Observations from a Hill

If I hear yet another Tory quack on about issuing new licences for new North Sea Gas exploration as the panacea for our energy woes, or some twonk spouting utter guff about deploying new nuclear developments to stem the tide of our increasing energy insecurity, I'll scream and start hitting things. There is one simple reality behind these follies: too, late, too damaging, too expensive. The only possible beneficiaries from any such developments are the corporates who are vested in these obsolescent technologies, their shareholders, and the speculator vultures who constantly circle the markets looking for carrion from the fallout. If I hear yet another vested pundit shrieking hysterically that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, I'll equally start screaming and hitting things. Anyone who lives in the British Isles knows full well that both of these meteorological phenomena actually occur with regularity, often in - surprise, surprise - a synchr...

I'm still searching for a referencing methodology that suits my scattergun approach to learning and organising the accumulated data that I amass daily; and as I prefer to work mostly in analogue, enhanced by digital aids, I decided I'd go back to basics and give the old heuristic approach a go once again, and throw in my old college favourite, the slightly unhinged collage approach: pulling together references between articles, papers, books and images using photocopies, scissors, Pritt Stick and highlighters, as well as hand-written scribbles, to cross-reference from one to many and back again. As you can imagine, this will have no actual formal structure, but it will include URLs, Dewey Decimal classifications, i.p numbers and just about anything that seems appropriate at any given moment. The idea - vague though it is - is roughly to 'organise' my stuff in such a form as suits me, but which might give others a glimpse into my world of thought at some point in the fut...

  I was going to mention that I have a new [in fact, actually very old] strategy for hyperlinking documents in my ever-increasing collection of references and oddments, but more of that tomorrow. To be frank, it's now impossible to gloss over, skirt around or ignore the fact that Donald J. Trump, 'leader' of the free world and the man with the nuclear codes at hand that could most certainly be used to reduce the known world to ashes, is utterly and completely bonkers. Barking. Certifiable. Ready for straitjacket and padded cell. Delusional doesn't even come close as a description of this man: he has literally identified himself, in order of posts on his own social media platform as a) The Pope, b) A King in a fighter jet, and most recently as c) Jesus Christ himself. In days past, pronouncements such as these would have seen him burnt at the stake for heresy, blasphemy, or probably for just plain lunacy. The man is clearly deranged; but the most disturbing thing about h...

  Pictured is Jane Hilton's wonderful portrait of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in yesterday's Observer Review. The subject of the photograph is one hundred years old. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen, coming to the UK after the Second World War to settle in north-west London, where she still lives. Without knowledge of context and her life story, we would simply be looking at a beautiful woman and gazing into strong intelligent eyes that speak of myriad, unfathomable depths of personal experience: a century of life and all which that implies and entails. What the image does not speak of is victim-hood or even, perversely, survival of the terrors that she experienced at the hands of the Nazis during her incarceration in the Second World War as a German Jew. Her gaze is defiantly of the present, a person very much in the now, and quietly reminding the world that true horror was once visited on the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and so many others that didn't fit within the st...

I've mentioned before how apparently trivial moments of choice and decision made without much thought can radically alter the course of one's life for the better - or if you're unlucky - for worse. I was thumbing through this week's House & Home section of the Weekend FT whilst half-watching one of those daft property reality TV shows and eating my lunchtime baguette of cheddar and pepperoni - yummy - when I saw a house for sale in the always maddeningly and ludicrously expensive property section of the paper. The place in question was in Bergerac, France [pictured]. The price? €1,250,000, which of course is so far outwith my reach and scope as to be entirely discountable, particularly at my stage of life. But it made me think: that kind of money was of the order that the property programme was talking about for very modestly-sized 1930s houses in Surrey. The French place featured in the FT plonked into the same county would currently fetch at least ten times as m...

As the weather beats an unseasonal tattoo of hail and sleet against my window, dragging us unceremoniously back into the depths of winter even as the bluebells are starting to bloom, I've managed a degree of internal warming due to the pictured pot of an experimental mushroom curry I made this evening. I started out, as usual, following someone else's recipe path and then, as always, found a virtual fork in the road to follow instead. I didn't hold out much hope for this one, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at the lightness of the result, and pleased at the extra kick I'd given it with some whole fresh green chillis. All in all, not half bad for a kitchen oddments special. I've just opened a bottle of cheap claret, and I might just hazard a bowl of tobacco before I settle in for the evening...