Observations from a Hill

  Another diary post tonight, as the weather has finally caught up with the season's turn. Pictured, the far corner of the bottom garden, with the dilapidated old shed that I built with the help of my late friend JC back in 2003, just after we moved into the house. On the right in the foreground is the New Zealand Flax that I wrote about six years ago, during Covid , and not long after I started this blog. The Flax is flourishing, despite the enormous growth of brambles, lilac and nettles that surround it. It now stands eleven or twelve feet tall and looks in decently rude health. It forms a bit of the wilder part of our gardens, and is much visited by bees at the moment. I look forward to the return of the butterfly population after the the unseasonable dip in temperatures of late; they're another regular feature of our mildly unkempt but wildlife-friendly space, alongside the myriad small birds, mammals and amphibians that visit. We keep enough structure, however to please ou...

  Just a diary post tonight, as I've done a lot of driving today and am feeling somewhat jaded as a result. One thing, though is that at last, the temperature has climbed beyond ten degrees - twenty-two Celsius, no less - and the sun is now shining. It actually feels like the season is finally turning toward summer at last. Pictured, the infant Rhododendron by the little Adwy that I built many years ago between the bottom and side gardens, where once, weirdly, stood a curious, low slate barrier; one slab of which became my father-in-law's tombstone for his burial place at Crosscrake Church in The Lake District. He never saw this place as he died soon after we bought it, with his approval and some help, on the strength of some photographs we'd taken of the place when we were bidding to buy it, twenty-odd years ago. I think fondly of that final, if remote connection between us.

I'm a great fan and adherent of the absurd, particularly when the absurd is rooted in logic and arithmetical fact: viz. my ramblings on stupidly large numbers and combinatorial arithmetical series in general. This particular peculiarity I find exceptionally intriguing, however: The Menger Sponge. This extraordinary and most intriguingly feasible of objects exhibits two parallel and opposing arithmetical series that render it thus fascinating. A cube of definite, defined dimensions subdivided in such manner as to lose mass as it gains surface area by the simplest of algorithms, ad infinitum. I'll simply give you the link to the page on The Medium where I discovered this little beauty, as it explains this arithmetical nicety to a tee. Exquisite at once in both its simplicity and complexity, it opens up a universe of possibility of thought... 

  OK - as semi-promised last night, an update on the meal I cooked then, tonight. As you can see above I zsuzsed it up with half a dozen topped whole green chillis of the hot variety, more chopped fresh coriander and half a red sweet pepper in fairly large chunks. I just sweated this lot under cover until it was hot, and ate it with poppadum and plain chapati. Pretty damned good and I have to say, pretty spicy hot: those Kenyan greenies do have somewhat of a kick, especially when eaten as a vegetable! On another note altogether, I decided on a whim to check on the current whereabouts of my old university professor, Andrew Radford, from my brief tenure as a postgrad linguistics student at the then University College of North Wales, Bangor, in 1980/81. Sadly, it appears that he died some two years ago at the age of seventy-nine; the belated news of which actually coming as somewhat of a punch to the gut: not just that I held the man in great respect [he was given the chair at Bangor ...

  Lazy food post tonight: featured above, a kind of Mushroom Jalfrezi thing. There was a pack of mushrooms and some small sweet peppers on the vegetable rack, along with some brown onions and tomatoes. As the mushrooms were starting to sweat, I decided to use them today. My original thought was to try and recreate the fabled Dangerous Mushrooms I knocked off in the nineties, when we lived at Brynbella, as I had jars of both Patak's Vindaloo and Kashmiri Masala pastes in the fridge; the key ingredients for this fierce little invention. However, on opening the jars, I realised they were both definitely dangerous in quite another way, so I decided against that idea and consigned the contents of the jars to the food recycling caddy. Pictured is the alternative in progress: an improvisation, as usual, which turned out half decent in my book. I'll see how the rest of it tastes tomorrow and maybe let you know my opinion of it at twenty-four hours remove. Keep you posted...

Creator, Mind, Self, Chicken, Egg, Lens/Focus; a Universe out of Nothing, Eternity. Which came first, Creator, or the mind of the created? Belief in the [definite article deliberate] Creator presupposes 'mind' and a consciousness capable of creating the concept of belief, the subtext of which is that of faith itself: adherence to the tenets of universal certainties, created of mind itself. The human mind, which in itself would seem to originate at some time in the womb and which produces its first obvious fruit after birth, developing gradually throughout life and maturing to a point, one would expect, of self-understanding and awareness, to perish with us at the end of our being at death. Mind, obviously, is the sole domain of its owner - the 'I', without whom it simply can't, apparently , exist. John Donne's 'No man is an island, entire of itself...' only obtains in respect of one person's place in the corporeal world of society: in terms of mind, ...