Observations from a Hill

I picked up on probably the most piquant philosophical statement I've yet heard to date, on Woman's Hour [BBC Radio Four] this morning. Toni Collette was being interviewed and dropped '"Pretty much all of life is memory..."' into the conversation. A stunning observation which was almost a throwaway. It just sums up exactly what human experience is about. It's like the old conundrum: 'What's always coming but never arrives?' - tomorrow, of course. Our experiences of the present are always the past, outside of whatever frame-rate and size our slices of perception are. Once perceived in the moment[?], they are already passed, and therefore only exist in the memory of those fleeting moments. Pretty much all of life is memory : sobering thought, but oddly comforting. We often talk blithely of living in the present, but to be frank that is all we are capable of. Im augenblick, man ganz Lebe jetzt: I'm sure my German is shriekingly inaccurate and ...

I caught a fragment of a programme Jane was watching this afternoon, featuring an interview with Alfred Hitchcock by the English film director and actor, Bryan Forbes. At one point, Forbes posited that one of his favourite Hitchcock movies might have been better served had it been filmed in black & white for effect. Hitchcock's instant response was: '"I opted for colour because the birds were in black & white..."', going on to say that the monochrome [of the antagonists - the birds themselves] was thrown into stark contrast to the very colour of the humans and whose environment they threatened. This kind of incisive thinking makes an artist out of an artesan. Thinking beyond the surface qualities of the medium in which they are working, the artist simultaneously exploits and transcends the limitations of that chosen medium. Think Turner. Think Masaccio, Think Hockney, Think Buñuel. Think Gentileschi. Think Derek Jarman's last film, 'Blue'. All ...

Started the day faced with a link emailed from Jeff to a byeline on BBC online by the veteran war reporter John Simpson, in which he says that in all his long career, 2025 has been the most worrying year he can remember.  Add to that a piece from today's i Paper about the increasing development of nerve agents by Putin's Russia, and the claims by the Russian leader that Ukraine have yet again been targeting Russian territory by drone* [disputed as yet], despite the so-called ongoing peace talks, and we have the rumblings of another Europe-wide conflict in the making. On the other side of the world, China is threatening further conflict with and annexation of Taiwan, that unresolved hangover from the original Revolution of 1949. Further to that, China is still an active supporter of Putin and Russia. *Trump goes on international media in support of Putin over claims that Ukraine has attacked Putin residences [he was informed allegedly by Putin himself on a phone call]: appeasem...

  Back to normality and sensible-sized meals: pictured, a perfectly adequate plate of poussin, carrots [left over from Christmas Day] and ponsh, Jane's family term [presumably Denbighshire in origin] for a swede & potato mash, referred to around here as stwnsh rwdan. She's been cooking this for as long as I've known her; fifty-three years to be precise, and it is and always will be one of our favourite staples to accompany just about any meat and vegetables we can throw at it, or even on its own fried up when cold. This kind of simple peasant food shouldn't be dismissed lightly: it is incredibly tasty and versatile, never mind healthy. Make it as a simple mash with a bit of milk and a good pinch or three of good salt, or go the whole hog with cream: white pepper is ideal for spiking this up. Trust me, the Welsh and the Scots [Neeps & Tatties: same deal] know as much about Cucina Povera as the Italians... 

I've long thought YouTube was destined for longevity in the world of online media. Now twenty years old and with a wealth, nay riches beyond conception, of content, it now outranks the media giants Netflix, Disney and Amazon Prime Video in the US [ Financial Times, today ]. Where it scores for me, though, is in offering intelligent content alongside the frivolous, from podcasting to music, archive footage, and live sports. And the great thing about its algorithms is that if you are interested in the more archane, dealing with very niche subjects like lost skills and crafts in Germany's midwest, such as this example , you can just search to - or let serendipity, even - point you at something you could never in a thousand years get via any other media, social or otherwise; then just start subscribing to the stuff you like, and your feed will be full of the kind of content you enjoy watching. There are enough sidebar tasters to get you venturing into other areas to pique a new int...

Feeling Boxing Day malaise this evening, with upset guts and a cold that can't quite decide whether or not to develop. Overindulgence & winter bugs, 1; Me, 0. Having a day watching re-runs of old films. Thus far, we watched 2001, A Space Odyssey and are following that with Apollo 13. How late I'll be out of bed this evening is debatable as I was up for about seventeen straight hours yesterday, and am feeling pretty jaded at the moment.

Christmas Day... we've seen most of those close to us, fed a few of them and downed a few drinks along the way - pictured, the roast of the day - pretty much a whole pork belly side. All in all though, and conviviality and good companionship aside, all rather too much for my digestive system these days; but very nice anyway. Time to doze in front of the fire and an ancient film on TV... 

'Twas the night before Christmas - well actually it is the night before Christmas - and there's not a creature stirring all through this house apart from our good selves, gradually getting stuff together for the festive blowout tomorrow. It's approaching freezing outside, which feels like a rare occurrence these days, and it looks set for a frosty start to Christmas Day, so we've turned on one of the storage heaters for the first time since last winter, so at least the sitting room will be warm first thing. We've got a pork belly for the main meal which I'll slow roast from around eight o'clock tomorrow morning and then finish off with the roast potatoes when we get back from the pub for lunch. As to the rest, it will all fall into place as we go, I hope. Given enough to drink and plenty of food, I don't foresee any great drama, short of the kind of power cut we experienced some thirty years ago, when we lived at Brynbella Cottage [pictured above in sun...

One last thought on slate, and quarrying the material here in North Wales, prompted by yet another woeful tale of silicosis in the business of cutting quartz kitchen surfaces here in the UK. The case in question is of Luke Bunker, who at the ridiculously young age of twenty-eight, was diagnosed with silicosis and COPD, after working in this disastrously unregulated workplace environment. Twenty-eight. In the few short years of his employ, he has succumbed to the kind and extent of disease that used to take a lifetime of hazardous working to arrive at. I've been watching another archive documentary about working in the Chwarelau of the North Wales slate industry today, focussing on the Dinorwig quarries that surround Llanberis. One of the interviewees related the presence and depth of the slate dust in the cutting sheds of the quarry, and how breathing protection was not even a consideration back in the day: which tragically chimes with the twenty-first century example mentioned ab...

I've been much engaged of late in viewing a lot of old, slow video media, courtesy of YouTube; featuring long-thought lost programming from decades-past UK TV. I'm not talking about re-runs of Blankety Blank or Are You Being Served, but rather of the more thoughtful and considered documentary kind, which we do so well in this archipelago of small countries that we call the United Kingdom. In particular the output by the estimable Jack Hargreaves, a man of far more depth and media-savvy than his avuncular, pipe-smoking on-screen persona might suggest. Anyway, if you feed the algorithm with enough searches for this type of material, all sorts of extraordinary footage from the archives emerges, like TikTok in a parallel universe for people of, shall we say, a more mature generation: you gotta game it to play, people. One such gem I found tonight is this episode of 'Horizon'. Living in North Wales and being immensely proud of our family's connections and heritage in the...

Winter Solstice is upon us yet again: I have to say this one of my favourite days of the year, despite the insistent late afternoon crepuscule that lies beyond the windows of our house; when we look forward to the coming spring and summer, and leave behind the gloom and despair of winter. One other good thing about this particular coming week of course is the annual seasonal excuse to for once be nice to one another, and share food and wine at table with friends and family, no matter what has travailed us in the year past. Over the years our number has sadly depleted, but, as always we look forward to our Christmas meal in good company; to eat and drink far more than we need, and ignore the hole the whole thing has left in our finances, for just a few days, at least. The point of this time of year is the looking forward to the future whilst absolutely enjoying simply being present in the moment. Ignore the religion, ignore the commercial Christmas pressures, and ignore the mawkish sent...

Referring back to last night's post about the Sheffield penknife cutler, I watched another couple of videos from this wonderful series this afternoon, including one about auger making at the Footprint factory in the same city. By the way, my lifetime awareness of and familiarity with the Footprint brand is via the above-illustrated pipe wrench, colloquially known amongst gas engineers such as my dad, who gave me this pair, as 'Footprints', just as pipe-grips were known as 'Gordons' after their originator, and likewise 'Stilsons', also eponymously referenced. Many brands of all three designs exist, but I will always refer to them by these names, much like we use the term 'Hoover' to reference any old vacuum cleaner. The title of this little scribble? I think most practical people of a certain age would recognise 'sprue' as the bits of waste material that result from the pour and vent holes of a casting, later to be removed to release the cast ...

I've just finished watching this beautiful old footage of a Sheffield penknife cutler fashioning a basic pocket knife, for the second time in two days. It just illustrates to me how far down the rabbit-hole we've gone when it comes to the loss of basic skills: virtually everything we buy, consume, and use these days is the product of anonymised CNC machining or 3D printing techniques, entirely controlled by computers. There's absolutely nothing wrong with any of these technologies, obviously; but the underpinnings of it all are the very basic skills beautifully illustrated by this film: design, prototypes, templates. These hand skills are the more analogue equivalents of the computer-controlled movements: cruder in accuracy, but in this context no less effective, except maybe in profit & loss terms; but that's another story entirely. The top and bottom of it all is that without the fundamental skills of using simple tools, complex tools would not exist: it's a s...

Today we took delivery of our new cooker at the extraordinary hour of 06:45 this morning. The delivery guys had driven two hours to get here, so Christ alone knows what time they start work in the wee small hours. I hope they are getting something like decent pay for their service, but I somehow doubt it. They took the old and severely knackered cooker with them: we've been using/abusing it for over ten years now, and it's range of functions have gradually dwindled over time from twin oven, grill and four hobs to just grill and four hob plates. I guess it doesn't owe us much, but compared to the very first stove we bought when we we living in our second flat in 1979/80; a 1950s era gas stove by New World, which we bought for the princely sum of either seven or fourteen pounds from the local paper's classifieds - I can't remember which, but I suspect the former - it was a waste of money. The New World [the exact same model of stove that my parents had from the fiftie...

Some things don't change. Today, The i Paper launched a campaign to end the poorly regulated working conditions of those directly involved in the process of producing those oh-so-fashionable engineered stone worktops favoured by those with 'trophy' kitchens. We seem to have come full-circle from the days of miner's Black Lung and slate quarrymen's 'The Dust' - the latter very much a problem straying into the latter part of the last century - to yet another unregulated and largely exploitative industry allowed liberal licence to flout safe-working directives by decades of laissez-faire government attitudes to the safety of workers. Silicosis is a well-known and documented disease of those who work without adequate breathing protection in any industry that involves the mining, breaking, or cutting and grinding of stone, coal or minerals; leaving their lungs compromised by inorganic particles which slowly and painfully disables the breathing of its victims to ...

Gareth's funeral at Bangor Crematorium this morning. That it was impossible to get into the chapel because of the very large number of people attending was no surprise, as he was a well-loved member of our community, and he himself as funeral director had overseen quite a few funerals of friends and acquaintances over the years. Fittingly, the weather broke its recent pattern of foulness and bluster, and he was seen off in glorious sunshine. Calon Lân was sung, as is customary, and the natural harmonies that came from the assembled throng were truly lovely. The sad corollary to this is that I've sung this hymn at the passing of far too many friends and colleagues over the past few years, the frequency of which kind I know only too well will increase with time...

We've all heard and used the phrase '...up a gum tree...' at some time in our lives [at least in the English-speaking diaspora] and generally meandering through the world of YouTube as it presents itself to me this afternoon, whilst waiting for a delivery of firewood, I came across a video which summed the phrase up to a tee; if not in the strictest metaphorical sense, but quite literally. It was of a young lumberjack felling a 250 year-old, dead and rotting gum tree in someone's backyard in some unspecified part of Australia, a country currently unfortunately reeling from the kind of mass shooting more associated with the US, but I digress. The precision of his cutting and felling skills is pretty damned impressive, given the tight constraints of the suburban plot he's working in, and if he is indeed only seventeen years old, hat's off to the man. The final topping off he did with a 56" bar Huskie, hanging off a rope, thirty-odd feet off the ground. Cojon...

I was minded earlier of "King Biscuit Time", a long-standing US radio show that has been broadcast daily since 1941, which makes even "The Archers" seem a tad arriviste. It has hosted and featured music by such blues greats as Sonny Boy Williamson, Pinetop Perkins and B.B.King. The 'King Biscuit' of its title refers to the sponsors of the programme, King Biscuit Flour. Now, to a Brit, a biscuit is a thin, crunchy, usually sweetened confection, often taken alongside tea as a compliment to the beverage, and sometimes dunked in said libation. To a North American, however, a biscuit is a kind of cross - to a Brit, anyway - between a scone and a Scotch Roll, to be eaten in savoury contexts such as mopping up gravy. Which wayward thought leads me to the muffin: in the UK, a muffin is a savoury, much like the American biscuit, to be eaten with butter - although often with sweet preserves such as jam - and cheese, Marmite or whatever. To a North American, a muffin i...

Just been watching - for the umpteenth time - "The Day After Tomorrow", which is a narrative both prescient and ironic in equal measure. Prescient in its affirmation of the the damage we've incurred on the world's climate and its concomitant effects on the flora and fauna of this world - ourselves included - and ironic on so many damn levels regarding pundit's and politician's views past and present. However, despite the underlying seriousness of the message that the film sought to portray, I was randomly drawn to the brief scene where the preppy rich boy takes the newly-assembled gang of high-school students to his father's pied-à-terre in Manhattan to take stock as the global weather anomaly approaches. His compatriots are somewhat taken aback by the opulence of his father's - very occasional - residence; and I was minded of the time when we, as young teenagers visited a schoolfriend's house in Harborne for the the first time. The house was, for ...

I'm currently revisiting a novel that I bought, secondhand, six years ago, but which got sidelined at some point, and I'm not sure why, as it's a compelling narrative told well, and it's got all the elements which I like: libraries, classification and the curious word of the curiosity; collected, shelved and cabinetted; cloistered, dark and musty rooms of books, shelves, spiral staircases and leather-topped desks. Most of all its central, inanimate but mechanical protagonist is a watch. To be specific, the watch: the Breguet 'Marie Antoinette', 'The Queen', 'The Grand Complication' [the English title of this book], which was stolen from the L.A. Mayer Institute For Islamic Art in 1983. Thought lost, this masterpiece of horology, completed in 1802, nine years after Marie Antoinette's death, and which features every possible watch function known at the time, comprises 802 individual components. It finally resurfaced in 2007, when the widow of ...

We were over at the boy's place for sausage-rolls and a cup of tea this lunchtime, and as usual we had a general family rant about the state of the world/country/politics/economics/religion/morality/ethics - delete as appropriate - when someone mentioned that they had heard that the state of the roads and their potholes was largely a function of changes of repair methodology and materials: ie. repairing less often, with cheaper, inferior materials. Mention was made of the overall increase in size and number of private vehicles in recent years causing more damage to road surfaces than the much smaller, lighter and fewer numbers of vehicles in the past. As one we opined on the fact that no government has yet addressed that bloody great pachyderm in the room: freight. Freight. Heavy haulage. No UK road was designed to take heavily-laden forty-foot artics, or twenty-ton heavy wagons of stone and ballast, all of which would have been more sensibly transported in the past first by canal,...

I would think everyone of my generation would have had a grandmother whose grave advice "Neither a borrower nor a lender be..." still rings in their ears to this day. We are also old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher's pronouncements on managing the country's economy as if it were a household budget; balancing the books carefully and prudently, saving for a rainy day and avoiding owing money where possible. Even today, we have Rachel Reeves' 'fiscal rules', strictly adhered to - some of the time - governing levels of taxation versus state spending on social services, health and defence, to name but three. Except that is not the way the world works. All countries and their governments are in debt - massively, apart from Macao, apparently - the largest numerical government debt being the United States of America; the most powerful nation on earth, and ultimately, caller of all the shots on just about everything for just about anyone, anywhere. The country...

We went as a family, the other day, to Penrhyn Castle in Llandegai: that grossest of expositions of wealth built by the Barons Penrhyn off the back of fortunes made from slavery, sugar, and most latterly the exploitation of Bethesda slate and off the backs of the working men of this area. Visiting the place is always a slightly bitter-sweet experience but a salutary one: a constant reminder of how far we've come politically and socially in this archipelago, but also of how so very far we still need to travel down that serpentine and rocky road to human equality and fairness. As I've mentioned several times before in these jottings, between 1900 and 1903, there was in Bethesda a Great Strike - Y Streic Fawr - of quarrymen in the employ of Baron Penrhyn of Llandegai over pay and conditions at the Bethesda slate quarry, which employed a great proportion of men in the area. We live in Rachub, a tiny village in the hills above Bethesda itself; specifically in the upper part formerly...

Been watching the re-runs of the 1970s series series "Secret Army" [blog posts passim] yet again - yes we're sticklers for punishment, if you want to frame it that way - but to be honest there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the convoluted and internecine struggles in the occupied countries during WWII. Evaders, resistance, Communists: all with the ultimate common aim of not just surviving Nazi occupation, but through diverse means moving the war effort against the occupying forces forward; but each with their own agenda in how that aim was to be achieved, often in contradiction and to the detriment of the other groups. Within commonality there is always difference: it seems to be an unfortunate human trait that we might appear to be aiming for the same goal, but for numerous and diverse reasons that place us in conflict with each other. We all want the best, but in general, we seem to be destined to forever seek a zero-sum result of whatever game we play, rather ...

I've been pondering the purchase of a decent winter sweater. This is not as straightforward as it sounds: my requirements and subsequent parameters for the garment unfortunately tend toward the expensive. I want something genuinely warm, therefore man-made fibres are out, in my book. I want something that is not going to itch the bejeezus out of me, as I want a turtle-neck to keep me nice and toasty. I want something that will outlast me ., for gawd's sake. All of which militates towards a well-made sweater made of a decent weight of Marino wool. So I've opted for a submariner-type - I like the simplicity of style and the warmth-giving intent of the design. I've also opted for a British-made item as companies in this archipelago genuinely need our support these days. Apropos of woollen longevity, I've owned two sweaters over the years that have been the apotheosis of this type of clothing. The first I bought in Greece, on the island of Siphnos [blog posts passim] in...

I've recently signed up again for a basic subscription to the online 'magazine' "Medium", whose tech feeds in particular I follow when I can. An article that caught my eye this week is by a contributor going by the handle TheOpinionatedDev: "Object-Oriented Programming is Dead - Here's What Killed it". Now, if you don't know what Object-Oriented Programming [OOP] is, I'm not going to try and explain it, as that's not the point of my mentioning it here: a quick WikiGoogle will fill you in on the basic concepts, and give you probably too much detail to absorb at one sitting if you don't have any knowledge of coding. The point is here that OOP has pretty much been the dominant architectural idea behind modern software coding for a good thirty years or so, and was the de facto dominant religion underlying all software development during that time [I use the term religion, because as in religion, dogma rules]. The key point is made in the ...

As you can see from my notepad, I scribbled a jotting the other day to the effect that my friend John, in repairing the old Zenith watch of mine [also pictured], had afforded me the gift of time. At least, the gift of time as measured by the venerable old timepiece in question. Time, as I think anyone who reads my scribbles in these pages knows, is a bit of a thing for me. It flows and passes - or appears to do so - never to return, apparently. All is relative, as is the 'passage' of time. Nothing is fixed, and all is possible...

  Pictured, tonight's repast of a Chicken Pasanda with Peshwari Naan - the small portion is actually my normal habit these days: I need far less food than I used to when I was working - which I have to say, turned out rather fine. The recipe was not entirely mine own, but as usual I worked with what I'd got to hand in the kitchen and modified accordingly. With Christmas approaching we both of us realised we had done bugger-all actual cooking lately, so I decided I'd get my act together, exercise my new chef's knife and plough on [btw, the knife is gratifyingly sharp and is very well-balanced in the hand, despite it being much lighter than a European knife of similar size]. I'm glad I did, as I've never tried to cook a Pasanda before [no idea why], as I'm rather taken with ease of it and the very tasty results. It's given me a few ideas to try out in the future, too, as the use of ground almonds as a thickener adds all sorts of dimensions to a sauce. Any...

It's gratifying to know sometimes that there are other people in the world that agree with one's intuitions on the future of society, and in addition add a depth of research, knowledge and erudition that cements those intuitions into a concrete basis for actual progress to potentially happen, given the right circumstances. Paul Mason, writing in last week's special AI edition of The New World, is one such person; calling out the AI 'revolution' as potentially precisely that: a revolution, but not one that the tech bro's and billionaire owners of the technology would either recognise or wish for. He posits the notion that within the bounding constraints of traditional capitalism and the adversarial zero-sum politics that we still insist in engaging with, AI will eventually crush its makers economically, as more and more workers [particularly middle-class, white collar workers - a trend already pushing more people into effective poverty] are edged out of work into...

I ventured out to The Bull in Bethesda for the first time in over a week, my rhino-viral indisposition having rendered the prospect hitherto less than attractive on several fronts. Anyhow, venture forth into the rain I did. On a rather more sober note, I was met at the pub with news from Chris that a mutual friend and well-known and loved local lad, Gareth Williams, had died at the rather too young age of sixty-one, having been ill and under treatment for some time. Gareth Taxi, or Cochyn as he was more widely known [he was a redhead in his youth], was a well-liked and respected member of our community, who we first got to know when he was a teenager back in the early 1980s. He was then a member of the Welsh language rock/punk band Proffwyd, playing in the then nascent and soon to burgeon Welsh rock scene of the time. As time went on and music took the back seat, he eventually took the reins of his late parent's taxi and funeral directors businesses, working in both until very rece...

Further to my post of the other night, the Zenith pocket watch [pictured] that John repaired for me - I thank you for that good favour, mate - would seem from its movement's serial number to date from 1914, making it not only 111 years old, but coincident with the onset of WWI and the death of my cousin Tom Rudge in France that year. The fact that the watch's case is of Birmingham manufacture by A.L. Dennison is kind of pleasantly circular in itself. I bought the timepiece in a charity shop [long gone now] in Menai Bridge some twenty-odd years ago for ten pounds, non-working and with a broken glass crystal, but I wanted it because it was a Zenith, a manufacture I respect, and because it's simply a beautiful watch. I had a chap in Bishop's Castle, Shropshire, fix it up initially, but it stopped running again last year or the year before, so I gave it to John to have a go at it, and here we are: running again and considering the age of the thing, keeping good time. Old do...