Observations from a Hill

Pictured, Yr Elen, from above Mynydd Llandegai late this morning, just before the squall that was already forming over the Eryri massif obscured the Carneddau in grey cloud and rain: a promising start that was already thwarted by the time we had reached the other side of Deiniolen, heading for Ynys Môn and lunch. The Bull in Biwmaris proved an unworkable option as it was rammed, and they don't do bar-food on Sundays when full. So a quick pint later, we decided to decamp to The Gazelle again for a Sunday roast and a glass of wine. After a mercifully light shop at Waitrose in Porthaethwy, we hied for home and the curiosity of a long-distance topical quiz via John's phone with friends in Scotland for an hour. Just a snack for supper, followed by a good two or three hours jangle, and Fairview Heights is settling down for the night: not exactly rock & roll, but there you go: we are all now, shall we say, a tad advanced in years, and so quite naturally averse to staying up till d...

Still full of cold, but it's now abating somewhat, which is a good job as we've got John [pictured the old Zenith pocket watch of mine that he's just fixed up for me] staying for a few days, and we also had our monthly lunch club today at The Gazelle in Menai Bridge, at erm, sort of tea-time-ish. Apparently this time of eating [ca 17:00-18:00] is becoming de rigueur amongst the younger generations here in the UK, who all seem to go to bed at the sort of times which in my youth would have been well into the start of my evening/early morning socialising: nine or even as early as eight o'clock at night. So the trend now is to eat out effectively in the late afternoon, in order to ensure that digestion doesn't interfere with getting off to sleep. To someone of my generation, this just seems frankly bizarre, but there you go. 

Feeling utterly drained and downright grumpy right now ["what's changed?" some might say] and I must emphasise that this is not the infamous and entirely spurious 'man-flu', but simply an ordinary, straightforward head cold. I'd forgotten [it is a very long time since the last one] just how bloody miserable the middle three days of the Common Cold [pictured, the culprit - a rhinovirus] really are. When I was young they were such a frequent occurrence we just took them on the chin and blithely infected everyone else around us. Whatever; this old bugger, whilst not out of commission - it takes a lot more than this - is in pretty much full-on 'can't be arsed mode' tonight. So I'll bid you nos da, and have another glass of wine. Normal service will be resumed as and when...

We're both full of winter colds [the first for years] at the moment and to be blunt pretty miserable, and for myself, almost completely lacking in motivation, so I'll keep this brief. We live in divisive times: I think that is pretty self-evident, but what is most disturbing to my mind is less the deliberate political divisiveness that fuels inequality at its heart, and which fosters discontent in the poorer two-thirds of society, than the willingness of those who stand to benefit from the safety-net of a welfare state should they at some time need it, to berate those who do and any policy that protects the rights that the state so enshrines; still characterising those who rely on benefits as 'scroungers'. God, when is that fucking sad, tired litany of right-wing tosh going to wither and die? I'm seventy-one now and absolutely sick and tired of working-class people - and it is, sadly largely thus, fuelled by the crass disinformation peddled by bad actors and amplifi...

Budget day 2025. Despite the absurd pre-release of the OBR report on it an hour before Reeve's speech in the House [deliberate? - who knows?], she was nevertheless not thrown by this blindsiding, which could have been a gift to the Opposition, delivering a confident appraisal of an altogether not bad budget, which balanced fiscal restrictions with adequate, incremental delivery of services. Given the budgetary hand of cards they were dealt in the first place, I think it's fair to say that the Labour government's progress, although slow, is at least sure and steady. Not everyone is going to be happy with what the budget contained, but then again that is true of any budget delivered by any government of whatever political stripe. If this leaking of the OBR's report was deliberate in an attempt to spook the markets to the benefit of the opposition, then it failed. If it was a genuine accident then someone needs to be held to account for it. Whatever the scenario, little ...

Be careful what you wish for. An adage most people would associate with their grandmothers, but one which they would well heed. Been watching the follow-up series to "Secret Army"; "Kessler", about the subsequent 'career' of one of the Nazi protagonists from the original series, made in the early 1980s. I was not exactly shocked, but certainly interested to note the parallels between then and now. Although the original protagonists of European Fascism are now largely dead and buried, their spectre lives on. Age doesn't automatically confer wisdom on anyone, but experience is its natural concomitant, and learning by experience one would think is the natural order of things. Unless that experience is divorced completely from historical context, which for a large swathe of the population seems to be the case these days, mediated as it is by the possible falsities of media consumption, we choose to side with the loudest and most charismatic voices, at the e...

I had a fully formed idea for tonight's post earlier today, that unfortunately now escapes me entirely, my having not taken the precaution of jotting down the crux of the idea before getting entirely distracted by some other stuff. Such is life. So, back to Musk and his mad ideas of colonising Mars to save the people of Earth. Even at a cursory glance, the notion is just plain bonkers, let alone if you actually zone in on the logic and logistics of the idea. As Neil Degrasse Tyson [respected astrophysicist] characterised it in an interview with the oh-so uneducated Piers Morgan: the time it would take to terraform an essentially dead planet with no atmosphere, would span much more than mere generations and consume more money and effort than is imaginable, making the entire enterprise nothing more than a vanity project that reflects an ego of itself planetary proportions. Instead of ploughing his vast wealth and resources into solving our climate problems here at home - a far, far e...

I was listening earlier this week to one of the excellent, re-run, Melvyn Bragg "In Our Time" Radio Four programmes. It's principal topic was eclipses, solar and lunar. It was a fascinating discussion overall, but an anecdote related by one of the guest experts chimed with me personally. He had, as a child in junior school been led out into the playground along with his classmates, to observe a partial eclipse of the sun. His teacher had prepared a telescope and a screen of sorts to safely show the image of the occlusion of the sun as it happened in real time, and tasked the class with making observations of time, temperature and so-on during the event. I say this chimed with me because I had exactly the same experience back in my childhood at City Road School in Birmingham, with our teacher setting us similar tasks to record the event. I don't recall the exact year, but I guess it was early-mid 1960s. I've never witnessed a total eclipse of the sun - and may neve...

I signed off the other night with an answer to Steve's comment on the post Traces  by saying that my quest to recreate the glorious tastes of Birmingham Anglo-Indian Madras curries in my own cooking continues to this day, as much in thought experiment as in actual empirical trial these days. I think I have a potential modus operandi, which draws from my experience and recipes, various authors on the subject, and my pretty detailed flavour memories of past lunches and suppers eaten around the West Midlands in the days before I moved here in 1980. My recall of flavours is pretty strong even at this distance in time, and I can group them into roughly three categories, depending on the restaurant. My favourite Madras curries were from The Light of Bengal and The Khanapina in Edgbaston and a takeaway on the Bearwood Road - whose name is lost to me - in Birmingham itself, and The Shah Bagh in Dudley, where I often took lunch as a hungover student. All of these had similarly dark, very li...

 'twould seem that the chickens are slowly coming home to roost for the previous Tory government and their mates over the Covid pandemic shenanigans and subsequent trouser-lining. In this week's Eye we hear again about Ayanda capital's principals pocketing of millions whilst still insisting "...nothing to see here..." At least the owner of this egregious pile of avaricious 'commerce' has now been arrested: it remains now to make some of the shit stick to him and the many others involved in fraternally-connected enterprises at that time. Also, the Hallett report on the then government's activities in response to the pandemic has been scathing: a not unwelcome reflection I would have thought, of the views of millions of people in the UK deeply affected by the Tories inability to focus on the job at hand, rather than the fast bucks on offer in exploitation of what was, after all, the black-marketeers' opportunity of a lifetime. Let's hope that som...

Went up to The Stretton Fox at J unction 10 of the M56 to rendezvous with Jane and Kev after her Lancashire visit this week. We always time it so the that bar is open for a quick pint on the turnaround, and I usually opt for Wainright's or Timothy Taylor's , depending on availability. But as soon as I walked into the place my eye was immediately drawn to an oval pump-plaque with a prominent red triangle on it. Bass . Decision automatic. Beer in top nick. Could have stayed on for more, but the drive home beckoned, so just the one it was. There was a time when Bass was ubiquitously available around here, but not any more. I've written about the paucity and variability of supply of the amber nectar in these parts before. It's a crying shame to have to limit myself to two pubs locally - one in Caernarfon , one in Biwmaris , both over ten miles from home, to get a pint of the stuff; let alone to have to drive nearly a hundred miles to Warrington on the off-chance it will b...

  Been thinking about memory over the last couple of days: a perennial topic for me in so many ways. Being possessed of an almost eidetic memory myself, I tend to recall in detail stuff that happened to me and in which I was involved many decades ago, which has a curious flattening, compression-of-time effect which collapses my time spiral [ referenced here ] in my personal historical visualisation. Pictured is the very-much-thumbed and abused copy of Madhur Jaffrey's wonderful book, which I bought the week we moved here from Birmingham, forty-five years since. Although we have never really scratched the surface of the recipes contained within its pages, it has proved to be the inspiration for not only my learning how to cook, but also the basis of thousands of meals we have cooked in the decades since. The weirdest thing is, though, is that because of the aforesaid timeline compressive effect of my eidetic recall, I still feel a form of imposter syndrome when it comes to cooking,...

I was drawn to a piece in the December "Oldie" [out now] by Quentin Letts, on his horror that the restoration of works of art constitutes a kind of criminal act against them [I exaggerate, but forgive me]. I agree that the over-extension of the restorer's art can lead to unfortunate attempts to re-interpret the original work in the 'light' of misguided historicist imaginings of the artist's original intent [never a good idea], but the assertion that an uncleaned 'old master' is somehow superior to the artist's original vision is frankly perverse. As a writer he should ask himself the question 'Would I prefer my writing to remain as clear and legible to a future audience - as true to my original intention - or should I prefer it to obscured by a cloud of obfuscatory noise and confusion instigated by age and degradation? For this is exactly his point about works of art: it would appear that he feels that the fog of history writ large in the agein...

This evening I've been caught up in the early-week ritual of watching re-runs of the late-seventies series "The Secret Army" [Google it if you're too young to remember it], which is, for someone of my generation, a bit of a guaranteed time-waster, as it is so compulsive. Whatever. Before settling down to watch the umpteen episodes in tonight's linear binge-feed, I was re-watching an interview on YouTube with Professor Sir Roger Penrose, regarding [particularly] his thoughts on the rôle of the 'observer' in the collapse the of the wave function in quantum mechanics. As you do. He, I think quite reasonably, argues that the notion of a simple observation of a quantum superposition of states by a 'consciousness' leads to that collapse is actually pretty daft. But the counter thought experiment that he uses is also basically flawed in my book: he uses the photographic medium as the intermediary recorded state of the quantum superposition, positing that ...

I have no fear of heights, only of falling. I have no fear of death, only of dying. This somewhat philosophical couplet I offer apropos of absolutely nothing: I've spent a lazy day today simply watching TV, which is something I seldom do these days, but today has been one of those sod-it days when inactivity becomes the norm and higher inspiration is there none. Sometimes the lack of something is substance in itself, not to be ignored or reviled, but embraced for what it is...

A weird, somewhat amorphous day today in the aftermath of last night's torrential tempest, which resulted in the discovery of a hitherto unknown point of ingress of rain into our dining room. I've worked out its origin, but the cure might turn out to be more painful [money-wise] than the problem itself. We'll see. I went over to The Bull Inn, Biwmaris, for a couple of pints of Bass [excellent - tip-top condition and served appropriately flat] and a bowl of chips [indifferent]. I spent a pleasant couple of hours over the papers and the beer, sat on a very comfortable sofa by myself, just people watching; a habit of a lifetime that began back in the early 1970s in The Bull Inn, Moseley , in Birmingham, after I had dropped out of school. One article that piqued my interest in this weekend's FT was by Quinn Slobodian, entitled "Libertarian eugenics is on the rise", which sums up the general tenor of the piece, that the Malthusian mentality of the elites is still a...

I wrote the other day that I had at last backed up my old iPod Classic to iTunes and refreshed the device itself with a factory reset and a reload. All true, but I think I did lose some tracks in the process, which must be down to Apple's abstruse and frankly weird file storage structure where such stuff is concerned. Whatever - there is still sufficient stuff on there to shuffle away for months and months should it be needed: anyhow, most of the music on there was ripped from my own CDs anyway, so making up any shortfall is trivial. Anyway, while I was scanning through the collection this evening I lit upon the single "Shapes of Things" by the Yardbirds from 1966. As I've written before, this was the first actual record purchase I ever made, motivated principally by my reaction to Jeff Beck's short but explosive guitar solo, which changed the way I saw and heard music for ever. Much like my exposure to The Kink's "You Really Got Me" a couple of year...

I've been wearing the old weskit more and more lately as the autumn kicks in yet again. I re-read the scribble I wrote about it a couple of years ago, and I've been reflecting on the remarkable fact that this old thing is the thick end of one hundred years old. I bought it from a church jumble sale over fifty years ago and wore it then with the irony of youth, and now I wear it earnestly and honestly as an old man. What is truly remarkable about the garment is the almost complete lack of wear to the material itself, or the stitching on the buttonholes, despite its age and the amount of use I personally have made of it over the last half century, let alone that of its previous owner(s) over the preceding fifty years or so. I think that by now, the old thing has more than repaid its carbon and water debt several thousand times over. There's also no doubt that quality such as this is pretty much impossible to find these days, outside of the most rarified of bespoke clothiers. ...

We took a ride over to Betws Y Coed today for a light lunch and a pint at The Royal Oak Hotel. There was much water in the air on the drive through the mountains and beyond, either in the form of thin, autumn rain or low, tree-hugging cloud. The rivers were full and roiling on their journey to the Conwy estuary and the sea. Pictured, the view from Pont Y Pair: neither kayaking nor swimming an option down there, methinks...

  Pictured, my new kitchen knife, newly arrived from Japan, from the forge of Toshio Nakamura. This thing is as sharp as a scalpel and will find good service with me in my kitchen for the foreseeable future. It will undoubtedly involve a good bit of caretaking, as with all good carbon steel blades, but as basic knives go, this is about as good as it gets. It even came with a sizeable chunk of whetstone, weighing in at about half a pound in itself. Great knife, great service, great story...

Pictured, my venerable old iPod Classic, which has been going for I would guess a decade now. Whilst I understand the motivation behind Apple's abandoning the format, I can't help the feeling that something special was laid to waste in their focus on the iPhone as the single point of contact for all of one's life and the media that feed it. There was something nice about the compartmentalisation of of one's life experiences into separate 'feeds', before everything became homogenised into the blob we call existence presently. Anyhow, I've been acutely aware that the underlying tech that underpins the survival of the thousands of tunes and classical and radical music on this wonderful piece of kit is inherently prone to eventual failure - battery, hard drive and so on - and so I decided today to bite the bullet and back it up to the ancient copy of iTunes on my equally ancient MacBook Pro [the previous iTunes having been wiped some years previously]. What a bl...

As promised - the finished article: the newly-laid carpet in our dining room/den. Just some tidying up around the edges and a couple of bits of new skirting board to fit, and we're all done. I've replaced the amp & tuner setup we previously used in there with the tiny, blue-lit box just visible on the top left of my bureau/desk, which is a bluetooth amplifier and FM receiver that cost the princely sum of just shy of twenty-five quid, including postage: it now powers the tiny Tannoys in this room. I have to say it sounds pretty decent, too, although its Aux input appears to be a tad noisy, which really won't matter as it will mostly be used as a radio, or in Bluetooth streaming mode, anyway. 

  I was going to post about our pretty much having finished the re-carpeting of our dining room/office, but I feel motivated to give a shout out to Kaweco and the quality and resilience of their fountain pens, as mine [blog posts passim] - pictured above - has just survived a journey through our washing machine unscathed. I was wondering what the hell I had done with this, my preferred pocket pen, when I realised that I hadn't checked the breast pocket of the denim shirt I'd put through the wash this morning. Sure enough, there amongst the soggy bunch of clothing in the machine was my uncapped pen. A rummage around the washing located the cap, and on investigation, the ink reservoir [convertor] was loose in the body of the pen itself, washed empty. So I filled it up with a fresh charge of ink, and as you can see from the picture, it still works perfectly, despite its brutal treatment by our washing machine on full spin. This modest little German fountain pen is indeed a tribute...

I do love a bit of slow media content. In an age of YouTube shorts that tantalise more than they satisfy, forcing one into a feedback loop of not-quite-satisfaction, reminiscent of a hypnotised pigeon paralysed into supine inaction by a semi-sadistic handler proving their own 'superiority' over the bemused creature; it's gratifying to see that there are still people out there who don't like to be rushed into, well, anything, and like to communicate that sentiment to the rest of us. In an age of adrenalin-rush short-termism, these creators are a welcome bulwark against the bullshit-mongers. In tonight's post I'd like to offer these two examples of slow-time explication, one old , one new ; and both centred around the making of smoking pipes. As I've written before, I've recently taken up - in a modest way - smoking the odd pipe or two of tobacco, late in the evening, inspired by a couple of Americans who visited us this summer [blog posts passim]. You nee...

  Further to last night's post, we're nearly done on re-carpeting the dining/writing room as you can see from the above. I've adopted the old bureau pictured to the right of the mantelpiece as my desk. This came originally from my grandparents house in Smethwick after my paternal grandfather died in the mid-sixties: the bookcase that adorned its top is still with one of my cousins on that side of the family. I inherited the modest old thing when my father died and it has never until now found its proper purpose in the house. Re-carpeting the dining room seemed a good opportunity to have a shift around and get rid of  one particularly nasty chipboard desk that we had. I'm writing this from that same old bureau, the contents of which drawers I intend to weed out over the next few days, as we've already got the usual rubbish - sorry, temporary (!) storage - drawers in the dresser at the end of the room. The pile of documents in one of the bureau's drawers hasn'...

Pictured, the current devastation of our dining room, where we have today started the process of changing the carpet, taking out the old floral job [right of picture] and replacing it with a cheaper, plainer contract carpeting in a sort of neutral grey pattern. We're leaving the old underlay down [centre] and are doing the job between the two of us, as carpet fitters are just out of our league, financially, these days. By God, wrestling with a roll of carpet the full width of the room is a challenge; like grappling an anaconda with rigour mortis: the difficulties compounded by the fact that this is a 150-plus-year-old building with nary a true plum or square wall to its name. Also, we're still using the other half of the room whilst doing the changeover: tomorrow will be the big furniture swap-over so we can continue the length of the room. Keep you posted: I'm having another glass of wine, I've had enough for one day... 

Here's a thing: I was just mulling over stuff in my head over a bowl of Peterson's Nightcap tobacco and marvelling at the loveliness of the Pyracantha that now festoons the ogee arch to the side garden, when, for some reason, a particular character from my past came to mind. The original spark for this stream of consciousness left me as soon as I focussed on the bloke in question, but there you go. I was a student on the Art Foundation course at Bournville School of Art, Birmingham in 1973 when I met this particular individual,  a mature student, who was seemingly ancient to my mind as he was twenty-seven years old [I was nineteen]. As a student he brought to the table much experience and life experience and outside knowledge, and to be frank, much cynicism and a rather cold and calculating approach to his time and study there, although leavened at times by a sharp, if somewhat cruel and deprecating sense of humour. I made contact with him a couple of years ago via some abstru...

Pictured, the Arduino Uno Q that I pre-ordered a short while back, which arrived this afternoon. I haven't been able to check the thing out yet, as all of the USB A to USB C leads in my current possession appear to be power only. Also, my ancient MacBook Pro doesn't want to play with the Arduino Apps software; and although the MacBook Air running Linux is happy enough to load and run the software, the lack of a suitable cable somewhat gets in the way of investigation. Anyhow, I've ordered an Arduino-approved/branded cable, so I can check it out, hopefully tomorrow evening. From there I can configure it to connect to the Linux Book via wifi if I want, although I'd like to get running in standalone programming mode, but that entails the purchase of a USB C hub, so we'll just play hardwired for now. I've no particular immediate project in mind for the board, but it looks like just tinkering will be fun, as it is essentially both a fairly powerful standalone single-...

Watched Christopher Nolan's "Interstellar" for the first time this afternoon: for some reason - probably laziness - it had escaped my radar until Jane starting watching it today. Like most of Nolan's films, time features heavily, either as a subtextual technical device, as in Dunkirk, or here in full-on philosophical discourse meets higher mathematics/astrophysics mode. Long and hyperbolic though the final film was, it was pacy enough and threw out sufficient questions about the nature of our realit[ies]y to hold my attention for the thick end of three hours. I won't bother summarising the plot: the Wikipedia entry does a good enough job of that. The concept of wormholes in spacetime has been around for some considerable time now, as has the general acceptance of the presence of black holes in the Universe: once merely also mathematically-conjectured theory, but now experimentally proven as real. What we don't know of course is what form reality might take at ...

There has been much grumbling about the current government's intention to encourage more low-level retail investment in the markets, not least from the two grumpy old buggers who inhabit this house [there are only two of us]. However, I think that maybe - and at the moment it is still a maybe - we might have misinterpreted that intention, and that, as usual, the Labour government has signally failed to adequately communicate its motives [and actions] to the public. This thought was prompted by an opinion piece in this weekend's FT by Nicolas Berggruen, a billionaire investor and philanthropist, offering up the notion of Universal Basic Capital [UBC] as a better alternative to the concept of a Universal Basic Income, something I've been in favour of for some twenty years or so, since visiting Denmark and talking with a journalist friend there about the Danish social support system. UBC would entail all citizens being given a one-off grant toward, and workers continuing to c...