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Asleep At The Helm

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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...
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Be Careful What You Wish For...

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There used to be an adage during the Cold War: ' ...if you hear the four-minute warning, put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye ...' On so many fronts at the moment we are hearing but not heeding four minute warnings every day of our lives. We've had a decade-plus of complete political inanity and insanity, with the Tories going full-tilt lemming over a cliff of their own making, and leaving the country in a post-Brexit swamp of rising prices and with a complete lack of our previously hard-earned freedom of movement between us and own nearest neighbours foisted upon us. Then they showed themselves to be the libertarian self-interested toss-pots we always knew them to be during the global disaster that was Covid, with so many of their number exploiting the gaping holes in the procurement process at our - great - expense; is it any wonder that the current Labour government is under siege at the moment, trying against all odds to mop up this mess? Unfortun...
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Still Boho After All These Years...

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Passing through the living room on my way upstairs to the bathroom and back this evening I caught a phrase emanating from a ten-year-old episode of Location, Location, Location: '...the bohemian area of King's Heath [Birmingham, UK]...'. They were viewing a flat in one of those glorious three-storey Victorian terraces that infest the area and which are firmly lodged in my memory and very much a feature of my youth. As I think I've mentioned before in these pages, there were two particular houses there that were multi-occupancy centres of just that King's Heath bohemia. To this day, over fifty years ago, we still count one of the residents of this hive of outré living as a very long-standing friend. Again, I've mentioned before about the 'Gerlan Bohemia' that accreted about us when we moved to Gerlan, Bethesda, and hooked up again with John, who had by then gravitated to North Wales to study archaeology at Bangor. We were visiting an old schoolfriend of m...
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No-Thing, No Limits

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In 1980, John Redhead, a then neighbour of ours in Bethesda, North Wales, whom we knew as an artist and little more, did the first ascent of the UKs first E7 rock route on North Stack, Ynys Môn: "The Bells, The Bells". As I didn't return to climbing until the mid-eighties and didn't engage with the climbing media, I was blissfully unaware of this at the time. By the time I got back into climbing, after a gap of around twenty years, I was approaching my thirties and had started to engage again with what the scene had mutated into in the interim, and learned that my now former neighbour was some kind of maverick legend in the game, and the route deemed, essentially, a potential death sentence to all but the most talented and fearless of climbers. In fact, it was a full six years before a successful second ascent of thing, and in all to date there have been, I think, only ten in the last forty -six years. What prompted my thinking about this was that I have been followin...
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Number, Please!

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Numbers, numbers, numbers. So many numbers. When we were growing up as teenagers and well into our adulthood, it was the norm to have an internal mental stash of telephone numbers - family, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends; and entering the world of work, numbers related to your job. Most of us carried around in our heads tens or hundreds of the damned things, all of which could be recalled at will, rarely having to resort to a book for a reminder. How many people these days know their number? I know mine because I've had the same network connection since 2003, in the pre-smartphone era, and I still use my iPhone as a telephone , from time to time, a practice which looked as if it might be on the wane at one time, with a preponderance of users sticking to text and social media alone to 'communicate' with each other. Before 1983, there was no generally used device that could be called a 'mobile phone'; and it was not until the mid-1990s until they entered more gen...
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There But For The Grace of God?

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I was very interested to read in the Weekend FT Arts of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's painting in Florence running currently. Not housed and concentrated in a single exhibition space, but distributed throughout three venues: the Palazzo Strozzi, the  Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana  and the Museo Di San Marco. I would dearly love to see these pictures in this latter context [above] as I'm of the opinion that of all twentieth century artists, Rothko is the most deeply and humanly spiritual of painters, and whose works sit most naturally alongside those of the great Italian quattrocento painters such as Fra Angelico. Rothko had the ability in his later paintings to bring the sublime into secular life in a way that few others have achieved. Religious belief isn't the central point of his work, much as I believe that religion, oddly, isn't a prerequisite for the spiritual experience of introspection in religious buildings either great or humble. Zen is zen, after all, and t...
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Unsung Hero

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I was just watching an interesting YouTube about the now long-retired British low-level strike aircraft, the Blackburn [later Hawker-Siddeley] Buccaneer, and its remarkable ability to fly at over 500 knots at sea level, as low as twenty feet. The video was a mixture of ancient film footage larded with AI slop [including the inevitable accompanying piss-poor machine-generated narration that infests just about everything online these days]. I won't mention the 'content' creator, but would simply point you to this video instead for a taster of what this aircraft could do. Obviously, as this was flown in domestic airspace in peacetime, it's not at a particularly high airspeed; but under the combat conditions it was designed for, it could routinely fly under ground radar and fighter cover at high speed, riding its own shockwave, which gave it an unusually high degree of natural stability in such a dangerous flight mode. I once had the privilege of seeing one of these things...
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