Observations from a Hill

  Pictured, my recently acquired Peterson pipe perched atop a plug of Cornell & Diehl's Black Frigate tobacco. To the left of it, the lovely Blue Funnel Line dice set that I bought this year from Rosie's Antiques in Bishop's Castle , Shrophire on our last stay there; and to the right the lovely teapot that the boys bought me as a gift a while ago, which has only so far brewed a very fine pot of Darjeeling . I have also recently ordered a blacksmith-crafted Santoku kitchen knife from Nakamura's workshop in Japan , as my current pair of knives are sadly now very tired and in need of retirement. I look forward to being able to thinly slice liver again for our signature recipe of liver, garlic and parsley, the erstwhile Liver Provençale   that we have been cooking for over four decades now. I think that what I'm trying to say is that flavour matters: the Black Frigate tobacco smells like an old leather sofa and its tastes are complex and informed by the rum in ...

  I've written quite a bit, in the past, about photographs and time: how sometimes, with a photograph of unknown provenance - no personal connection - possible narratives present themselves to the mind unbidden. As I said last night, that's the nature of the pattern/narrative-seeking human mind. Sometimes, as with my late-seventies industrial photographs of the Black Country , the subject is known [as I took them in the first place] but the background detail has been forgotten over time. Pictured, however, is a photograph that has been part of my life since early childhood, and which currently hangs in our dining room. The very young girl in this over one-hundred-year-old studio photograph is my maternal grandmother. This image - then in a rather heavier, earlier frame - used to hang in the front bedroom of my great-great aunt's home - Fairview , Fromes Hill, Herefordshire - which my sister and I used to share as very young children ourselves, back in the late 1950s and ea...

I wrote a piece earlier this year "Hyperactive" about Vannevar Bush and information overload. My conclusion was that little had changed in terms of such overloading in the eighty years between his article " As We May Think " of 1945 and the present day. With each subsequent development iteration in data handling and processing, either incrementally or through radical leaps of technological progress, the quantity of data to be handled, processed and filed increases concurrently: an inversion of Parkinson's Law and an extension of Moore's Law alike. At the heart of the phenomenon though, is an incontrovertible human truth: an obsession with progress and growth for their own sake, which overrides the fundamental needs that they appear to satisfy. Human beings are inquisitive, socially-connected entities that love and actively seek to find connections, patterns and logic in the overall gestalt soup of our existence: in making sense of our sensory overload, w...

The tractrix . What the hell is it? Simplest answer is that it's a mathematical curve that can be produced mechanically by the rotation of a rod or a line through a plane: in itself not a fact that immediately strikes one as interesting, methinks. But as it turns out, it has a very practical application that might not be obvious to a non sound engineer ; and something that has impacted on the lives of just about everyone who loves music. The tractrix curve is one of two such curves, the other being the exponential curve , employed in the design of loudspeakers for the last century or so, either in the domestic realm, or, more particularly in the sphere of the auditorium or stadium PA system . In short, it's the basis of the horn-loaded loudspeaker / loudspeaker cabinet that makes projecting music to its audience as loudly and efficiently as possible. The horn loudspeaker is the most effective projector of sound for the least energy input we have to date. I have written quite ...

We went for a decently brisk constitutional around Church Island, Menai Bridge [Ynys Llandysilio, Porthaethwy in Welsh] before lunch today: chilly - somewhat bracing, even - but very pleasant. We always finish our circuit of the island by going via The Belgian Promenade up past Carreg Halen and under the bridge itself: the very best views of the structure are from sea-level, looking up at this magnificent structure, and back across towards the mainland. Always a time for quiet reflection, we've made this walk hundreds of times over the past forty-five years and taken many friends and family on it when visited. It's a pity St Tysilio's tiny church [Eglwys St. Tysilio] isn't open more often as it's a splendid place to visit, small as it is. 

... a' Changin'. Well, here we are again at the tail end of October and time-shifted back to Greenwich Mean Time for yet another winter. Hence, I'm still sat here at effectively 22:15 British Summer Time, writing this. These days the changeover simply heralds the gloom of the coming cold season; whereas in my youth, as I've probably said before, the changing of the clocks signalled the start of the autumn party season and hanging about in brightly lit pubs and bars drinking copious quantities of falling-over beverages until the early hours of the morning. Those days are long gone: happily, in a bitter-sweet way; the salad days and high-life of youth having given way to a rather more sedate alcohol consumption of an evening with rather less of the concomitant collateral damage to the brain. One thing I would also remark upon, though, is the effective loss of the bi-annual ritual of forgetting to alter the clocks before bed: these days most of our timekeeping is updated f...

  ... run a hospitality business. I'm sorry if this sounds like continuous carping and griping [blog posts passim] about one particular establishment, but these things have to be said. We went over to Biwmaris for our customary lunch of soup and chips today and found the town - and the pub - rammed. The frequent heavy showers had forced people to seek shelter and sustenance wherever they could, the Bull being no exception. What we found there was the usual story: a bar, lounge and restaurant full to capacity: all ordering food and drink, and just three front-of-house staff to cope. As always, I'll point out with some emphasis that those three were unfailingly polite, courteous and efficient; given the enormity of the task they faced. Nevertheless, there was an inevitable wait for both service and food - how could it possibly be otherwise? - and a queue (!) across the bar, as only one person was tasked with dealing with orders both from there and the not-small front lounge. The ...

I think a kind of addendum to last night's post is in order, as I've found links to Hudson and Beardsmore's  Commonwealth War Graves Commission entries in the civilian casualties section, (thanks to Google AI , weirdly enough: it does have its uses, after all...) where their commendations are noted. I've added these and a few links in that post to follow up on stuff if you want. The point is that Joseph Beardsmore was my uncle Ivor's father: I've referenced Beardsmore - as he was always known to my family - before in blog posts past. The young Ivor and Irene stayed with us in Winson Street for a while, sleeping on the sofa bed in our tiny living room: our open house in existence even in the fifties and early sixties. Ivor, too, is no longer with us, sadly: tempus fugit, time & tide, etc. As it's my seventy-first birthday today, I'll leave it at that, methinks...

Good Friday, 1941 . German bombs hit houses in High Park Road, Smethwick , trapping thirteen women and children in a coal cellar beneath one of them, where they were sheltering from the air raid. Two local men, George 'Soapy' Hudson and Joseph Beardsmore , dashed into the mayhem that followed and pulled out and saved nine children and three women from the wreckage of the building, before both succumbing to the effects of leaking gas pipes at the scene. They were unable to save the last trapped woman as a result. The two men received a King's Commendation and a special medal struck by the town council for their bravery; however, the Home Secretary of the time refused to honour them with The George Cross - the civilian equivalent of The Victoria Cross - despite a petition to the effect signed by six thousand people. These men were of The Midlands , they were not southerners , and they were not elevated in any way in society, but they exhibited the kind of selfless brave...

Pictured bottom right amongst the clutter on my desk is a record I bought from the indoor market at Oswestry  of a similar vintage to me, on our brief sojourn into Mid Wales last week. A copy of " Double Barrel " by Dave & Ansel Collins from 1970 . This, along with many great ska and rocksteady of the late sixties - I featured Dandy's "The Operation" in a post in 2020  - was the musical underpinning of my early adolescence and the soundtrack to my approaching adulthood. These glorious emanations from the recording studios of Jamaica were part of the very fabric of life in my part of Birmingham at the time. This particular track, along with the likes of " The Liquidator ", " The Israelites ", " Red, Red Wine [the original Tony Tribe reggae version of the Neil Diamond song]" and so many others, featured frequently in the weekly youth disco that we went to at the time, which was held in the prison warders' club in Wins...

Introspection and reflection - as opposed to nostalgia and regret - are a natural concomitant of the ageing process. The former pairing serve to accentuate the present and inform the possibilities of the future [however long or short], whilst the latter pairing inform nothing, ignoring the present and denying the future in the service of the past. Not in my book a healthy mindset. An appreciation of as opposed to a longing for one's past, is however to reinforce one's connection with the world that is the present, and which presents the potential of the future. I gave up cigarettes some twenty-odd years ago, having decided that I no longer enjoyed smoking the damned things, and that the habit was just that: a habit. It was potentially doing me harm, and worst of all, gave me no pleasure whatsoever, at great monetary expense to boot. A few years ago, I said that if I made it to seventy years old I might consider taking up smoking the occasional pipe of tobacco: I had smoked a pi...

I got an email from Phil today with the results of some tinkering he'd been doing with Google Gemini AI , on a photo of the two us taken two or three years ago - not the image above I hasten to add - which was taken amid the chaos of my studio workshop, which he then upscaled. Although the AI had taken quite a on a photo of the two us taken two or three years ago - not the image above I hasten to add - which was few liberties with the actuality of my mate and myself - in our ego's favour I have to admit - the removal of the clutter and the complex lighting from the image was as good as the very best Photoshop wrangler's work. It even included subtle shadows that would indicate that the photo was taken in front of a standard studio scoop background. OK, I thought, and downloaded the Gemini app to have a play with it. First, I chucked it a trivial task: create a logo from my own logotype in the manner of pre-WWII Soviet design , which it duly did. I then thought I'd try s...

I've been watching a YouTube channel called Essential Craftsmen , where a guy 'reacts' [in the modern usage of the word] to assorted content centred around - you guessed it - craftsmen/women engaged in traditional woodworking practices throughout the world. His style and tone of delivery made me think of him as a kind of American version of that pioneer of crafts-content-watching/reacting: dear old Jack Hargreaves of UK TV fame in the sixties and seventies, in his TV show " Out of Town ". The programme consisted of a series of short 16mm films to which Hargreaves would add narration, comment and anecdote from a studio set built to resemble a garden shed. His approach would doesn't look out of place on YouTube today, aside from the period production values and reproduction quality. Here he is in a episode on walking sticks and hurdle-making from I think the 1980s, on YouTube today. One thing that does mark these programmes out from the modern is the pacin...

We had our monthly lunch club today at The White Eagle in Rhoscolyn , Ynys Môn , and in a brief conversation between Leo, Nigel and myself, Leo mentioned data lakes , which are large collections of data stored in their native format; as structured, semi-structured or binary data streams. Think database tables , Word documents, spreadsheets or audio and video files. This 'wheelie-bin' approach to storage can make access to the granular information within individual files much easier, and the whole process cheaper, to boot. As I understand it, rather than indexing, relating and applying metadata to catalogue atomic data objects for later sorting and retrieval; you rather train a system to seek, access and retrieve data for further processing using knowledge of the data structures themselves as identifiers to guide the retrieval process itself. This immediately brought to mind my original thoughts on the now sadly defunct, abandoned and totally deceased Apple Quicktime API , w...

Pictured, inside the Chapter House of the ruined Valle Crucis Abbey, near Llangollen, at Llantysilio in Denbighshire; showing the rather beautiful rib-vaulted ceiling there. I've seen photographs of the place many times before, but we've never visited until today, despite having lived just over an hour away for over forty-five years. Despite being rather unceremoniously dwarfed in area to one side by a massive campsite, inside the curtilage of the place it is as peaceful a place as any, quite lovely in its ruination, its eight-hundred-year history written in its remaining stones. Well worth the visit: it won't be our last...

We went over to Welshpool today for a mooch around. After a cup of coffee, we had a quick stroll up and down the main street in the town, and were pleased to find our favourite antique clothing shop, Ashman's, still in business and with its original proprietor, Diane Ashman still at the helm at the age of 81: a joy to behold under the lead grey sky that has held sway over us all for the last few days and a welcome antidote to the depression-inducing gloom. From there we drove over to Berriew for a pint and to visit The Andrew Logan Museum of Sculpture for the first time in some years: a place we often used to frequent in the late nineties into the current century. As always, the place is a ray of sunshine and always serves to lift the spirits, and not bad value at a fiver a pop, either.... 

Today, we went to Trefonen to look for signs of the Morris family in the graveyards there. We found half-a-dozen Morris graves and the mention of four more on the Roll of Honour in the church there: research to be done on our return home later in the week. We had a wander around Oswestry and a pint in a pub there: there seemed to quite a number open, which is encouraging given the state of the licensing industry and culture these days; although whether this typical of the town - it was market day, after all - remains to be seen. However, it's a very pleasant and surprisingly vibrant place and well worth the visit. We then investigated a place we'd noticed on our way into town, in Llanfyllin : the old workhouse , pictured, which is now part museum, part community resource and part bunkhouse. A little tired and under-funded, it is nevertheless free to explore, has a video explainer, a cafe and secondhand bookshop operating an honesty-box principle . One thing though, was the ...

  I'll keep my posts brief this week as we've no working broadband here in the cabin, the view from which pictured above. Despite the curious high-pressure-induced mist, this is a very beautiful valley; quite unlike those to the north or the south of it. I realised that my post of last night is a tad misleading: we're actually staying across the border in Powys, rather than in Sîr Ddinbych [Denbighshire] itself. We will of course be roaming in and out of both counties over the next couple of days on our quest for family connections. We had a drink in The Hand before checking in at our rental: I had a couple of pints of very acceptable Bass ale in what can only be described as a good old-fashioned rural village pub: the kind of hostelry I remember and love from my earlier years and which sadly is on the decline in the second quarter of the twenty-first century. It might appear at first sight to the nervous interloper to be the very model on which The Slaughtered Lamb of ...

So, we're off tomorrow on our brief sojourn into deepest Denbighshire, to try and glean some more of our collective family history and revisit stony ground from our ancestry. That the county is within spitting distance from where we have lived most of our lives, I guess is no coincidence: we moved here from the city because there was an emotional pull that I would characterise as spiritual. We felt at home, and still feel so. Cartref: home. Our little village, Rachub - Yr Achub - literally the rescue: a refuge. More over the next two or three days: also there will be a lengthy report on The Hand Inn - Y Tafarn Llaw - at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, which will hopefully be our local for the duration, and also on the quality of its Bass...

We had a bit of A Grand Day Out today. We met the boys at Bodnant Gardens in the Conwy Valley this morning - pictured, The Pin Mill at the end of one of the formal gardens , reflected in the lily pond to its front. We'd visited this spot before with my parents, before my mother died, and I had worked on the estate a couple of times with my job at the time, but we'd never actually explored the full extent of the place, which is eighty acres in extent, and which have been developed and continue to be developed, since 1874, when the original late eighteenth century plot was expanded into the place that exists today. I have to say that this place is probably the finest suite of gardens and parkland I've ever seen; better than Chatsworth , Plas Newydd or Blenheim , and far more imaginative than Versailles ' open parklands. It is unrivalled in my humble opinion and experience: the view created across the Italianate terracing from the house and across the Conwy Valley ove...

  I was going to post a supper-related lazy one tonight, but although the food looked good on the plate and in the pic, both the raw materials and my rather perfunctory execution of their cooking somewhat disappointed me, so I will turn instead to my latest little acquisition, pictured above. Not the rather antique book of labels - the origin of which is lost to memory - but the splendid little pen resting thereupon. This is a Kaweco Sport [pocket] fountain pen, which when capped is a very small and pocket friendly 10cm in length, but with the cap posted, is a goodly-sized handful, facilitating ease of use. The nib I chose was their 'broad', and whilst my Parker Duofold Junior rather better qualifies this description, I'm sure, with use, it will bed in nicely; although having said that, the writing quality of the thing is smooth and sure, right out of the box. The colour of it is described as Burgundy , a shade I'm quite drawn to. I wonder why? And it is currently cha...

As I said yesterday evening I drove up to the Stretton Fox , near Warrington , today to meet Jane and Kevin, as usual on our customary half-way-point pick up between Carnforth and here in Rachub . As the Wainwrights ale was off, I chose a pint of the estimable Timothy Taylor's Landlord bitter instead, and I was not disappointed: it was in particularly fine fettle and was obviously in the sweet spot of the barrel. It's no great surprise that the establishment has been awarded prizes from the Brewery for its keeping of their ales: splendid stuff. For supper tonight, we contented ourselves with a couple of Cornish pasties [stock picture of such above] Jane bought from a butchers in Kirkby Lonsdale the day before last, which we revived in the air-fryer to great effect: can't speak too highly of the device; it does so many things so well. Cornish Pasties, like pork pies , however, can be a bit of a minefield in the search for a decent example [a bit like getting a good pin...

I was filling up at the petrol station at Biwmaris this afternoon in preparation for my drive up to Stretton tomorrow to pick Jane up from her visit to see her family, when I noticed there was a resident arachnid behind the glass of the pump I was using: pictured above. Oddly, my immediate thought was what on earth does the spider make of its current micro universe? Below [it] a constant flux of movement and activity in place of solid ground, and above [it] a largely fixed, glowing orange sky with odd clouds that occasionally flicker across it in some apparently pre-ordained fashion. What can the creature make of the the other inordinately large, shadowy 'creatures', that from time to time appear from nowhere beneath it; or do they appear as earth movements or roiling seas? And how is it that these gross movements appear to have no effect on the stability of repose of the spider from its own [gravitationally perpendicular] viewpoint? Much as in Edwin Abbot 's " Flat...

I was messing around with making some noise earlier on this evening - pictured, some of the electronica employed in making various bleeps, drones and rhythms: a strange hobby, I know - and ended up creating what I thought were quite passable Dr. Who incidentals from the late sixties. I got my supper out of the oven and switched on the TV, searching for something vaguely entertaining to watch while I ate. Scrolling away from the usual tedious mainstream of Eastenders , etc., I entered  the territory of fringe commercial channels aimed at God knows what audience, and lit upon a channel called U&Eden, which for once doesn't seem to be targeting the old [myself included in that demographic of course]. Bugger me if the programme that had just started was a re-run of " Spearhead From Space ", the Doctor Who story first aired in 1970, and the first to feature Jon Pertwee as the reincarnated Doctor. Two things on the music front issue from this: the person principally resp...

As I didn't have a Lazy Sunday meal post this week, here's one I made tonight. Pictured, my solo repast [Jane's away on a visit for a few days] of Tagliatelle al Ragu [ Bolognese ], and very fine it was too. I have never claimed this recipe to be mine own: it is one passed down to the world by the late, great Antonio Carluccio . It is basically meat and tomatoes, adding only onion, white wine and seasoning. He recommended a couple of hours cooking: I always finish mine off for half a day in the slow cooker , having sealed the minced meats [50-50 pork and beef ] and fried the onion in advance. Tip: seal the meat as solid chunks or meatballs , then cook them down in the sauce for several hours before breaking them up. It's the simplest of recipes, and whilst I agree with Carluccio that tagliatelle is the only appropriate pasta to eat with it [added to the sauce, not just the sauce dolloped on top of the pasta], I always add grated fresh Parmesan - something that puris...

Life, unsurprisingly, is demonstrably organic. It is subject to the fundamental laws of entropy: the tendency of all systems towards chaos. The human race has spent a considerable amount of effort over the centuries trying to circumvent this simple fact of existence. Check out the tech-bro billionaire club aiming for personal immortality as a contemporary case in point: a futile pursuit on so many levels. I guess that the closest we get as a species to denying the decay and dissolution of our own corporeal existence is through our art and music, and even there in the sweeter realms of artistic abstraction from life, there is decay, wear, and damage. Welcoming entropy into our lives, though, can have a positive side if we let it. We simply need to accept life with all its imperfections for what it is. Even the most apparently perfect works of human creation are far from absolute perfection, and they are all the better for it. Some try to deny the ravages of time in a vain search for the...

There have been many naysayers against the efficacy of renewable energy sources ever since we decided that it might just be necessary in the long run to switch away from fossil fuels in order to stem the tide of climate change and the ultimate screwing over of our one and only planet. In fact, far from - Trump's words [wind power] being '...the most expensive form of energy...' - wind power can contribute, in stormy weather such as we get most autumns and winters these days, up to three-quarters of our electricity demand. Unfortunately, the downside is a distribution network unable to cope with the sheer amount of potential electricity generated at such times, when in fact, the wholesale price of electricity can and does become negative. As we still have a relatively modest power storage infrastructure, the producers have choices that need to made when that happens. In a telling little piece in this weekend's Financial Times, Malcolm Moore quotes Finton Devenney, a seni...

Earlier this year I wrote about Longplayer , the art/music project started in the last moment of 1999, and which 'composition' will continue without repetition until the last moment of 2999, exactly 1000 years later. I mention this because, as I do occasionally, I fired up the app on my phone for a listen to it, and was struck by the thought as to how, if the project actually gets maintained that far into the future, folk might view it and the actual activity of maintaining it, deep into its lifespan. I wondered if, as in the manner of Douglas Adams' Deep Thought in "The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy", it might cease at some point to be a simple if profound enquiry - in this case, art project - and become a religion; it's original purpose lost to memory and the continuing modus operandi of its maintenance transmuted into holy ritual. Just a thought. The thing is, there is No-Thing...

I'm trying to ignore the minor tempest battering Fairview Heights currently [Storm Amy: a bit of an anodyne moniker, if you ask me], and so have contented myself with digging out some leftovers from the freezer - a couple of curries, in fact - plopping them on a low heat to defrost, and satisfy myself with some excellent slow TV from just over fifty years ago. A time when we had but three TV channels; two of them state-run. The piece I've been watching is a short documentary about the long-established English camera maker, Gandolfi [Brothers]. When I was at art school during the seventies, in particular after I had decided finally to throw in my lot with photography as a work medium, the name Gandolfi was held in awe, nay reverence, by my peers. A small London manufacture based in Peckham Rye, Louis Gandolfi started making fine cameras in 1885. They continued producing these works of functional art and craftsmanship until 2017, although the last of the Gandolfis themselves died...

Fun and games looming on the twelfth of October, it seems; when the new EU entry checks at Dover and Folkestone will kick in for freight and coach passengers. Car drivers get a brief respite until November the first. Oh, joy: getting into our own continent to holiday, conduct business or visit family and friends is just about to get harder and frankly much more tedious. Thank you Brexiteers! Job well done, at least if you subscribe to the xenophobic tosh touted by the Little Englanders currently causing so much fuss about 'foreigners'. Reform, Conservatives, [The Metropolitan Police], Trump, et al: they all seem to want to drag not just this sorry little archipelago, but the rest of the world, into the fucking nine circles of hell: and to boot, the first named storm of the season is already banging on the windows here; a pattern becoming ominously familiar as global climate change takes its toll on the planet. What is the political Right's response to it? Reverse all global...

Data: the plural of datum, from the Latin: '...that which is given; a fact...' . Facts. Linguistic or enumerated encapsulations of the real; the concrete. Fact: '... a thing that is known or proved to be true...' . In 2017, Kelly-Anne Conway, a Trump advisor during his first administration, effectively coined the phrase 'alternative facts'; which obviously trades semantic redundancy for political expediency: a non sequitur par excellence: it's akin to saying '...quite unique...'. But there we are; trapped in an Alice Through the Looking Glass quantum world of make believe, where one thing mutates into another and back again almost, but not quite, at random. And therein lies the rub, mes enfants: The people who fuck around with language and meaning to suit their own political and pecuniary agendas are the very ones who want control over actual facts, not the made-up ones they promulgate to us - the hoi polloi - cloaked under the fog of unknowing that...