wonder that we naturally had when we knew for sure that, despite the fact we were watching a fictional narrative, a l...

Well, it's a glorious evening here in Fairview Heights: I've cooked Sheesh Kebabs on the barbie, welcomed some new guests to the cottage and discovered the delights of Radio 3 Unwind: the perfect accompaniment to an early evening in the garden. However, the footie beckoned at eight o' clock, despite it being England - the country of my birth, not of my heart - playing Argentina for a place in the final of the World Cup. A physical, hard-bastard kind of game thus far, it's pretty evenly pitched and could go either way. Anyhow, I'm currently optically challenged - my optician's appointment is ten days away, and I'm on improvised reading tackle for a while, so I'm keeping these posts as short as possible to save my eyes. O, the joys of old age! Whatever, pictured is a scene taken from my BBQ at the bottom of the garden this evening. Keep you posted on domestic stuff: the football will look after itself...

Just a very quick diary post tonight as I am not really in the mood for much else, having lost a lens from my remaining functioning pair of prescription reading glasses, which means I'm going to have to go to the bloody opticians tomorrow and spend yet more money simply to get around things that are frankly just irritants, like my damned hay fever. Still, I haven't been tested since before the pandemic, so I guess it's about time to go: faits accompli, mes ami: n'est pas? So, pictured is a scene from this evening, chez moi. Keep you posted on the opticals... 

This is not some fanciful rendering of a Japanese landscape, but rather the view from our house in Rachub the other night at around nine-thirty in the evening, at the setting of the sun over Ynys Môn. Or is it?  I must say that the camera/software on my iPhone is truly astounding: to get anything like an image such as this on film would have been practically, though not totally, impossible, in the days of film or nowt photography. Of course, this manner of imaging the world about us begs some questions, which frankly are not always obvious and probably lie more within the ambit of philosophy or psychology than any particular photographic practice per se. Are we depicting exactly what's out there or is it a confection mediated through many layers of software abstraction and rendered likewise via many layers of hardware? Both, of course; and here's the thing. This process of abstraction is exactly parallel to that human process that translates the 'real' onto the flatten...

Well I have to say I feel properly wrung out by the [Gentle]men's final that ended this year's Wimbledon, and I was only couched out and drinking beer watching on TV. Close to being one of the best finals I've seen yet, Yannik Sinner came out of it as a worthy winner after four often brutally athletic and very hard-serving sets: I guess that singles tennis is as close to gladiatorial combat as we get these days, especially at the elite level. Centre Court kind of resembles a genteel amphitheatre, where egos and aspirations are put to the sword to the [usually] polite baying of the mob -  sorry -  spectators. Top stuff and all very entertaining in any case. Which leaves me with a bit of a vacuum where my nightly post should be. It's been another hot day today, although a large chunk of the hottest part of the afternoon was obviously spent in the semi-dark watching the final. Although the temperature outside is cooling nicely with a gentle fresh breeze to help things alon...