Observations from a Hill

I was just sitting here trying to come up with a topic for tonight's post - my usual status quo at this time of day; the fog of unknowing meeting the sea of doubt somewhere near the shores of confusion - when a bloody migraine struck me. I won't say right between the eyes, because that's not how migraines work. They're not just headaches; in fact I rarely get much of a headache as a consequence: I'm one of the lucky ones that experience the visual disturbances without the concomitant crippling head pain. But they are intrusive in the extreme, nevertheless, as, to be frank, not being able to see straight is exactly how it is with the damned things. Much as with hay fever, I arrived at experiencing migraines rather late in life: hay fever appeared when I was forty, and the migraines when I was in my mid-fifties, around 2011. They take the form of a gradual onset of 'the halo', which is a visual disturbance that varies from person to person: in my case a kind o...

I came across my copy of Carl Chinn's book "Peaky Blinders, The Real Story", whilst rummaging around in the studio. Looking through it at the old black & white photographs of my old city - a place I left almost exactly forty-five years ago at the age of twenty-five - I was moved by a curious nostalgia for something I voluntarily divorced myself from in 1980. It's a strange thing as I, as a young adult, actively hated the vestiges of Victorian Birmingham, and glorified the concrete brutalism of the city's 1970s architectural transformation. The thing is now, I love both: I love all the onion-skin layers of a the great city's history. But could I return there to live? Never. Big city, or even big town living has not been on my radar for most of my life. My village here has a population of fewer than five hundred  approximately nine hundred people [correction courtesy of Wikipedia: although I feel they might be conflating parts of the community that are elect...

  Early Autumn is kicking in and party season beckons: at least that's the way I would have characterised this time of year in my youth and early thirties. That too-soon dusk and the incipient sharpness of early evening air - although tonight it's still reasonably warm, to be fair - heralding in days past an evening of revelry, drunkenness and fun to be had. I still get that frisson of anticipation that goes with the turn of late summer into the fall, despite not really having any great desire to repeat the excesses of youth simply for the sake of repetition or continuity. The period of discovery in the particularities of nighthawk partying has long since passed for me; what was once new is now familiar and much less attractive, let alone sustainable. But I just hope that future generations will discover the magic that we experienced in our youth; go for it, suffer a bit, and grow as people, as a result. I fear that the current generation(s) are either denying experiencing them...

Just a brief one in tribute to the Red Roses and their victory over Canada to take the World Championship. In my humble opinion, as a rugby fan of many decades, the women's game at the international level has now drawn ahead of the men's. The women's game is rugby at its most complete and ultimately this means it's great for those of us who grew up with the game of total rugby union to watch and appreciate. All elements of the game are played and to the highest level of precision: from the ruck to the scrum; the line-out to the driving maul and the kicking game, all are played with a style, speed and elegance which harks back to the great days of 1970's men's rugby. Since then, the emphasis in the men's game seems to be brute strength and attrition over open play. I can honestly say that I've enjoyed the game far more during this World Cup than I have done for a good while. This year has also been a major tipping point in bringing not just equality to th...

...and what a time it was... I promised something more about yesterday's visit to Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire, so here we are. The house itself is an imposing Palladian edifice, designed by Thomas Paine and built in 1733 for the Winn family, on the site of a medieval priory. In the ownership of The National Trust since 1953, it houses a fine collection of Thomas Chippendale furniture, a substantial library and some artworks of note; two of which were pointed out to me by Steve on our visit there and are of particular interest to me personally. The first is "The Procession to Calvary", by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which, though difficult to see in the now customary - and necessary, from a conservation point of view - stygian gloom, is nevertheless magnificent. The second, however, is far more accessible, in terms of access, scale and lighting: "Sir Thomas More & His Family" [pictured above], a 1592 copy of a lost painting from 1527 by Hans Holbein the Y...

Pictured, The Tapestry Room at Nostell Priory, Nostell, near Wakefield; which we visited this morning. A pretty sumptuous collection of rooms, with a couple of stand-out artworks to which I will return tomorrow, as I'm frankly too knackered to think straight, have walked the gardens in beautiful early autumn sunshine, following this late afternoon with a trip into Huddersfield for a few pints and an excellent meal at the genuinely authentic Kebabish: again, I'll post something about that too, tomorrow. 

Tonight's repast, pictured, at Steve & Margaret's in Yorkshire: and a splendid repast it was too [now demolished]. Middle-eastern food, home-cooked, and frankly bloody lovely. This is de facto a brief diary post as I've just eaten my fill of this excellent fare, including pudding, and we are into our third or fourth bottle of wine, so I am not going to last much longer this evening. All I will say though, it is so good to see Steve & Marg: we are the oldest and best of friends. More tomorrow...

A decent day's calm, weather-wise, today; the firethorn berries are out in abundance [foreground], and the clematis seems to be holding its own across the archway. The sky appears to herald change for the good, but we'll see. Tomorrow we're off to Yorkshire for a couple of nights to see some old friends of ours, and we'll take pot-luck on the weather as usual. I'll leave out my feelings on the front page news in the FT today, as I really do not feel up to it: the idiocy just keeps coming, as steadily as Trump's encroaching dementia impinges on the fate of the world: just stop, old man, you gotta know your limitations. And that goes for the rather younger idiots behind the AI gold rush, too... 

Today we decided to head over to Conwy for a mooch about. I used to spend a good deal of my working life with BT in and around the town, but haven't been back there since I retired five years ago. We have recently joined CADW, the Welsh ancient monuments organisation, equivalent to English Heritage, as well as having rejoined The National Trust this year; so a visit to Y Castell Conwy seemed like a good starting point to the day, followed by lunch at the local Dylans restaurant in the town. Pictured is the upper floor of the Chapel Tower in the castle, in whose ground floor still lies buried the remains of an installation I did there back in 1991, with my left arm still in plaster from the fractured wrist I'd incurred on a recent job in a Birmingham nightclub that year [no, I wasn't a bouncer - quite literally...]. The cement screed on the floor of the base of the tower, if excavated, will reveal the ribbon cables I laid to control the display we installed back then. Initia...

I've been five years long out of the world of work now; content with the self-imposed strictures of writing this daily scribble versus the constant struggle against idiots who think they know better, despite their own piss-poor performance records. Whatever, I often mull on all those slights and knock-backs that we all experience in our work lives, most often from little Hitlers who choose to hide their own pathetic inadequacies behind your supposed 'inferior' performance, by belittling you and doing you down, despite clear evidence that you've actually done a good job. I think I've mentioned before that in my first 'proper' job after leaving college, I went from newbie salesman to the third best in the UK for the chain that I worked for, in just three months; only to be told by my manager that I was selling too much(!): how that computes in a retail environment, I really don't know. I've often wondered whatever happened to him after the entire chai...

A mixed bag of a day, I suppose you would call it. A trip out to Plas Newydd in the pouring rain - it's still pouring now at eight in the evening, having barely desisted since I crawled out of bed at eight this morning - to see some manner of art exhibition on display in the music room there. I haven't been in the house since I worked there for BT some years ago: I had access to the non-public underbelly of the place - very prosaic - in the process. Today's visit was a good chance to revisit Rex Whistler's dining-room mural again after some considerable time. It really is rather fine, and always brings to mind the sensibilities of Clough Williams-Ellis, of Portmeirion renown: that kind of left-of-field, wistful and curiously ornate nod to the Classical Mediterranean so popular with British artists of a certain elevated class back in the salad days of the inter-war period, but into which imagined, fanciful world Whistler also conflated the landscape of North Wales. Whist...

I was just idly thumbing through one of my favourite dipping books [pictured], and lit upon the article on Thallium, atomic number 81, chemical symbol Tl; a highly toxic post-transition heavy metal that does not occur freely in nature. It was discovered in 1862 and over the years since has seen it gain a grim reputation as a poisoner's go-to stealth weapon of choice. The symptoms of its toxic effects on the human body number at least five, and initially, diagnosis of Thallium poisoning was difficult and patchy to say the least. However, in her novel of 1961, "The Pale Horse", Agatha Christie showcases the use of the metal in a series of murders centred around a public house called "The Pale Horse", whereupon the presentation of Thallium poisoning became more widely known, leading to a number of real-world convictions of poisoners as a result. Reading this, a thought crossed my mind about that relative of mine who ran a similarly-named pub [The White Horse, Clun...

So - Google Deepmind wins gold at the 'coding Olympics'. Interesting, and frankly not a great surprise as coding is something that AI is becoming increasingly proficient at. Does this mean that AI is approaching actual artificial general intelligence [the ultimate goal of its proponents]? Of course not. Can it achieve things that humans simply can't? Yes. But by the same token, there are some tasks, even in the field of coding, that humans are simply better at; and these are the areas where human intuition, rather than simply raw knowledge or expertise trumps either in taking an idea further and beyond the rules and formalities of what would otherwise appear to be an entirely codified [sorry] discipline. Truth is that humans invented computers and computer coding in the first place; wrote the rule books and then proceeded to tear up those rules in the service of human invention, despite themselves. I once heard an 'expert' coder telling a young games programmer that...

I picked up the above - now mostly finished - packet of pork scratchings, from our local convenience store/Post Office in the village square, last night. Now, not all pork scratchings are created equal. Some are tough, some are soft (!). Some are highly [over?] salted, some are bland. Some are spot on, like the above pictured: easily crunchable rind under which lies a lardy layer of soft fat, to which is attached delightfully flaky dried meat. Absolutely scrumptious. There was a time when scratchings sold in packets in public places like pubs and off-licenses [you'll have to Google the latter reference], were almost exclusively a Midlands thing; particularly the Black Country, where most were and still are made, as indeed are those above. As with so many working-class foods and snacks, there is a certain general opprobrium directed towards them: a sort of looking-down-the-nose foodie sensibility that tends to dismiss such foodstuffs as somehow beneath the sophisticated palate of th...

So whadaya know and who'da thunk it: the prosecutors in the case of Charlie Kirk's murder will be seeking the death penalty [bread & circuses, anyone?] for the alleged assailant, Tyler Robinson, should he be tried and proven guilty. I would say that it is only par for the course for the American Right of today to be baying for blood after this too close to home blood letting, which had more to do with their own attitudes, philosophies and politics than the supposed '...rhetoric of the Hard Left...' that Trump was banging on about immediately after the shooting occurred. If shooting is rhetoric, that is simply because the American Right and the second amendment to the US constitution have historically enshrined it as such. To quote Galatians 6:7: ' ... whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' Living by the sword carries with it the concomitant that one might also die by the sword. Interestingly enough, an article by Simon Kuper in the FT Weekend mag...

Pictured above, on top of our forty-five-year-old copy of Lawrence Durrell's "The Greek Islands", is my silver Greek Cross, purchased in 1979 from a small dockside jewellery shop on Milos, as we waited for the ferry to take us to Santorini. This imperfect, hand-finished, stamping of the simple cross of Hellas - the crux immissa quadrata - has been with me now since I was twenty-four years old. It has seen off numerous silver chains over the decades, and now resides on a simple, double string of fine paracord. I fear it has lasted somewhat better than the island on which it was bought, however. Milos, when were we there all those years ago, was a pretty unremarkable, if pleasant and pretty Greek island, rather lumped together with others in its Cycladean orbit by Durrell in his book. Milos of course was the place where the Venus De Milo was discovered: in fact, while were there, a film was being made, "Milo-Milo", featuring Veruschka [Google her] centred around t...

I was watching the BBC Last Night of The Proms last night, but decided to bail out to bed before the finale, as I was tired. However, I fired up BBC Sounds on my iPhone so I could listen through to the end lying abed. I actually preferred the 'radio' listen to watching it, and I think I know why. Because that was the way I was exposed to The Last Night in the first place, back in the mid-1960s as a child. My uncle Edgar made me a crystal set for either Christmas or my birthday one year: from scratch, in his own workshop, from scavenged bits of GPO cast-offs and components from his stock of bits and pieces. He delivered the device to me, and rigged an aerial from my back-bedroom window to the furthest point from it at the back of our small garden. The thing was constructed of a black vulcanite front plate upon which all the controls and components were mounted, and it was housed in a simple wooden box of Edgar's making. [Pictured, a commercial crystal set]. The sound issued ...

Further reflections on my piece of the other day,  Dreamtime , began when I picked up this week's New Scientist the day after I posted; which runs an article on Quantum Geometry. '...How a special compass tells you how moving in a loop reorientates you. It would tell you if you unknowingly turned while walking in a circle back to your starting point and ended up pointing in a different direction...'. However you choose to interpret this - depends on your standpoint - it strikes me that this notion of loops that aren't straightforward loops, echoes, mirrors even, are the kind of dream state I described in the post. Given there is already published thinking on the notion that 'consciousness' itself is a product of interactions at the quantum level, it makes me wonder if all of those myriad states of being within the dream world, with their twists in space and time are actually 'closer' manifestations of the underlying mysteries of existence than our more ...

Charlie Kirk gets himself murdered. And I use the active tense deliberately. He got himself murdered. At this juncture in the twenty-first century, are we completely surprised? Should he have been completely surprised that someone should take a pot-shot at him, given the foul bile that he peddled via the internet? If you put your head above the parapet spouting untruths and hate, shouldn't you realise, maybe even expect, that someone is going to take extreme umbrage at you and your views? This is the point: people like Kirk feed the hatred whilst thinking that their notion of 'free speech' gives them the God-given right to pass through this world without sanction. They feel themselves to be the chosen ones; invulnerable to both criticism and consequence for their views and actions, despite the harm that they themselves visit upon others without due thought. Unscrupulous, sans moral compass, and with an unassailable sense of 'mission', these people imagine that they...

Further to last night's post and the madcap dream sequence that led to the idea for a game/story mentioned therein, I was mulling over not just that particular unconscious reverie, but many such dream sequences that have inhabited my sleep over many years, particularly in my childhood and youth. One characteristic feature of my dreamtime - and this might [even probably] be general to most people's dream-spaces - is the labyrinth, in some form or another: a [virtual] place of mystery on which much of human myth is built, from ancient times. Who, even in modern times does not enjoy a maze, either virtual or physical? This morning, I was mulling over where I'd got both my fascination for a good labyrinth from and how it has impacted on my dreamworld over the last seven decades, when Steve rang about our upcoming visit  to see them in Yorkshire. Talking to him about this maze/dream thing I realised that where the two of us grew up - Birmingham - and in particular the city centr...

  This morning, I awoke from a series of interconnected dreams, punctuated by short periods of wakefulness to go to the loo or take a drink of water, or both; always returning to the next episode of the same dream. I finally awoke at around seven-fifteen with a fully-formed idea for what could be a belter of a game, or even a story: maybe both. Imagine if you will, a folded, multidimensional world of interiors and exteriors where either can be both, separately or congruently; fixed or randomly distributed: a Matryoshka doll whose innermost shell can at once be its outermost, contained itself by the depth of ink of a full-stop on a medieval manuscript, that is shelved within a library housed in a jewellery box. I got up from my bed, made tea, and started a notebook, writing several pages of thoughts already fleeting as my dream-state started to fade into the day. As this idea was literally and profoundly exposed in its entirety to me this morning, I'll continue to think profoundly ...

As a short aside to last night's scribble, I mentioned telephone 'phreaking' in the piece. This was a practice popular in the 1960s and 70s that persisted well into the 1980s, which basically amounted to obtaining free phone calls on the public telephone system by various means. Back in those days this seemed like a big deal and it was seen as one in the eye for the establishment: a bit counter-culture, if you will. A version of this was famously alluded to in the 1983 film WarGames, where Mathew Broderick's character hacks a call in a payphone booth with some earth-calling chicanery involving a beer can ring-pull [itself an artefact now consigned to history] to short one of the transmitter terminals to ground. Whilst thinking about this, I was reminded of a couple of characters in the history of phone phreaking. First was the godfather of the practice, or at the very least one of its most prominent exponents: John Draper, a computer programmer now aged 82, who went by ...

I was watching a piece by a YouTuber I follow [NetworkChuck], earlier on today, about the huge data centres that sit on opposite sides of a road in Dallas, Texas. Whilst not unique, they represent a significant portion of the interchange of data that passes through the internet, nanosecond by nanosecond, carrying huge amounts of information traffic from all over the network. In the piece, much is made of the stringent physical security of the place, with multiple air-locked entry/exit traps, locked equipment cages and pass-card/fingerprint devices. All good and proper, one might imagine. But the fatal flaw in this cosy commercial scenario? But of course; in order to function in its allotted task sphere, it is perforce connected . To the internet. And hence potentially to any and every other network/server farm/computer/device also so connected, and so, vulnerable to attack by those that know how to exploit network and software vulnerabilities to whatever ends they so choose. Hacking, a...

OK - gratuitous Sunday Supper Post tonight, as I can't be arsed to think of much else after I took in the front page of the FT Weekend - I only got mine this afternoon - and immediately got a nose-bleed. The main masthead piece was about Angela Rayner's resignation - see the last couple of posts here - and the extraordinary news below it that Tesla are offering Musk a $1tn payout to hit certain targets over the next ten years, which must be a strategic ploy to try and reign in the man who bought their company, made it super-successful and has since proceeded to fuck them over by his madcap antics at the court of King Trump. Whatever, it gave me a nosebleed, unlike my dinner; nos da... 

The biggest problem with writing a blog without a central topic or purpose is that sometimes finding a theme for the evening's post is a bit fraught if one simply has either run dry of ideas, or, as tonight, I've got a complex idea that I'm simply too tired to explore at present. I'll return to what I'm mulling over at the moment at a later date, methinks. Anyhow, Jane has just opened the door to the living room so that I can hear a Proms performance of 'Mars' from Holst's Planet Suite. This immediately brought to mind morning assemblies at my infant/junior school in the 1950/60s, where we were exposed to the most wonderful music to start the day - via the technology of a gramophone record player and loudspeaker of utilitarian grade but quite fine quality sound, that I remember fondly to this day. Those were the glory days of post-war social living: schools provided learning, culture and physical exercise; whilst fostering a nurturing, though reasonably ...

Predictably, Angela Rayner has fallen on her sword and resigned both as Housing Secretary and as Deputy Prime Minister; a ritual sacrifice on the altar of ostensible political probity simply to satisfy the blood-lust of the Right. Marvellous. The one shining working-class light in this Labour Party and government has been snuffed out as a result of trial by the mob: the lynching of the last real voice of the working class is complete, and the Right have spared no time in crowing about it like the bunch of self-aggrandising no-marks that they are; sparing no thought for the truths behind Rayner's story in the matter. That she resigned shows that she is a woman of honour. That her resignation was accepted shows that the Labour Party acts within the rules of the game. However, in introducing these stricter rules of probity, they now find themselves having to sacrifice good and honest people in the process. Who benefits ultimately from this act of political seppuku? The political Right...

Whatever we are to make of Angela Rayner's current predicament over her missteps over property and tax; and to be fair, there is as of today no official pronouncement on the affair and so, in my opinion, comment should be kept at simply that: comment. But in this always on, insta-feed world of opinion-as-fact, I know best and the rest of you can shut up, the woman has already been convicted, tried and executed. It's bad enough that the rumour mill of social media has already made its varied and often vitriolic pronouncements on the matter; but the worst thing is that Badenoch and her reprobate Tory opposition are claiming the moral high ground in the matter: as if! Even given that Angela Rayner deliberately tried to evade taxes - I don't really believe she did, and anyway the jury's still out on the matter - where does that put the very many on the blue side of the House to whom tax avoidance is a routine of life? That one is illegal and the other not is but a nicety o...

We were just talking about the long lost AADW studios in Y Capel Tabernacl [blog posts passim], Bethesda, which eventually burnt down in the mid 1990s, to be replaced eventually by a block of houses [pictured above, after the fire and and before its demolition]. The branch had an association with Theatr Fach, who for a while stored various flats and props in the chapel. There was, as I remember it, a plan afoot to stage productions there by the company, but financial restrictions meant that we couldn't bring the building up to the appropriate standards for public performance, such as fitting adequate fire doors, supplying sufficient fire alarms/extinguishers or even decent toilet facilities(!), so the grand idea withered on the vine along with our enthusiasm for the project.  It was a shame, really, as the upstairs housed a large stage area, with audience seating on three sides for a good eighty to a hundred people; but unfortunately the only realistic exit, whilst wide enough, was...

Two things: first, the other day, I was listening to a Radio Four dramatisation about the 1972 report " The Limits To Growth", how it came about and how for at least thirty years its findings were poo-pooed into obscurity by the economic establishment. The other is the news that the Tory opposition leader Kemi Badenoch, has gone into full banzai mode over oil and gas production in the North Sea, threatening - should her ailing party of ineffectual no-marks ever get near power again - to rip up every climate control agreement made in the last twenty years and drag us back into the nineteenth century. The first points out a very salient - and to be frank, blindingly obvious - concept: that unlimited growth is impossible in a finite system. I mean, for chrissakes, the basic arithmetic is not difficult: what is finite is finite, after all. I know the arguments are far more nuanced than that bald statement, but at the end of the day, finite is just what it says on the tin. As to ...

I was following a thread this evening about Jimi Hendrix and his opinion of who was his choice for the greatest guitarist of all time: it was click-bait of course, as the man apparently never rose to his being considered such, or or ever offered any alternative to that opinion: he was a diffident and modest man after all. So why is Jimi Hendrix considered still to be the greatest [rock] guitarist of all time? Given the plethora of great guitarists out there - particularly today, when guitar music has been fully rehabilitated to its rightful place in the musical pantheon - you might argue that his technical and musical limitations pale into insignificance with the mastery of the instrument manifested by so many modern practitioners of the six-string art. I wrote a little piece  a couple of years ago about what I consider to be the single most important piece of improvised [and it was improvised in entirety apart from the basic structure of the song] rock guitar music of all time: ...