Observations from a Hill

The ingenuity of mankind knows few bounds: '... What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.' [Hamlet, Act II, scene 2], and it would seem to be obvious that our ingenuity as a species is a self-reinforcing feedback loop, with one idea or physical invention of our ingenuity leading either logically or tangentially to another, and another, and so on. The development of human natural language is inextricably linked to our development of technology and vice versa.  Out of the need to teach and pass on our tool-making came language, as much as it emerged out of our need to navigate the wider world beyond our immediate environment for survival. As we gradually corralled our environment to serve our needs, so too did language develop and feed ideas back into further technological advances; in agric...

So, the government is acting on its pledge to lower the voting age in the UK to sixteen from eighteen, a move that has created much debate amongst the chatterati and on social and linear media alike. For myself I have long thought that if you are considered old enough to work and pay taxes, join the armed forces and in years past, potentially fight and die for your country, you should at least be granted the courtesy of having the franchise to vote in governmental elections. No brainer. The Conservative pundits and Nigel Farage have said that the Labour government is trying to rig the electoral system in favour of the Left. Really?  Give the youth of this archipelago some credit for having political thoughts of their own - I know I did at that age, and the two years left before my enfranchisement kicked in changed not a whit of my thinking, nor has it altered since. Given that one's mental acuity peaks before the age of twenty, and even given a teenager's relative lack of expe...

I was taken, by a chance meeting with a very old friend this morning, back to the earliest years of our tenure here in Gogledd Cymru; some forty-plus years since. We were the foundation stones of the Gerlan Bohemia [blog posts passim], along with several other couples, all involved in the early days of the local food co-op, in which we shared bagging-up duties, banter, laughs and partying in equal measure: a little slice of true communal endeavour that belied the Thatcherite ethos starting to wreak its - unfortunately long-lasting - havoc in the wider world beyond our semi-rural idyll. We were, it has to be said, escapees - or so we supposed - from the increasingly fraught world of Mammon out-with our particular slice of paradise. Of course, we were youthfully optimistic and probably quite wrong that the world wouldn't catch up with us eventually, but there you go. It has to be said that we are still making a fight of it, forty-odd years later, nevertheless, despite the attrition a...

There's currently a lot of traffic about Trump, the Epstein papers and the DOJ. Trump's MAGA support is faltering because of this one issue: the DOJ's not releasing of the 'papers' related to Jeffrey Epstein's operation and criminal activities regarding sex-trafficking and abuse of minors. From Trump's standpoint, he says there's nothing here to see, and his '...it's quite boring actually, sordid but boring...' attitude, would suggest one thing, alluded to by his erstwhile buddy, Elon Musk. As far as MAGA are concerned, it would seem they are up in arms about it, but not for the reasons one might think. It's not because they feel affronted at the President's apparent passive defence of Epstein, or that the accusations of his complicity in Epstein's criminality might actually be real; but rather that they still wholeheartedly believe in the entire Democrat/Pizza Parlour/Sex Trafficking/Alien Lizard King conspiracy. They now seem to...

On our way up to Junction 10 of the M56 to meet up halfway with Kev for Jane's visit to her family in Carnforth this week, we were listening on Radio Four to Mark Kermode and Ellen E Jones on the film programme, Screenshot. The topic of conversation was centred on Wong Kar-wai's film of 2000, "I'm In The Mood For Love", which apparently is finding a cult following amongst new cinema-goers born around or after the film's actual release; which can't be at all bad: bringing young people back into long-form media can only be a good sign after the last few years of mind-sapping insta-this and insta-that short-term bollocks. Add to this that the film is unashamedly romantic and emotional, and you have a ray of hope in the current wilderness of disconnected humanity. Films mentioned in the same breath that might also be current favourites with this new generation of romantic cinephiles were "Casablanca" and "Brief Encounter"; both similarly ab...

I got a link through on a feed this morning to a piece on the blog "The Conversation", about an article written eighty years ago by Vannevar Bush on information overload and its impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of academic research. In his original piece of July 1945, he argued that the sheer weight of information produced by academia in the form of papers, books and journal articles stood as a bulwark against the useful absorption and cataloguing of those data for re-use in future research. In those days, research was very much a case of sifting through physical catalogues and index files in order to make the connections between ideas and the concrete findings of individual researches to further advance knowledge. He argued that the volume - even then - of works which needed to be considered in any rational assessment of a particular subject's development was too onerous, given the very linear nature of the filing structures and access methods then available, t...

Tonight, a Lazy Sunday food post that is actually vaguely justifiable, as I've had to juggle cooking this meal and watch the Wimbledon Mens' Final at the same time. The fish won, as I missed the denouement of the match whilst tending this rather large slab of Scottish salmon fillet. The fish turned out rather well: in the pan to the left is olive oil warmed through with lemon thyme, chilli flakes and a Kaffir lime leaf, to serve as a drizzle for the fish. The pan to the rear holds a mixture of Camargue, brown Basmati and wild rices. We ate all this with a Greek salad, and very fine it was to be sure; very apposite, too, given the weather: very warm, humid and promising some manner of rainfall, given the appearance of some rather impressive cumulus clouds in the sky this evening. That's all for now, folks...

Pictured is the view of the mountains of Eryri from the top of The Eagle Tower of Caernarfon Castle, which we visited today to exercise our newly-minted CADW joint [oh, how I do despise the descriptor 'Senior', but I guess I need to get over it and ignore the epithet] membership. I'd not been inside the walls of the place for probably fifteen or twenty years, when I worked there as a telecoms engineer. Much work has been done on the place in the intervening years, with the Museum of The Royal Welch Fusiliers relocated to a larger site in The Queen's Tower, the addition of accessibility features such as ramps and lifts, the opening up to the public of much of the castle which has lain unseen to the public for centuries; and of course the usual tea, coffee and retail outlets obligatory in this late-stage-capitalist age. The castle was one of the locations where we as a small AV company, back in the early 1990s, installed and maintained a visitor display that ran for some ...

Pictured, my latest eBay find, which arrived this lunchtime: a Parker Duofold Senior fountain pen, which I chanced upon last week. I made a speculative and fairly low bid, then let it be, not going back to check upon or watch its progress. A few days later, I got the message/email notification that I'd won the thing. It came in an [its?] original box, having been cleaned and serviced by the seller. I duly filled it with Diamine Imperial Purple [my favoured] ink, and gave it a go. It's a little broader of nib than my Parker Duofold Maxima, and very slightly shorter of stature, but nevertheless a decent handful of a pen. It goes into my little collection of Parker Duofolds, alongside the Slimfold, the Junior and the aforementioned Maxima; all of which do see regular service. The thing of interest - for me, at least - is that this latest piece of retro writing technology is exactly the same age as me, its year of manufacture being 1954. It of course, was destined to be mine, natc...

  Pictured, the fruits of yesterday's endeavours in the workshop - amid much chuntering, walking back and forth to the bathroom and back down to the studio - measure, cut, measure, cut [it's a good step back and to from studio to house and some thousands of steps can be added to my daily total this way]: a seemingly trivial bit of boxing-in twixt bath and bog. It turned out pretty well, methinks, although its reverse is nowhere near as neat as its obverse, but I care not; it's only set-dressing, after all: this smidgeon of carpentry now hides the excrescence of assorted pipework and shit plaster that has been a domestic bone of contention for some - too much - time. I started work on the bathroom woodwork sometime in the last ice-age, and for some unaccountable reason, I've let it slip. And let it slip. And let it slip: und so weiter, ad nauseam, ad infinitum; a victim to my procrastination and the diversions of sundry other probably - certainly - less pressing tasks. S...

  A while back I posted a couple of pieces on my recently acquired old chess table, and how I'd decided that it was possibly originally a tilt-top that had been hard-tailed [to use a term borrowed from the worlds of guitar and motorcycles] at some point in its history. I was going to try and use a stout hardwood dowel as the hinge pin - as many antique tilt top tables do - but ended up using two short lengths of 6mm silver steel round bar instead, running through interference-fit holes in the top and pedestal crown, a solution which works fine. The top is secured in the horizontal position by a small brass catch and all is pretty solid in use. I've just got to find house room for the little beauty now; no small task in the rather overstuffed edifice we call  home! Keep you posted...

Pictured, my table saw - which I stupidly allowed to remove a 5mm chunk out of my thumb, thankfully now all healed with little sign of that particular trauma: mea culpa in spades - with today's construction in the background, the second bit of woodwork in the glacial completion of our bathroom project: again, mea culpa. Having cut, glued and pinned the thing together, I've just applied some wood filler to hide the panel pins [that brown gloop], which I'll sand down tomorrow before offering the piece up to it final resting place to await a coat of paint. In the mid-ground of the picture is a book that came today from the estimable World Of Books, which cost me the princely sum of around three quid plus postage. It's packed with great ideas and beautifully illustrated, so I look forward to building some of the tools within its pages. Keep you posted...

There's a good piece in this week's New Statesman by Will Dunn, a man with no small measure of sagacity in matters politic and economic. Briefly, his contention is that the UK's current Byzantine taxation system needs to be ripped up and replaced with something more logical and frankly just plain simpler to manage. The complexities and absurdities of the extant tax regime serve only to complicate and obfuscate what is, after all, a relatively straightforward goal: to raise money from the working populace in order to run the country and its public services. Simple. He suggests removing National Insurance altogether and hiking direct income tax to compensate. I agree: National Insurance long ago lost any semblance of its original meaning or function, and is an over-complication which serves no concrete purpose of its own. Similarly, Road Tax; originally the Road Fund Licence, which was designed to act as a central fund to maintain the highways: completely inoperable in the pr...

The last hurrah of Black Sabbath this week in Birmingham prompted a brief flurry of emails from The Lads [blog posts passim], about our listening to a tape of their eponymous first album - pictured above - on a dark evening in Lightwoods Park, Birmingham, just after its release. We were, as my dad would have phrased it 'just bits o' kids' back then, firmly convinced that there was a secret incantation buried within the sounds of the title track that would elicit dark forces. Old Nick fortunately never made an appearance that evening, but we all enjoyed the night, nevertheless. Some time after, we got to see the band in one of their first outings at Birmingham Town Hall [ticket stub also pictured]. My ears rang for a good three days afterwards, and my tinnitus to this day bears witness to those youthful good times of over half a century ago. Glad I was there to see the birth of Brummagem's indigenous musical art form, as it happened, though. By the way, my ticket to the ...

The UK Labour government has a monumental task still ahead of it, no question. U-turns, vacillations and direction changes are to be expected at this still early stage in the current parliament. As my son wisely said over lunch, it's still far too early to call the next election result, and to be frank it's positively damned stupid to do so. The Sisyphean task of righting the totally shagged UK economy they are faced with is enormous, vied against the weight of the collected 'always on' media pressure against them is daunting, to say the very least. They inherited this poisoned chalice willingly, and they knew exactly what it meant. It's not going swimmingly to date, and they are still learning how to navigate their way through the shark-infested waters of a shattered economy, but who else do we have as a credible alternative that could even make a fist to shake at the manifestly crap situation that we are suffering as the direct result of fourteen years of Tory n...

OK - too lazy to confront the world outside my door today, so a supper post it is. Pictured, belly pork strips with Greek-style olive oil & lemon-roasted potato wedges with apple sauce made from the residue of the meat roasting dish [white wine and apples], seasoned with salt and lemon juice. Mighty fine, and a good deal less stressful than current politics or even the second test match against India...

I was pretty pissed off at today's coverage of Rachel Reeves 'event' at PMQ's yesterday. She appeared 'tearful': so what? So far we know nothing of the reason(s) behind her obvious emotions [caveat: I didn't catch PMQ's this week, but I think the pictures show something actually occurred], and so any speculation as to their origin is plain bloody moot and frankly immaterial until further notice. Why is that the press still feel that it is OK to pontificate about a female politician in a way that would be unthinkable were the person concerned a man? Yes, the Government and its ministers have thus far not played a great game on the economic front, let alone the public relations one; but for God's sake, surely we are above the crass sexism of old by now, even if we can't shake off the racist attitudes that go hand in hand with it. We all deserve better of ourselves, and the press and social media are simply amplifying the very worst of us in the nam...

Pictured, Fairview Heights this evening, with the moon rising in what can only be described as the unbroken azure of the skies above us [how poetic/clichéd]. Whatever, this time of the year is the sweet spot for this place, and the gardens never look better at any other time of the year. We've both been out this morning and have cut both lawns [they'll need another do before the week's out, however], and trimmed a few of the coiffed shrubs of their more enthusiastic growth after the recent rains. The sunshine is glorious and the air at present is sensibly cool, so probably the perfect balance for an early summer's evening here in God's own country. Hwyl!

I have nothing against offshore - or indeed onshore - wind power electricity generation: we need it, and we need it and other renewable sources of power desperately urgently, if we are to stem the tide of the climate disasters that threaten to overwhelm our planet. No beef with this particular technological path at all; rather with the principal pecuniary beneficiary here i the UK: the King. The Crown Estate owns the bloody seabed around our archipelago for God's sake, and so so directly benefits from the sale of rights to erect wind farms offshore. In the King's case, he will benefit from an income of £132mn next year, due to profits from offshore wind making the Crown more than £1bn.  Whilst I applaud all efforts made toward greening our islands, I do feel more than a tad peeved that so much money can be siphoned off by the institution due to the serial accidents of history that is 'our' monarchy. I've said it before: my late father's constant litany was that...

It's intriguing how often I'll chuck away a possible thread for an idea of a topic for a post [cf. last night's scribble], and then find myself faced with the potential substance of that post the following day. In today's case, I read with interest a piece in today's Financial Times about Cortical Labs' early stage experiments in implementing 'biological intelligence', using lab-grown human brain cells living on silicon substrates from which their responses can be 'read' and via which they can be 'trained' [or at least 'nudged']. So far they have created a machine they have dubbed 'CL1', with 200,000 brain cells. The aim of this endeavour is to create computing devices of enormous power that, like the human brain, '...consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics...'. If realisable in genuinely practical terms, this would leapfrog current developments in the field of quantum computing, ...

I was going to write something about consciousness and quantum superposition with reference to Roger Penrose's conjectures on the subject; but when these beauties came out of the oven, I thought nah! all that can wait. It's Sunday Roast time, after all. Chicken legs with garlic and roast Maris Piper potatoes, cooked in olive oil for an hour or so: ultimately served with steamed carrots and chicken gravy. Molto bene!

Oh, how woeful is the attention span of so many of us today. It's tragic how the dopamine rush of the AI-mediated instant gratification of social media and next-day delivered goods has severed us from the grit and shit of the actual realities of life. The knock on effects of this shift in human consciousness can be seen daily in the febrile arena of realpolitik and its ancillary bullshit. There is actually a reason for four and five year government terms, as oh-so-terribly-long as they might seem to those more used to 'reacting' in milliseconds to just about anything that crosses their event-awareness thresholds. The current trend is that Nigel Farage and his band of demented fuckwits are preparing the ground for government, and that the current one - Labour - could soon face an early General Election, leaving the path clear for them. Christ Almighty, we are four years away from the next national voting round and Labour still has a crushing majority that absolutely preclud...

Why am I largely unmoved by the Glastonbury Festival phenomenon? Everyone else seems to deify this event in almost religious terms. Have I ever been? No. Not from a lack of love for music in all its manifest variety, that's for sure. Have I ever been to a festival? Just the one: Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, 1970. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but what I rather less enjoyed was the presence about me of 120,000 other people, something I found claustrophobic and frankly annoying. I never thought about attending another like event after that day, as much as I enjoyed the music. I guess one of the reasons we left Birmingham for North Wales in 1980 was motivated by our growing unease among crowds: I was always more comfortable, both as a child and as a young adult, with the gentler pace of the countryside. Even as an adolescent I gravitated to the quieter parts of the city I grew up in, venturing into the crowds only at night to drink to the early hours. Do I miss the throng? Not a bit of it: my freq...

Amidst all the clatter and clarion that passes for the norm each morning, noon and night in the news cycle at present, all I want to do tonight is draw breath and let the clamour subside into the background noise of my tinnitus, and say fuck it all for a bit. I bumped into an old mate from work today, quite out of the blue, in the village. I haven't seen him since some time before I retired five years ago, and although he's still only in his early mid-fifties, he reckons on retiring well before he's sixty, as he's paying a third of his salary towards his pension every month, chwarae teg. I hope he get's to have a long and happy retirement on the back of his efforts. As to me, I've found/created a sweet spot in my latest incarnation that I could only have dreamed about [and often did] in my youth, where I can get on with being me: where Jane & I can get on with being us: where the boys are now making their own way and are happy in their travels through life. ...

I don't know if it's me, but the arithmetic in Eliot Wilson's article [yesterday's i Newspaper, UK] on Reform UK's recently-touted idea of '... a system of wealth transfer from rich to poor.' just doesn't seem to stack up. The mechanism that Farage's party of no-marks and flakes is proposing would attract non-domiciled wealthy individuals into a new, tax-lite environment here in the UK. As well as being exempt from UK taxation for a decade on their overseas earnings, they would avoid all inheritance tax, in return for buying into a scheme Reform have dubbed "The Britannia Card", for a one-off payment of £250,000 each, the proceeds of all earnings from this to be distributed among the lowest ten percent of UK earners at the end of each year. According to the article's [Reform's?] figures, this would net around 2.5 million workers between £600 and £1,000 each per year. This all sounds very grand and dashingly Robin Hood of Farage and ...

Back in the early 1980's, in a former life [I've had many], I worked at The Unemployed Workers' Advice Centre in Bangor: a short-lived but valuable resource created by Richard Grimes of the Newham Rights Centre, London and others, in Bangor, in 1982. I was there for a scant two years, but we managed to make a significant impact on what was then becoming a hostile environment for the underprivileged at the hands of Thatcher's state apparatus. We were trained in how the various convoluted 'benefits' of our social security system were supposed to work by the [still] estimable Child Poverty Action Group, which gave us both the tools and the cachet to argue our claimant-client cases and win, usually in short order, against the then Department for Health & Social Security: a short phone call from us pointing out the niceties of the legal obligations the authorities faced was usually enough to get a result for the client on the spot. Further afield in the human rig...

I was just reading an interview [ under the byline "Lunch With The FT", this weekend] with the computational linguist Emily Bender, who has been taking metaphorical chunks out of the AI gold rush's claims that it represents some sort of New Jerusalem [fans of the late, great Joe Don Baker will get that reference] in evolution, taking mankind out of itself and to the stars as immortals. Ahem . She wrote a paper in 2021 in which she described AI chatbots and image-creation tools as "stochastic parrots" [her neologism], the definition of which is, and I quote: '... a system for "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in it's vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning"...' Apparently this led to much umbrage in the AI community, motivating OpenAI's Sam Altman to tweet '... "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u"......

  I just had to post a Sunday food piece today, as we've had the boys around for the first family Sunday Roast in ages. To celebrate the occasion, I slow-cooked a whole shoulder of lamb with garlic, rosemary & bay from the garden, white wine and anchovies, pictured centre. My usual olive-oil roast potatoes and purple-sprouting broccoli, and mint-sauce from our own garden mint, served with a reduced sauce of shallots, white wine, chicken stock, vegetable water and meat-pan juices. It took around six hours to do, and I enjoyed every minute of cooking it. I enjoyed the eating of it even more... Hwyl!

OK - I was prompted to write this note in the light of an ' interesting ' conversation I had the other day on the subject of conspiracy theories. In it was mentioned a blog called "The Daily Sceptic", which to be frank I was unaware of, but the notion that was floated that this might be some sort of source of 'truth', regarding climate change scepticism/denial, big pharma vaccine cons and the even more grandiose concepts of global elites cashing in on the gullibility of the masses prompted me to stick my toe into the shark-infested waters of paranoid public 'debate'. What I found was pretty much what I expected. However, on reading the first article I turned to: "Universities Are a Conspiracy Against the Public", allegedly by one James Alexander, later credited at the foot of the piece as '... a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey...' I discovered something less obvious but rather more insi...

  The population of this collective archipelago is famous for moidering on and on about the weather, finding it by far the easiest conversational opening gambit, and with no real surprise, given the insane variety thereof that we experience, pretty much on a second-by-second basis. However, hyperbole and convention notwithstanding, I'm moved to comment on the plethora of bollocks that passeth for meteorological descriptors today. Viz: the BBC Weather app stated that the temperature in Llanllechid this afternoon was 23C. On the wearisome 'Today in Your Area' we were treated to the frankly psychedelic "...feels like 26C",  going on to assert that the daytime temperature would be 16C, as it would be overnight. I can confirm that in this little corner of Rachub, the temperature at Fairview Heights reached 32C, confirmed by two independent thermometers and concurring with my lifetime's experience of weather. It has been basically as hot as Corfu today up here: it...

Pictured, the view from the broad saddle between Carnfadryn and Garn Bach, with Yr Eifl [known as The Rivals in English, even though it doesn't mean that] in the far distance, on our walk this morning. The plan was to get to the top of the smaller Garn Bach, but we landed up here with onward progress thwarted a little further on by a stock fence and a locked gate. Even by 09:30 when we reached the fence, it was already shaping up to be a very hot day, and so, rather than spend any time searching for a way through and up, we decided that turning around and heading back to the cars would be the wisest course of action under the circumstances. We did Carnfadryn last year on a similarly sunny but very cold day. Some more map research is needed before the next attempt, methinks...  

Pictured above, the striated rock of Porth Ceiriad, one of our favourite beaches down here in Pen Lleyn, and one which we collectively have been visiting for well over forty years as a family. However, Jane's history with this place goes back to her childhood. Most years we take a photograph of her, and her sister Carol sat on the rocks at the base of this cliff, echoing photographs taken in the fifties and sixties. I guess it qualifies as a kind of pilgrimage: an homage to life and continuity that spans lifetimes and geologic time alike. It's a lovely place, especially out of season, when it is always pretty quiet, and today we were treated to good weather and a stretch of briny strand populated by fewer than a couple of dozen people at most. Most pleasing to the soul. Bendigedig go iawn. Hwyl...

  We decided to drive over to see a site we've visited before, as we we're staying only a few miles distant, and Carol & Kev hadn't heard of or seen the place before. I discovered it back when I was working in the area eight years ago, and Jane, James & I revisited it that year together. This rather striking ruin is the Ynys-Y-Pandy slate-slab mill in the hills above Garndolbenmaen, Pen Lleyn. Built between 1856 and 1857, it was producing over 2,000 tons of slate per year by 1860, but within seven years, the output of decent quality material was down to a mere 25 tons, with the company going into liquidation in 1871. Pictured to the right is the retaining wall for the one of the tramways which brought the slate down from the Gorseddau quarry beyond for processing. I'll try and post in a bit more detail about the place at some point, but we're off down the pub shortly for a bite to eat and a pint. Talk later. Hwyl!

We revisited the tiny church of St. Maelrhys, near Porth Ysgo; the interior of which is pictured. The pews featured are Georgian in date, but the nave in which they sit dates to the 13th. Century, the oldest part of the church. The chancel was added some centuries later and the west end of the church with the now sole entrance, is Victorian. The original medieval doors to the north and south are long filled in. The pews in the picture illustrate the demarcation lines of the class structure of the time: land-owning family box pews with benches for estate workers: servants and labourers alike. All men equal before God, eh? Still, the place is a lovely building in its simplicity and in its setting. I wrote briefly about my first visit there a couple of years ago. Hwyl!  

Looking towards Ynys Enlli [on the left of the picture] when we got back from a Fathers' Day lunch [we didn't really need the excuse as the boys would have visited for the day and a meal out anyway], and a short walk with the dog over at Mynydd Rhiw. The gloom has cleared back from the sea and the sky is showing hints of the sunny days ahead that the weather forecast promises. We'll see as the week ahead progresses, eh? Ever the optimist, I contend it will be a corker, so there! Not sure whether we've any particular plans for tomorrow, but as usual I'll go with the flow anyway. Keep you posted... Hwyl!

  Down at Porth Neigwl, Pen Lleyn for a few days on one of our regular annual visits here [blog posts passim]. Pictured, the view towards Llanengan from the cottage, with the old lead mine chimney on the hill above the village, built circa 1878. Tomorrow the boys are coming down from Ynys Môn to meet us for lunch at The Sun Inn there. Posts this week will focus on the visit, as usual. Hwyl!

OK - two things, both flagged in The New Scientist this week: I'll take the second piece first. Apparently, the Moon is stocked with platinum and other precious metals to the approximate value of $1trn, and that it is therefore ripe for for exploitation from a commercial point of view. The second piece relates to the emission of ancient sequestered carbon from rivers. Apparently a gigatonne of carbon is being released annually from peat bogs and wetlands by the rivers they ultimately feed. This could, and probably is being accelerated by climate change and the actions of mankind [surprise?], alluding to our having disturbed these millennia-long carbon stores directly or indirectly, but definitely by our own hand. There are two thoughts on these reports going through my mind: one is that we have successfully demonstrated that we are incapable as species of respecting and working with our environment to its and our own long term benefit; choosing instead to value short term economic ...

Nineteen-ninety-five. Thirty years have since passed, and the technological seeds of the world in which we currently live were but nascent potential then, awaiting release into the wild. Five years previously, the Internet [it was capitalised in those days] was mostly just a military/academic/geek network with much connectivity but little structure. But one year into the Nineties, Tim Berners-Lee changed the whole ballgame by inventing the World Wide Web, whose nomenclature survives in vestigial form in the still-used 'web-page', although few younger than my now advanced age would ever refer to  even 'the Web' these days, so commoditised has the Gargantua that most now characterise as simply 'my internet', become. Similarly, our attitudes to, and usage of, digital photography have mutated from niche activity to quotidian normalcy over the period; to a point where now, there are no boundaries between human activity itself and the recording of it as merely normal;...