Observations from a Hill

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 ...

Well, it's that time of day again and I am totally bereft of ideas for a topic for this post: the news is generally too depressing to even contemplate; in particular the appalling behaviour of Donald Trump's henchmen in chief, Vance and Hegseth; two nastier individuals it would be very hard to find, as if the President himself wasn't bad enough already. However, my iTunes is set to shuffle and Country Pie from the album 'Five Bridges' by The Nice, released in 1970, has just surfaced from the digital soup of nascent music that resides on my laptop's hard drive. Which reminds me that the first time I actually met my wife Jane was that very summer, at a house party in Quinton when I was just fifteen. I'd just bought that album [I still have it and it's still in eminently playable condition]. At that point she was sixteen and we didn't know each other; in fact we didn't get together until over two years later, at the close of 1972. We seem to have go...

A slightly meta post tonight, as it's about the keyboard I'm typing it on: a 60% mechanical key job that I took delivery of this afternoon. It's a very solidly built little unit that stays reassuringly put on the desk surface. As with pretty much all general purpose keyboards these days though, the default modifier key layout is Windows biassed. I've remapped the key's functions, but now need some replacement Mac keycaps to satisfy my OCD and stop me cursing every time I look down at the bottom row of keys. This particular little beauty goes by the name of the Royal Kludge (!) R65: there must be a particularly heinous piece of software in use in China that generates the weirdest English names for products to sell in the West. Still, the sheer surreality of some of these monikers don't half keep one amused, don't y'know? Anyhow, even though it's always a bit strange to migrate back to a mechanical keyboard from the spongy MacBook chiclet affair, I thi...

  Well, here we are again at yet another lazy Sunday afternoon gratuitous food post. Pictured, our supper of pan-fried Welsh lamb cutlets, minted new potatoes and Greek salad. All very nice, I thank you: the lamb was lovely [and there's nowt but bone left on our post-prandial plates as evidence to the fact]; but O! how expensive has our national meat become. Thirty-four pounds a kilo! Each of these cutlets prices out at £3.12p apiece. I'll leave the older of you to ponder on this little factoid: when we did our first lamb spit roast down in Brynbella [I know it was thirty-odd years ago now], we bought a whole carcass for exactly that same amount of money: thirty-four quid. And as it was around thirty-five pounds in weight, that puts the per-kilo price then at around two quid. I'm not one to champion stupidly cheap, factory-farmed food or cost-cutting when it comes to farming, but it does act as a real wake-up call as to where our priorities lie in this world, with people be...

News in The Guardian today about the charity the British Heart Foundation, which is reported to be shedding 150 of its shops across the UK as its net profits crashed out from £18.8m to £3.6m in the 2024-25 financial year. They blame an increasingly hostile retail environment and competition from online retailing for the losses and will be shedding hundreds of staff and volunteers in the proposed reshuffle. Never mind the fact that its CEO, Charmaine Griffiths, was awarded a £35,000 pay rise , more than most workers in the UK actually earn in a year; taking her remuneration to £268,239 for this current financial year or the fact that the charity's wage and pension bill amounted to £136m last year, with 180 of its staff being paid £60,000 or more per year. This picture of highly paid senior executives is played out across the entire charity sector in the UK. If these people were as good at their jobs as their salaries would appear to indicate, surely they would have predicted both th...