Observations from a Hill

It's Sunday and gratuitous food post time! Being much exercised by Wimbledon at the moment, and what with Leo's graduation tomorrow and guests arriving throughout the next ten days, I feel at least some way justified in this rather meagre and mundane offering tonight. Pictured is a kind of mongrel Sunday roast, involving sumac roasted poussin, olive oil roasted potatoes, boiled tender-stem broccoli and a fairly standard gravy. I thought there might be a taste clash between the Middle-Eastern and British flavours, but I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked pretty harmoniously as a piece. There you go. Back to the tennis and my wine...

A question that seems often to be asked, no matter the context, is where is the next big idea coming from? It's such a commonplace question that no-one actually questions the question itself. What exactly is a big idea, anyway? The history of the financial markets is littered with the debris of failed 'big ideas', from the South Sea Bubble to the dot.com boom and bust, and one presumes onward to the inevitable collapse of the hyperventilating AI scrimmage currently taxing the tiny minds of market traders worldwide. No, these are not only not big ideas, they are not really ideas at all; merely fashions posing as ideas: trends from which to make a fast buck before getting out and onto the the next gravy train. Snake oil, no more, no less. The true reality is that really big and significant ideas emanate from small but incisive insights, often in the unguarded moments of unfocussed thought that we usually characterise as daydreaming: these days much-derided as un-productive t...

Pictured: today's further progress in taming and shaping [which I started a few weeks ago] of the smaller holly tree that stands guard at the bottom right corner of our bottom garden. The intention was to denude the thing of its lower branches and their foliage and to leave a tall, sculptural 'lollipop' that will still provide a singing platform for blackbirds [blog posts passim] whilst allowing us to see at least some of the view out west towards the boy's home on the horizon on Ynys Môn. So far, so good, and the work hasn't been too difficult, as holly is easily thinned out from near ground level: my ladders having been only really used as steps for the most part. I've just got to take out the last of the lower straggly bits and finish taking the fresh sprouts of new foliage from the lower trunks before they get established. Holly really is one of the great survivors of the plant world: it's practically indestructible and returns from even the most brutal ...

My interest was piqued this afternoon by a post on Medium regarding the number nine. Now the content on Medium varies from the rigorous to the fantastical, depending on how the algorithm interprets the direction in which you want to go based on your reading habits. The stuff I get back I try and filter before actually reading a post, to at least partially game the system as much in my favour as possible, and avoiding the more hysterical crap that can appear in your inbox if you're not careful. What interested me was not the old arithmetical party game of multiplying any number by nine and adding the digits of the product together sequentially until the number is reduced to a single digit and - ta-da! - revealing the number nine; intriguing though that particular numerical phenomenon happens to be. Rather, the author of the post relates that her birth year similarly reduced by addition of individual digits similarly results in a result of nine, both in the Gregorian calendar we use ...

I referenced my dad [yet again] in last night's post, and something turned up today that made think of the old man with psychological reference to myself. Anyone who knows me knows that I ain't the tidiest person when it comes to most things, despite my reverence for, for instance, library catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System, to name but one small area of interest to me. When it comes to my own personal spaces; my desks, workshop, etc., I tend to accumulate stuff until it becomes uncomfortable to work in the space: at which time I will clear up, re-organise and move on, probably to frustratingly lose track of some momentarily important thing or another. With other things, though, I am somewhat OCD. Anyway, I drove up to the Stretton Fox to pick Jane up today on return from her visiting family in Carnforth; a trip I do many times a year at the moment. The Fox is conveniently halfway for a rendezvous and is a pleasant watering hole for an hour's break and a welcome pint o...

  When I was growing up, dad used to spend occasional time perusing his rather old - even then - Chamber's Etymological Dictionary, originally his sister Margaret's; and which I inherited after he died in 2012. I've since passed the book to my son, as seems appropriate, given that he, like his grandfather and me, is himself a wordsmith fascinated by the eccentricities of language, given to twisting words and sentences at will. I remember fondly my father's love of wordplay for comic effect; a characteristic affectation of his, like so many other, that I have absorbed, along with a growing physical resemblance to the old man, into my being. As a teenager, I started to take on board the desire for and acquisition of books: marshalling words, concepts and ideas into serried rows of paperbacks and the occasional hardback on shelf after shelf, in house after house. None are fancy tomes worthy of bibliophile attention, but all are collected for their content: the true purpose...