Observations from a Hill

As [what we imagine ourselves to be] a sentient species, we operate reasonably efficiently in the world we inhabit through a kind of sensory consensus constructed entirely within our brains and our nervous system; a complex of signal timing, buffering and convolution that we are thankfully, normally blissfully unaware of as we make our way through life. I mention this because on the last evening the family were gathered at Lower Down, we had exactly this discussion: what is the nature of perception, and by extension, reality itself? Untroubled by these kinds of philosophical questions, most people continue on their path from birth to death with just maybe the odd quizzical sideways glance into the unknown, but then continue on as normal without further thought on the matter. The fact is that we don't see, hear or feel the world around us in anything like synchronised real time; all our sensory inputs are firstly perceived quite crudely and at different timings, dependent on their ...

Back home again to Fairview Heights this afternoon, after an uneventful journey back from Shropshire, with little traffic  in the way of our progress. Nevertheless, we had an early start to the day, and I'm now rather knackered. I've also been struggling to pick the bones out of a credit-card application that has gone south in a most peculiar way [bearing in mind that I have made several successful applications for cards and car lease agreements in the last eight months with no hiccups whatsoever and my credit rating is OK], with the application being pre-approved, and accepted within minutes, only for me to receive a rather oddly-worded text(!) from the company - no names, no pack drill [yet] - the following morning instructing me to destroy any correspondence - and the card - that arrived in the post. I also received email confirmations of the success of the application, and immediately afterwards a similar instruction to destroy, etc., etc. also via email. Anyhow, I thought...

Ah, well, it's the last evening of our fortnight's stay here in Shropshire: the weather has turned out kind for us, after a bit of a mixed start and some heavy rain yesterday. We managed  to get some Bishop's Castle and Church Stretton mooching done and finished with a last visit to The White Horse in Clun for lunch and a couple of pints of Clun Pale. Homeward bound in the morning. Talk to you later...

Just a brief observation on a piece in today's FT. The UK's Sizewell C nuclear plant build is late, over budget, already obsolescent, and with a lifespan of just a few decades, will produce electricity at twice or three times the cost of other generating sectors. Not only that, when finished it will take decades to decommission the plant and thousands of years of waste management to safely store the radioactive materials produced during its lifetime. Not exactly the endless clean and cheap energy that the opening of the Windscale [now Sellafield] plant in Cumbria in the 1950s was trumpeted as heralding at the time; which of course was mere window-dressing to cover up its primary purpose, which was to produce weapons-grade materiel to bring the UK firmly into the Nuclear Club. The fact is that there are far better, less hazardous, cheaper to build and run methods of electricity generation that produce far cheaper energy and last far longer than nuclear. Just on a cost/benefit b...

I read with interest and some confusion, the column in today's Financial Times by Marc Dunkelman, on why the far-right and its noisome, and more often than not noisy, politicking is of appeal to an increasingly large segment of civil society. His thesis in the piece - bearing in mind that he is a senior fellow with the democratically-aligned think-tank the Searchlight Institute - is that democracy isn't working [I agree] and pretty much everything is broken [which it is], because governments are losing the trust of their electorate by signally failing to cover all the bases of public service and supply [which is also true].  Where I diverge from his thinking is when he posits that the reason for this increasing lack of trust, or indeed any faith, in the system(s) of government we employ, is that liberal, progressive thinking has 'hamstrung' governments in their delivery of infrastructure and public services. Further, he characterises a 'paranoia' among the Left...

  Pictured, two of the three Giant Sequoias that frame the old cricket pavilion on the edge of The Grange fields in Leominster. The scale of the one to the left is just about indicated by the two figures next to it. Currently standing at over a hundred feet in height, these trees are mere infants in the world of these incredible organisms, having only been planted in the nineteenth century, with examples in their native North America living to three thousand and more years and growing to three times the height of these youngsters. However singular and magnificent this stand of trees is; a far more poignant spectacle is the Verdun Oak that stands to the right of these, adjacent to the War Memorial. It was grown from an acorn picked up at and brought home from the First World War Battle of Verdun, and planted in memory of the dead in 1921. Enough said...

  Today we went to Croft Castle to visit and for us to activate our recently renewed National Trust membership, some good few years after we let it lapse when the family membership became redundant on James leaving home. Afterwards, we drove into Leominster for a mooch around. It's a town I've visited in the past, either as a child, as my family has connections there, or more latterly, on my way to or from somewhere else, as it used to be part of the main route into and out of Herefordshire on the north-south axis. We found a very quiet and much prettier town this bank holiday, bathed in sunshine and baking in 28-degree late summer heat. Pictured, one of the narrow alleys that connect the streets in the town, one to the other, the centre now made over to pedestrians, the heavy through-traffic of yore having been banished and diverted around the old town; which like so many in Shropshire and Herefordshire, have long and storied histories, mirrored in the fabric of the town's...

  George Orwell once famously fictionalised his idea of the perfect pub: "The Moon Under Water", where '... it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.' Over the decades since, and in particular this century, pubs of an 'ideal' kind such as his creation have gotten rather too thin on the ground, with inappropriate conversions and closures alike conspiring along with the smoking ban and more latterly Covid to force long-established public houses into extinction with no realistic prospect of resurrection. Happily for me, though, there is one establishment that continues to fulfil its historical role with aplomb: The White Horse in Clun, which I've mentioned in these pages many times [this week, even], and which we've frequented, when on holiday down here, for just about as long as the current owner/publican, Jack Limond, h...

  Pictured, the eighty-foot tall remains of the keep of Clun Castle, Shropshire, UK. Built by the Norman lord Robert de Say in the twelfth century, it was in the possession of the Fitzalan family for many years, who converted it into a hunting lodge(!) in the fourteenth century. It formed the centrepiece to our perambulations around Clun this morning before lunch. Currently still owned by the Duke of Norfolk, but maintained by English Heritage, the place is a crumbling but still impressive edifice commanding views over the town and surrounding countryside. Some of us might well speculate exactly what contribution [almost certainly nowt] the owner actually makes toward its upkeep and keeping its ageing masonry from killing some innocent walker as they pass by. That strikes me as fuel for a post for another day...

We went over to Ludlow this morning and spent a couple of pleasant hours mooching around the fine old market town, which wears its history proudly on its sleeve. Pictured, our morning coffee at a very quaint and pleasant tea-rooms there. The curious thing about the disparity between the horizontals of the glazing bars of the windows and the line taken by the window sill is not an artefact of the wide angle iPhone lens, but illustrates clearly that the sill slopes wildly to the left and toward me taking the photograph. As with so many of the older buildings there, they are gradually settling one way or the other, taking their window and door frames with them along the way. The town, however is also showing some signs of the economic malaise prevalent across the country. Whilst still a prosperous place, there are shop closures that a few years ago would have been unimaginable, testimony to the treacherously fine line that small businesses tread in a world dominated by wealth and corporat...

Pictured, the inscription on the bench here at Lower Down, from A. E. Houseman's "A Shropshire Lad", a poem cycle that forms as much a part of the mythology of the area as The Green Man himself, despite the author having written much of his 'observational' verse from the remove of his adopted London home, before ever visiting the county of Salop. He himself was a native of Worcestershire, having been born near Bromsgrove. Nevertheless, his phrase, '...those blue remembered hills...' sums up the rolling grey-blue terrain of the county perfectly...

Pictured above is the small Mah Jongg set that I picked up from a charity shop in Church Stretton yesterday for the princely sum of £7.50. Although a small-tiled set, it's pretty nicely made, with bamboo-backed resin tiles and has never been used, by the look and feel of it; and considering these Chinese-made sets are still made and go for around thirty quid more than I paid for this one, I consider it a bargain. The next thing is to learn how to play the game: it's always fascinated me, but reading the rule books and how-to guides I've always been put off by the apparent complexity of it. I realise now that I have mostly been reading about the American evolution of the game that was made popular last century. The standard Hong Kong game that I've since looked at has at least fewer of the intricate rules of the US variant, and basic gameplay appears not dissimilar to Gin Rummy, a game I know of old. However, there is a caviat: the initial setup and mechanics of the HK s...

  Tonight's repast: spanakopita from the excellent Saxon's Deli in Church Stretton served with a plain, simply-dressed salad [no feta in the salad as that would simply be overkill]. Lovely. We bought a few mezze ingredients to try, including smoked anchovies,  but we'll give those a go tomorrow or the next night. This afternoon I started watching a YouTube interview with Dr Abby Innes: "How neoliberalism broke economics" on the Institute of Art & Ideas channel. Her ideas seem to offer an incisive and slightly left-field view of a situation in which we are all embroiled but few have any insights into the cause(s) of or possible ways forward from [the current mess]. I look forward to reading her book of 2023, "Late Soviet Britain" (...Why Materialist Utopias Fail...). In the meantime it's a glass or three of Puglian vino...

Just a diary post tonight as James has turned up here at Lower Down to join us for the holidays this afternoon: Leo is working this week and joins us next weekend. Jane & I went to The White Horse for lunch again today: haddock & chips and pints of Clun Pale for me! Pictured, evidence that hay-gathering was much earlier this year than last: we were here in September then and they were still getting it in. James and I had a long and wide-ranging conversation this evening about things photographic, cinematic and the encroachment and influence of AI on them. The opening phrase of Susan Sontag's essay, "Plato's Cave" [from the collection "On Photography", 1979 ] came up: 'Mankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's Cave, still revelling, in its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth...' and the discussion turned to the extrapolation of this concept - she was of course talking of traditional, analogue, chemical-based photography in those d...

Oh, how I do love serendipitous synchronicity. On this, our first full day of our second sojourn this year to Lower Down in Shropshire, I happened on a beauty. But first, let's recapitulate the Salopian connection to my family that I've referred to in quite a few posts past - last February's visit being the most recent  - Elizabeth Graves, née Southall: my Great-Great Aunt and hostess of The White Horse Inn in Clun, Shropshire, for some decades in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; surviving two husbands in the process; and whose connection to me was unknown by me until a couple of years ago, even though the pub has been a favourite holiday haunt [see blog posts passim on the subject to get that oblique reference] of ours for thirty years or so. Anyhow, today I bought my usual copy of the FT Weekend and we repaired to the White Horse for a good basic pub lunch of sausage and chips, washed down in my case with a couple of pints of their home-brewed Pale Ale. I s...

  Well, here we are again in Shropshire. The journey down was slowed by the traffic on the A5, all the way to the border, but once past Chirk, it was OK. After a short break for a snack halfway, progress was pretty much as usual, and so we made a stop at Llanymynech to go and have a look at the old lime works heritage site there. We've visited the quarries on the opposite side of the main road there before , but had never ventured down to see the old kilns on the site. Pictured [Jane's excellent photo] is the interior of the very well preserved and restored Hoffmann Kiln, which was built around 1900, but which was already an obsolete design on completion. Nevertheless it was a serious piece of kit, reducing limestone to quicklime at a temperature of over 900ºC in its oval coal-fired ignition circuit: each section of the furnace lighting sequentially in the heat from the previous one. Ingenious and energy-efficient system though it was, you can't help feeling sorry for the p...

  We decided we were going to search out either a proper fishmonger or butcher to supply us with the makings of tonight's meal, as there is nowhere left in Bethesda - nary a butcher or a baker, when we used to have three of each in the 80s; nor in Bangor itself, which had a splendid array of local produce suppliers when we arrived here forty-five years ago: even a pork butcher and a grocers that sold game, which hung on the rail outside the shop front on hooks. Along with the numerous thriving pubs in both the small city and Bethesda itself, we wanted for not much, except the exotica that we had grown up with as working class Brummies, surrounded as we were with the produce of the Caribbean, Canton and the Indian subcontinent; the takeaways, the restaurants: the suppliers of goodies that had, in 1980, not quite reached North Wales. Anyhow, we decided on a short trip to Llanfairfechan [the strand pictured, with Llandudno and Penmaenmawr in the distance] and its excellent butcher...

Reading an interesting piece in this week's New Scientist about the Ultra-Finitist school of thought in mathematics -a kind of rebel, left-field, fringe movement that posits that infinity[-ies] are not at all necessary in mathematics. Not being a mathematician, I had not really encountered this philosophical tendency before, but nevertheless, I'm finding the concept interesting. I think I've talked about infinity[ies] before. Ah, yes I have, a couple of years ago . The debate would seem to hang on the difference between the concept of 'countability', ie. the basic structure of numbers themselves, and the real, physical things that we actually use numbers to 'count'. In any series of numbers; integers, real numbers, decimals, etc., it's intuitively the case that one can always increase the series by simple addition, or in the negative case, by subtraction, with no conceptual limit to the process. Fine. Simple, you might say, and suggest that one can keep ...

Pictured, a news clipping from a quarter of a century ago, featuring the Douglas Arms Hotel and its estimable and fearsomely eccentric late landlord, Geoffrey Davies. Sadly, the pub itself is also late of this parish, having closed a couple of years ago, for reasons various. Back when we first moved to Bethesda, forty-five years ago, The Douglas [Duggie] was the hostelry of choice for the nervous incomer, and pretty much an enclave for middle class intellectuals and traditionalists alike. The place still dealt in old money: pounds, shillings and pence, which for the younger arrivistes was a bit of a poser, and failure to comply with the antiquated monetary terminology was dealt with pretty short shrift by Geoff [known locally as 'Geoff Davis, Douglas': nicknames being the norm here in Wales], who could be intimidatingly brusque to the point of, shall we say, rudeness, when it came to such things. Fortunately for us, navigating the currency conversion minefield was easy, as we...

It's-very-warm-here-tonight: much warmer - hotter, even - than the forecasters/weather apps suggest, at around 30C. I think I might have mentioned before that this little corner of Llanllechid parish sports the biggest solar battery imaginable: we are sat on top of, and surrounded by, millions of tons of slate, both still in its original geologic state and as waste from the local quarries, mined over the centuries from antiquity. This stuff really holds the heat, as anyone who has worked on a slate roof in summer will attest, and I have much direct experience of that little number! I remember one particularly hot summer in the mid-eighties, when several of us were re-slating a roof in Bethesda where the local planning officer had taken issue with the previous job: a pettifogging issue of no actual practical, physical import whatsoever: merely someone exercising their authority for the sake of it. We took the roof off and put it back on again; and the afternoon we topped it out, we ...

As anyone who knows me knows, I consider economics to be, at its very best, a pseudo-science, hiding its inadequacies behind a veil of obscurantist terminology and spurious statistical theory. No economic theory - and that is what all economics is: empirically unsubstantiated theory - has ever managed to predict or explain the way that economies actually work or why they often fail: they simply reflect, in obfuscated, stock terms, the symptoms of the disease after the patient is dead and six feet under. Economists reflect. They seldom influence any but the political elites who use their theories to justify their policies - viz the forty-five year disaster that is neo-liberal 'thinking'. What economists certainly can't and don't do is predict the exact behaviour of an economy at any given point in time, even its moments of fatal criticality, ie. market crashes and hyperinflation: an economy is, in reality, a barely-damped feedback loop - no, rather a vast complex web o...

I wasn't intending a lazy food post tonight and had lined up some comment on the tissue of lies and fiction that is the macroeconomic fantasy that has driven neoliberalism for the past forty-five bloody years, and which has blighted the lives of ordinary folk worldwide since its widespread adoption, by capitalists and governments alike, in the mid-seventies. I watched with some joy and gratification a YouTube video this morning posted by Richard Murphy, as an introduction to his new series debunking this economic snake oil and pointing directly at the naked emperor and his pet elephant in the room and calling them out for what they actually are. But I won't tonight, as I'm full of kebab and Greek salad and frankly can't be arsed. I shall return to the subject tomorrow, and hopefully throw a few well-honed barbs of my own at the Shibboleth that is Macro-Bleeding-Economics. I recommend watching Richard's introductory piece on the subject, and would suggest that those...

Further to last night's post, I linked to a previous post of mine that I wrote five years ago. In it I pondered in which of my Dad's brother's ownership the above knife was, during WWII. I have since corrected the error in my uncle Sam's service on the post, which obviously leads me to believe with reasonable certainty that the Army issue jack knife was indeed my uncle Arthur's service-issued kit. As I wrote about during last year's eightieth anniversary of Operation Market Garden in Arnhem, Holland; my uncle Arthur was in the First Airborne. I don't know for sure exactly when he volunteered/was seconded to the glider brigade, but I do know he served in the Sicily operations of 1943 and subsequently fought at Arnhem in 1944, surviving only to be taken as a POW until the war's end. The date of issue of the pictured knife is 1943, and it has been in the family for as long as I can remember, and I'm seventy. I was given the knife by my dad, who held his...

  Pictured, one of my latest acquisitions, semi-artistically arranged on top of a log: make of that what you will, but it's just the way I do stuff. The little pocket knife featured is Japanese and although very cheap, exhibits the very best of Japanese knife manufacturing practice. Evidence of the forging process is left as an aesthetic statement in and of itself; the sleeve of the knife is of the simplest construction imaginable: a folded piece of stainless steel: but the business end of this slice of excellent carbon steel is as sharp as a razor blade. These, alongside the great Opinel Carbonne range of knives and the best of Sheffield steel blades of yore , really are the utility blades of choice on a budget, rivalling just about any edge available, anywhere. They can be bought online for not a lot of money here in the UK, but I guess also anywhere: they are by Higonokami, the design dating back to 1896. Brilliant.

Now here's a thing: I've been playing with Claude AI over the last couple of days, and have got it to try and approximate a browser-based version of HyperCard [cf. blog posts passim: ' Retro But Nice ', ' This Is The Modern World ', ' Hyperactive ', ' Zettelkasten ', and ' Wrong - In A Good Way '.] - a pretty meta [ not the company ] kind of exercise, which I like for its somewhat tautologous nature. I don't have a combination of machine/operating system/HyperCard version that would enable me to tinker with what was one of my favourite software environments any more, so I've decided to use Claude AI to help me recreate - within the limitations of a browser - something that approximates the original UX; and maybe take the thing forward a step or two. Certainly, I have always had a hankering to use HyperCard again, and for its original purpose: a personal filing and data assistant, customisable by the user themselves. So far, Claude...

Pictured, tonight's repast of an all-time classic: the venerable cheese and bacon toastie: unequalled in any other cuisine and a thing of umami wonder. OK I'm straying into hyperbolic territory here, but by 'eck, it don't half hit the spot: and that includes the soupçon of carbonisation on the [it has to be crap white sliced] bread. Crispy smoked streaky bacon and cheddar cheese: an unparalleled combination. Which brings me around to the demise of proper pubs and hotels again, tonight. Last night I talked of the sad demise of The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire. But the place I associate most of all with the above food item is The Victoria Hotel, Menai Bridge; another establishment we've frequented for well over forty years. Back in the mid-nineties, it was the favoured venue for a Friday lunchtime office downtime and brainstorming session over games of pool, pints of Bass and the ubiquitous cheese & bacon toastie. Unfortunately, about four years...

To paraphrase Alex Harvey of The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, '...another pub dies in shame...'. The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, which we have known and loved since it first emerged from long disuse almost exactly thirty years ago, has closed again. As in so many like tragic cases, yet again it is an example of an erstwhile successful pub and community hub brought to its knees by a latter-day management powered by that fatal combination of hubris and a plain lack of understanding of running a hospitality business.The pub shut its doors around three weeks ago, amid the ongoing gradual dilapidation of the building's fabric and the business's poor performance over the last two or three years. It's owners, Heineken Star Pubs [really, I ask you...] are seeking a new licensee to take over the business. Considering that Heineken SP were responsible for recruiting this last lot of misfits, who not only estranged the adjacent, ancient - established in 164...

Well, the storm that passed through last night was nowhere near as severe as predicted, but sometime today there must have been an almighty gust of wind that simply took yesterday's tarp installation to the cleaners, leaving it attached by only one edge, and in a pile by the front gable of the studio. The resultant amorphous agglomeration of fabric is pictured above at the back of the wood/potting/garden shed. Back to the drawing board and a bit of e[Bay]Commerce is in order to raise the funds for a better solution to keeping my machine tools dry in the future, methinks. I have a plan: I have an STC 4038 studio microphone dating back to the 1950's [later, and to this day, made by Coles, and still widely in use by the BBC and recording studios worldwide]. It's a rare one: a low impedance model [30Ω] with a very low serial number [169]. If anyone reading this has a professional use for this wee beastie [c/w XLR adapter and is in a third-party ABS case] - I'm in the marke...

Pictured, nestling amongst the rather lugubrious late summer overgrowth at the bottom of the side garden, is the freshly-tarped roof of the studio workshop, which I managed to do get done this afternoon in advance of Storm Floris, that's putatively due to arrive tonight and blow through tomorrow. It was warm work fettling the 7x5 metre tarpaulin single-handedly, as even the merest whisper of a breeze made it balloon like a spinnaker and make it quite difficult to manage. Still, manage it I did, and the roof is covered at least until tomorrow morning, depending on the severity of the storm, although I'm hoping that the worst of it will be to the north of us. When I've got a spare two grand or so, I'll get some proper roofing material to make the place water-tight once and for all; a project I look forward to. In the meantime, these cheapo temporary fixes will have to suffice. I'll let you know more after Floris has been and gone...

Jane and I went over to Llanberis today to recce the food situation over there and have a bit of a wander about. It turns out that the legendary Pete's Eats has reopened after a major refurbishment;  actually a complete makeover into what appears to be a rather more sophisticated eaterie than the climbers' café of fame and fable. We are going to make a foray into the place at some time to check out the menu, fare and service at some future time, and so I will post on our findings as and when, but today we just fancied simpler fare, and so went up Llanberis Pass to The Pen-Y-Gwryd Hotel, to see what was happening there. The answer was not a lot, as we were only two of three punters there at lunchtime; which is a genuine shame as the place is still an absolute gem, frozen in time, and which hasn't altered a jot in our direct personal experience in just over forty-five years. My guess it hasn't altered by that much in over a century, apart from bringing the residential f...

Sometimes it's just plain weird how one can say something about world politics and almost immediately, that shit starts to become manifest. Last night I mentioned that Trump 'holds the football' , and lo and behold, tonight, The Guardian reports that the Orange One has ordered two US nuclear submarines to take up stations close to Russia in answer to comments made by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, regarding Russia's nuclear capability. This, as always, could simply be a willy-waving contest, but the problem with the exercising of male egos on this scale and in this particular theatre, where the two principle actors are both deluded male egotists, is that the potential consequences should the face-off turn real, are dire and world-threatening indeed. The fallout [literally] from any such conflict between the US and Russia would affect all of us trapped in the crossfire. Not great...