Observations from a Hill

All languages have words that in a single lexical entity embody a whole philosophical idea untranslatable directly to other languages. Welsh, for instance has the word hiraeth to describe a whole raft of emotions that accompany separation from one's homeland. French has ennui to embody languor and listlessness born of a perceived existential loss of purpose. Then there is the wonderful German word  schadenfreude: the taking of pleasure at witnessing someone else's discomfort or misfortune. Not nice, one might argue, but sometimes one just can't help it. I think pretty much all right thinking people must currently be experiencing a profound schadenfreude over the recent castration of the Trump hegemony in the mid-terms: many thousands or millions of his erstwhile supporters are probably this weekend feeling a slight twinge of it at least. But in this weekend's FT, there is a piece of news that really spikes my schadenfreude. DeBeers Diamonds has it would seem, shot its...

OK - so I was watching a discussion on some political TV channel - BBC Politics, I think - about the Russell Brand case. Dame Helena Kennedy KC, a person for whom I have a good deal of respect, made a comment about Brand that made me wince as soon as she uttered the words, and I paraphrase: '... he's intelligent but he's an autodidact...'. This was meant I think to explain Brand's egotistical need to impress and impose his assumed superiority over others. Yes, the man exhibits a high degree of narcissism and of control of others through his charismatic persona, fame and wealth. But I fundamentally disagree with the notion that being an autodidact somehow de facto renders a person liable to such inferiority-based narcissistic delusion and controlling behaviour, which I took Kennedy's comment to imply. Brand, like so many of his kind, operate by guile and native intelligence in the service of their desires; but being self-taught is not a necessary concomitant of t...

... starts with but a single step... I've waited for the initial dust to settle and the reality check to kick in to prove the mid-term results were not just a fever dream. It would seem they're not, and the world can once again breathe after what seems a lifetime of mayhem and stone-cold idiocy in world politics. With the silencing - almost - of the UK Tory party and Trump - almost - in the States, we can start to think about rebuilding some trust in the political process and begin redefining how economies can work to the benefit of the people they're actually supposed to be for and about: the sustenance of the majority of us. The fact that Trump's geo-politics have forced the world economy into possibly its most unstable state, not just since the last global neoliberal disaster, but since the Wall Street Crash and Great Depression, goes I think, without saying. His second term has been an unmitigated disaster for the world at large, and the USA most pointedly and perti...

I was watching an episode of 'The Rest is Science' on YouTube this afternoon where they were playing a game of guess the origin of this or that noise from a selection of almost abstract and quite spooky-sounding samples. As one might imagine, given the click-bait-y style of this little scientific parlour game, the origins of these noises were all from normal and explicable sources, either natural or man-made in origin, and spanning some 150 years or so in their making. Various whale sounds - not the more familiar ones - icebergs calving and glaciers grinding the earth below the sea made up the bulk of the samples reviewed, but the earliest recording was that which surfaced a few years ago [2008] of the earliest known mechanical recording of a human voice, dating to 1860, of someone born in 1817: Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville, who captured his own singing voice in a waveform drawn on paper by his own invention, the Phonautograph, which he built and was patented in 1857. His...

I've pondered time and human memory much in these pages over the last five-and-a-half years of writing these daily scribbles; as much as a process of personal, philosophical introspection as anything else. As far as conclusions regarding the nature of either outside my immediate sphere of consciousness go, I have none. Life and my memory of what is past to me is still as mysterious as ever, which I guess in my philosophy is just how it should be: there is no goal to attain, so the striving for such is de facto negated and meaningless in itself. I pace [if indeed that's the right word or concept - I suspect not] my existence as an evolving series of life experiences: each phase of my past history and possible futures marked separately in my imagination as individual 'lives'. The overarching question that puzzles me is 'Why is time?' According to physics, without time matter cannot exist, and vice versa. Chicken or egg? What existed before time or matter came into...

Just a quick postscript on the Unhurried Curry before I forget. As expected, yesterday's afternoon feast at the boys' place left us without need of much food last night, so a quick snack grazed from the fridge sufficed. Tonight we tucked back into the two curries from the night before, and were both pleasantly surprised how much better - and hotter - they were than originally. Leaving them to mature cold brought out the complex spices in the mushroom curry and the potato and peas dish took on a greater depth of the warm and earthy spicing I'd given it: belter! I caught the news that the Labour government is trying to negotiate a deal with the EU for more freedom of movement for young students to study across borders as before Brexit, alongside other putative trading and climate agreements. All I can say is well done in advance and carry on; we need to rebuild the foreign student base that effectively supports university funding, and if this policy is close-coupled with a dr...