Observations from a Hill

As the weather beats an unseasonal tattoo of hail and sleet against my window, dragging us unceremoniously back into the depths of winter even as the bluebells are starting to bloom, I've managed a degree of internal warming due to the pictured pot of an experimental mushroom curry I made this evening. I started out, as usual, following someone else's recipe path and then, as always, found a virtual fork in the road to follow instead. I didn't hold out much hope for this one, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at the lightness of the result, and pleased at the extra kick I'd given it with some whole fresh green chillis. All in all, not half bad for a kitchen oddments special. I've just opened a bottle of cheap claret, and I might just hazard a bowl of tobacco before I settle in for the evening...

When it comes to selling green tech and energy generation to the general public, I would say we've been using the wrong narrative to convince people with limited resources to buy into the the new low-carbon revolution. Everything hitherto has been framed in grand gestures and bleeding edge technology, none of which is affordable to most of us. £30-40k for a car? £10k for a solar installation? Heat pumps, ground source, passivhaus, triple glazing and the rest of it spell a second mortgage [if you're lucky enough to own your own place] even given any available grant support. Couple this with the largely shaky trustworthiness of pretty much global private outsourcing in the provision of the stuff, and you have a pretty solid recipe for general apathy regarding adoption, leaving the uptake of green tech to the fashionistas-with-the-dosh who oh-so-want to demonstrate their green creds in offsetting their otherwise ludicrously energy-profligate lifestyles. A re-framing of the basics ...

...But Oddly Normal... I'm not oft given to wistfulness: introspection and reflection, yes; but wistfulness strikes me seldom and strangely, as was so this afternoon. And the unlikely trigger for this impulse is pictured: a rather unremarkable old pigskin case of mine. This camera bag I bought on a day out to Coventry some forty-eight years ago, when Jane and I went to see the iconic Coventry Cathedral - the only time I've visited the place - and have a wander about what is actually a far more interesting city than most imagine. Like so many places, it was despoiled in the 1960s and '70s by the increasingly powerful road transport and planning lobby that tore so many of our cities and towns apart in the service of the motor vehicle at the expense of local populations and history alike; but in common with so many of these, Coventry has a rich history behind it to be discovered within its precincts. My response to digging out this simple camera case, though, was on  the surfa...

Mission critical. First define your mission, then define the points of criticality where failure would be potentially or actually mission catastrophic. Outline those breakpoints and define failsafe exit strategies to escape any potentially catastrophic error in the execution of your mission. These sorts of checkpoints are second nature to the kinds of human activity and exploration such as space travel, where the margins for error, particularly in cases such as the current mission to and from the moon, are vanishingly small; and where there is an almost total reliance on computers and software to achieve the safe passage of machine and crew there and back. Nasa and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory know this utterly: their standards of software control are second to none. They operate under conditions of multiply redundant software systems that fail safe and delegate to the next tier of machine control by default. In the days of the Apollo missions, software was small in scale and largely ...

  I've expressed doubts about modern space exploration programs and the underlying motivation behind most of them in these pages probably many times, now; but the Artemis mission has rekindled in me some of the wonder that I first experienced when the first astronauts made it to the Moon back in my early adulthood back in the late sixties. From the start of this mission, there has been a real sense of voyage to it, not mere remote, robotic interference, but exploration in the truest, most human sense of the word. And the key here is the word human, with all its manifest and manifold semantic depths laid out in the form of one actually quite simple quest. The complexity of science and technicality underpinning that quest cannot be ignored, but the goal of the enterprise, ultimately, is still simple and visceral: '... to seek to find and not to yield...' . Which is so unlike the billionaire tech bros and their dick-waving contests and colonial instincts: this mission is foun...

We went over to Nantlle today for a wander around the old slate quarries there. We hadn't been for I guess a good thirty years, although I wrote about the place in these pages last year . It seems that at long last, there is some public admission that there is a major contamination problem in one of the upper quarries of the group, something we two were aware of some forty years ago. It is also the reason why no-one who buys the Nantlle quarries can ever get past first base in developing the place for leisure use for the general public: the cost of cleaning up the quarry in question would simply be prohibitive and could not attract any serious finance so to do. Pictured is an example of signage on the site that never existed before, in the days when the unitary authority simply glossed over the serial failures to complete any sale of the site to commercial third parties, all of whom ran a mile when the truth of the contamination and its scale became manifest at each successive surv...

I'm no more a believer in divination than the next rational human being; at least not in the sense that there are divine or otherwise forces at work behind any particular mechanical modus operandi of such practices. Tarot, i Ching, throwing bones, reading palms, crystal balls &etc., what have you. All carry a freight of superstition and arcane 'magickal-ness' akin to faith and/or religion: the unprovable 'proving' the improbable to the satisfaction of the naive. What I do believe, however, is the power of association of ideas, both the rational and the symbolic or rather, the concrete known, set in apposition to abstract ideas. What I mean by this, is that as a species, we construct our world from fragments of our immediate sensory inputs, memories of previous sensory inputs, and abstract constructs created from the combination of both plus the recorded history of our collective thought as humans; all mediated through our personal imagination: our own, personal ...

I came across a word new to me, today, in the FT Weekend Magazine's 'Departments' sidebar: ' RETCON/ rɛtkɒn / (verb or noun), a contraction of 'retroactive continuity', for when an existing narrative and the established facts within that narrative are overwritten, as in the [cited] Patrick Duffy shower resurrection in the TV show 'Dallas'. Having been killed off in the previous season of the show, it was decided that Duffy that should stay with the show, and returned, as if from the dead, with the entire previous season being written off as a dream. How so 'now' this seems, with The Trump Show performing this feat of narrative gymnastics on an almost daily basis, now that the scene has expanded into the catastrophic war we are witnessing in the Middle East. A man not overly familiar with or given to the telling of the truth, Trump not only mangles the English language on a sentence by sentence basis, but flips narratives to suit the expediency of...

I was reading a book this afternoon that I've mentioned before in these pages: "Cataloguing The World" by Alex Wright, and came across a reference to Esperanto, which immediately made me think of my old mate Phil, whose dad was a member of the Esperanto community, speaking and writing the synthetic language invented in the late nineteenth century by a Jewish opthalmologist from Bialystok [now in Poland]: one L.L. Zamenhof; in an attempt to create an international second and common language through which international relations could be built. The name derives from the Spanish for 'hope' or 'expectation', essentially the motivation behind the creation of the language: through commonality of thought and communication, the hope of a better and less divided world. No wonder that the Nazis characterised it negatively as a 'Jewish conspiracy', echoes of which mindset are still resounding at present in the divisive world of human affairs today. Quite tang...

Pictured, a rather old set of dominoes, still housed in their tinplate box, in lovely nick. I really can't remember how I came to have them, but there you go. As far as I can tell - knowing full well that the brand pre-dates my seventy-plus years - that this was a cheap line of cigarettes by W.D & H.O Wills sometime around the 1930s. That's as much as I know. What I do know, though, is that dominoes, like darts, bar billiards and cribbage, used to be the staples of pub games when I started frequenting the many ale-houses of Birmingham and the Black Country back in my youth.Though I almost never play any of these games any more - no-one else seems particularly interested to partake of these pastimes - I always liked a game of crib, darts or dommies, back in the day. In fact, one of the few things - alongside jazz - that my late father-in-law and I bonded over was a game of dominoes whilst consuming a pint or three of decent ale. It's a deceptively simple game that many w...

Reading a short piece in the latest US edition of Wired that dropped in the mail today, about COBOL [the ancient programming language that still occupies the bulk of extant working computer code on planet earth], I was struck by the tone of the argument - echoing a not particularly recent sentiment, either - that COBOL is essentially the spawn of the devil. The analogy used is with asbestos: at once ubiquitous and as dangerous as hell and difficult to eradicate, to boot. Well, yes, this is indeed the case: COBOL is pretty much still at the heart of mainframe business, banking and government administration computer systems to this day, and yes, the numbers of competent individuals left to deal with its many-fold exigencies [blog posts passim] are few and far between. However, whilst the piece outlines the historical and pragmatic expediencies that led to its widespread adoption by governments and agencies worldwide in the first place, its demonising of the COBOL language itself [and in ...

I caught a glimpse of some [YouTube?] short that Jane was watching this morning which was about how the political left - in this case particularly The Labour Party in government - needs to double down on its historically traditional socialist roots and address the fundamental inequalities in our society. No argument there as far as I'm concerned: we have gone so far down the rabbit hole of Neo-Narcissist economic theories that a good dose of plain old socialist thinking would definitely not go amiss. Class inequality is still unfortunately a very real thing, albeit cast from a much different mould than it was in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when notions of land ownership inherited via the 'divine right of Kings'; the 'gifts' of monarchs to their faithful of great swathes of the commons, held sway. A system of divided heritage between the 'great & the good' and the hoi polloi, where land ownership lorded it over the general population...

... the Mercury Arc Rectifier. Logically I should be posting a foodie piece as I've just been binge-watching some YouTube of some pretty impressive cooks making some equally impressive food. If you've been cooking as long as I have - nearly half-a-bloody-century [where does the time go?] - you know instinctively when someone is cooking up a culinary storm even on video. But I won't post cooking stuff until I've tried some of these recipes for myself: then I'll put something up. So, apropos of something I came across earlier today - on Pinterest [groan, I know...] - I decided that my topic for tonight's short [I'm hungry now] post would be the extraordinary if almost completely obsolete Mercury Arc Rectifier. Interesting, no? To most people I guess most definitely no, as I would figure that most people would not know what any sort of 'rectifier' was in the first place, let alone the decidedly spooky and slightly scary looking piece of apparatus pictur...

I've mentioned before how, as a Brummie growing up in the sixties and seventies, I came to grow fond of Brutalist and functionalist architecture in most of its forms - the now listed New Street Station signal box is still moot as far as I'm concerned, but I think that is more a question of location and context rather architectural quality, and as it and I have aged together, I'm more inclined to look at it in a more favourable light these days. I was inordinately fond of the [old] New Library which sadly met its demise a few years ago to be replaced by what strikes me as a slightly fussy building, at least from the exterior. Having said that, I really loved the Victorian library that the [old] New Library replaced: it was truly the absolute exemplar of "library-ness", and everything a card catalogue-loving geek such as myself ever wanted, with its multiple levels of shelves interconnected by cast iron walkways, accessed by beautiful, ornate cast iron spiral stairc...

There's a piece in this weekend's FT 'Opinion' which caught my eye just now, about that very modern phenomenon of not owning one's music collection any more. And by that I mean streaming: as with all other subscription-based listen or watch on demand services, you only get access to the stuff you curate into your playlist for as long as your direct debit holds good. As soon as you default on that payment, for whatever reason, you lose your stuff to back whence it came. As James Max observes in his piece, '... when it comes to the music that actually matters to me, the albums I return to, the ones that reward proper listening, I want something permanent. Something that doesn't disappear because a licensing deal in California wobbled... ' He has now set about capitalising on the resurgence of vinyl record popularity and production by buying up a new collection to fill the void left by the vacuum of streaming non-ownership. I have to say I concur and wholeh...

Human creativity is one of the fundamental driving forces in 'our' world - an undeniable truth and practically a truism - for better or worse as far as the rest of creation that we share the planet with. I'm sticking with the notion that the human imagination is effectively an infinity of infinities wrapped up in just shy of one and a half kilos of grey matter and stuffed into a thin carapace of a bony skull. Some of us have the intuition to see but cannot understand - for there is no understanding, much as no lens can focus upon itself - the infinity of thought that we all possess within us. Some either can't or simply choose not to introspect on such things, relying instead on the outer stimulus of others and events beyond their sphere to populate their Weltanschauung with meaning. Some choose to tout their ignorance wilfully as a badge of honour, embedding themselves in the confusion of the world without question and attempting to exploit that chaos to their own ...

OK, Wunderkammern and Infinities. The last two night's posts have hinted at the kind of Zen that I espouse and kind of follow, as following is not really my kind of thing, if you know what I mean. What do I mean by this? Good question and no doctrinal answer will do, as I don't do doctrine or dogma. The easiest way to approach it is by trawling back and accessing your store of childhood memories, before adolescence clouded your mind with sex and aspirations for your future life; a time when there was stuff that needed to be dealt with, in the moment, on the spot, day in, day out. When priorities were as and when they presented themselves, not part of some grand plan as yet to be formulated let alone unfold. In short, child-mind: the mind-state untainted by the weight of the future yet to be, entangled as it inevitably will be by the exigencies of daily necessity and struggle. Sometimes, those travails and the baggage of formal education plus the abstraction of 'career pat...

We went into town today to drop off some charity shop donations of clothes and books, as we're in the process of thinning down some - only some - of our stuff, in truth probably to make way for more of the same. After the drops we went up to Bangor's little 'village' Kyffin, at the top of town, for coffee at Jo Pott's excellent little café there. She serves great coffee and bakes most of the cakes and other stuff on sale there, including her beautiful lemon sponge. The ambience of the place is world music, posh chocolate and well, comfortably 'alternative'. She keeps a daily copy of the i Paper, Private Eye, and a floating selection of other periodicals. Today I picked up the current issue of The New Internationalist, in which I found a good essay by Remy Ngamije entitled "Approaching Infinity", which gave me much food for thought. Randomly, I've just lit upon a YouTube episode of the excellent podcast "The Rest is Science" ponderin...

Wunderkammer. The word itself is redolent of mystery and wonder; of rooms and cabinets of curiosities, discoverables, themselves discovered, and curated reverently and felicitously in no particular order save that of the principle of the 'good neighbour'. I am gradually getting my space back to the realms of such creations, after many years of simply living within a forest of stacks of books, records, CDs and magazines, all very nice, if gathering great gouts of dust, Quentin Crisp style, but not seeing enough actual use; and hence not quite approaching a liveable ideal. So, as pictured above, more shelves have gone up today, almost completing my two-wall covering of books and interesting 'stuff'. Where I go when I've used up every square inch of those two surfaces, I've not yet decided, but I have ideas: I like ordered clutter if that makes any sense, and although it can rapidly spiral out of control if left to chance, as it has done in the past, if a little re...

My eye was drawn to a piece in today's Financial Times - yes, I'm still buying analogue print media: use it or lose it, folks, the alternatives don't bear thinking about in my book - by Rana Foroohar, on the repetition of history that the current, war-induced global financial panic represents. Stating at the outset that the current conflict has exposed the vulnerability of the U.S at sea, she points out out rightly that the world and particularly Trump's America has been wrong-footed by the scale of the economic domino tumble that ensued from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. How can this be, when we have effectively been rehearsing these same conditions for, in her words, almost the last thirty years? Forgive me if I choke a little on that rather youthful overview of political and economic history, but only thirty years? Oh, how were are destined to think only a generation deep, if we're not careful or mindful enough: Many of us are still alive that remember, a...

OK, despite it being Sunday and even given that I've constructed the usual Sunday roast dinner which would normally precipitate a 'Lazy Sunday Food Post™', I've decided instead that I would share instead a fragment of the progress in my reorganisation of the chaotic clutter that is my material existence. I have been busily constructing shelving and re-jigging my library of books, files and vinyl records, some of which are pictured above; in an attempt to keep up with my ever-increasing consumption of such stuff. I've decided that my vinyl collection will stay pretty much static in its present state from now on; but books, I can't resist adding to my collection weekly [daily?]. It's a thing, but there you are. What is visible here is but a portion of the household library, most of which is randomly spread throughout the house and the cottage next door. I've mentioned it before, but the importance of the presence of books in my life was given to me by the ...

I love treading the shoreline between analogue and digital, that liminal space between human and machine interaction, each informing the other in beneficial positive feedback. It reflects the absolute need for us to engage with the world in as broadly-formed a manner as possible, obviating source bias and echo chamber reinforcement. We were talking earlier over lunch about actual, personal and group knowledge of historical events versus the unfounded suppositions and associations of the more conspiracy-minded of our world. How some of our number are old enough to remember events now having doubt cast upon them by the 'C-Theorists', whose views are propagated digitally and further reinforced, digitally , by reward algorithms via 'social' media, until the resultant epistemological soup resembles less the reality that pre-digitised minds can actually remember first-hand, and more the output of rogue feedback loops [see blog posts passim for more on those ]. The beauty of h...

I've always had a penchant for a Gothic arch. Not for me the homely, stolid stoutness of the Norman, decorated though it might be: the plainness of their semicircular geometry is reassuring but somehow lacks the aesthetic finesse of the more nuanced construction of the Goth. However, given that of the classical era, I would always favour the Greek over Roman architects' fancies, and within that subset, the homely, stolid stoutness of the Doric over the far fussier Ionic or Corinthian; my preferences might seem a little at odds with each other to the casual observer. However, there it is. There is a brutalist subtlety to the plainer Gothic arch forms, such as the Lancet, Equilateral or Obtuse. Having said that I'm also not averse either to the prissier formulations of the Trefoils, the Perpendicular or the vaguely Oriental in nature Ogee;  although, to be frank, the Flat Trefoil simply leaves me, well, a tad flat . Of all of these, given choice however, I would take the Equ...

Time and memory: recurring themes in my scribblings in these pages. One might argue that at my age, this pairing are the natural focus of an old person running out of the former and struggling to retain the latter; but not so. I have been obsessed with their nexus as long as I can remember: the elasticity of perceived time; the encapsulated and frozen time of photographs, time and memory as linear spoken or written narrative: and how these impact on memory itself; remembered, cellular, folk, false or otherwise. We are memory. We are our collected, collective and entwined past; our futures merely pasts-in-waiting: potentialities, possibilities and probabilistic: no more than that until time ensnares them in its flow, encapsulating the now into the past; always one step ahead of us, controlling the arc of our lives. We are born tabula rasa. We grow, learn, experience and become some-thing, some-one: we carve our narratives out of time itself, forming our own past narratives alongside th...

It's been a central question to me in my quest for a better understanding of my family's many and various migrations in and out of Wales and The Marches over the past couple of centuries: how did they move around with such apparent ease, given their backgrounds and circumstances? Practically all of my forebears were from poor stock, insofar as I understand, and most originated in sparsely-populated rural communities, very often with populations as few as a hundred or so individuals. That they ranged as far and wide as they did, whilst frequently returning to their homeland as they often did, has taxed me in  wondering about the mechanics of it all. The other night, the penny dropped. The railways. I'd quite forgotten that this archipelago, including quite isolated rural areas, was once well served with a railway system that allowed easy and often cheap transport to pretty much anywhere else. It goes some considerable way to explaining how - the why is self-evident: the need...

Stranger. Someone hitherto unknown. An outlier from outwith one's social zone, marking a space of unfamiliarity and unknowingness. Threat or no threat? This is the deep-rooted psychological dichotomy vested in our subconscious by our visceral and ancient instinct for survival. Fight or flight? Argue or parlez? The stranger in fiction and particularly in Hollywood movies is often characterised and read merely as threat or at least someone to be held cautiously at arms-length for fear of some dire personal outcome, narrative permitting. Yes, we've all experienced that nape of the neck feeling with the sound of ever closer footsteps behind us on walking alone on a dark night; waiting for whomever those footfalls belong to pass harmlessly ahead of of us. When I was growing up in the city, this was not an uncommon sensation, and it was only on moving to shall we say, a far less populous environment, that these feelings, though still there, were much attenuated and more manageable. B...

  A couple of things that I read at lunch today kind of gelled into some form of weird gestalt. In this week's New Statesman, the disturbing if unsurprising fact that in 2024, internal documents from Meta '... suggested it was serving fraudulent ads to it's users 15 billion times a day, accounting for more than 10% of [Meta's] global revenue. Press Gazette reported that Meta appeared to be making more from publicising online scams than the entire news media makes from legitimate marketing...' The other piece was in today's Financial Times about Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and PayPal co-founder [the other being Elon Musk] and the man behind Palantir Technologies, and his trip to Rome to lecture on the antichrist, challenging Pope Leo XIV and the papacy itself in the very seat of world Catholicism. As weird a confluence of images as all of this represents, especially in the light of the fact that this is supposed to be the modern era - remember progress and ...

Gratuitous food post tonight: pictured, Rhug Estate organic shoulder of lamb, potatoes and tenderstem broccoli, with a gravy of the pan juices, plain flour roux, deglazed with sauvignon blanc, and let down slightly with the broccoli water. The lamb and potatoes were cooked with lemon, garlic, sea salt and black pepper, with rosemary and fresh bay leaves from the garden: not half bad, if I say so myself. I even made crisps from the potatoes skins, with a hefty dose of chilli and sea salt, as an appetiser. All in all, a reasonable end to a day's dog-sitting duties here at Fairview Heights... 

Well, the Six Nations has gone out with an absolute bang this year, with all the participants raising their game to the very highest level imaginable for this three-match "Super Saturday". No mediocre or lacklustre performances in evidence at all today, and even though Wales walked away as bottom of the table again, their squad won against a very credible Italian opposition today to their absolute credit. Ireland played an absolute blinder to close out Scotland after their momentous win against France last week, which ensured a race for the line between the Shamrocks and Les Bleus at the end of it all. To say it went to the wire is probably the sporting understatement of the century: a last minute penalty kick by Ramos wresting the title away from Ireland's grasp at the death of a game exhausting to watch, let alone participate in. As for the rugby? An absolute joy to watch: proper rugby football, that harks back to the glory days of the game, making it once again the tru...

We live in a crumbling collection of connected cottages housed in a plot of land of around a quarter of an acre - more than sufficient to manage by ourselves - which, at our time of life seem's a tad counter-intuitive, and which raises the question why stick with it, especially as we're situated at the top of a steep hill that gets steeper and steeper toward the very top, where we live. Frankly, that question has never really entered my mind as I am still counting my lucky what-sits that we found and managed to buy this house in the first place, well into middle-age. Why am I so particularly appreciative of the fact of living up here in Fairview Heights? I think to answer that, you have to revisit my childhood and the house that I grew up in and only left at the age of twenty-three. I can't nay-say those twenty-three years in any way, as number 16, Winson Street in Winson Green, Birmingham was, in it's day the legendary locus of 'The Lads' [blog posts passim]; a...

It's been a perfectly foul day here today; in fact it was perfectly foul all last night, as it is perfectly foul now, at gone seven in the evening; the awful winds having given way to torrential rain in their wake. We were dog-sitting today, and even Lady, a Black Lab Collie cross not given to reticence about the weather, decided that curling up and sleeping was by far the best option to take. So, apart from a short morning trip to the council recycling centre to offload more stuff from our over-burdened estate, we've also spent the day closeted in Fairview Heights with little inclination to venture forth. Given this extended break from garden clearance and general property maintenance, I've been starting in on my latest OCD-backed project of trying to organise and catalogue my modest library of a couple of thousand or so books and my accumulation of loosely-filed documents and pulled references; all of which help to feed the maw of this blog, and serve as a pre-internet [m...

Online commerce, de facto, has to operate on a system of mutual trust with a financial locking mechanism to gently enforce the otherwise ad hoc nature of the transaction in question. Fine; and in the current world of eBay, Uber, Amazon, AirBnB et al, this system is largely structurally sound, even given the sometimes labyrinthine procedures it is necessary to endure if something goes wrong in the process. Having said that, close to all transactions processed online essentially work fine. The online payment paradigm of pay, lock, supply, unlock has logical merit given the usually remote nature of transactions thus made, and follows basic database methodology in the process [something the Post Office and their software goons most certainly did not respect, but I digress], ensuring the best continuity of flow of cash and goods to complete the distant transaction. All well and good, and now that the dust of the Wild West of the early days of the likes of eBay - a Dodge City of minor crime ...

As the Crown Prince of fantasy politics calms the markets - why on earth would anyone listen to him in the first place? - by insisting the Iranian War will be over in short order, so nothing further to worry about folks; the rest of us are looking at the price of fuel at the pumps with wonder at the alacrity with which prices rise when the 'cost' of crude rockets in the heat of a Middle-Eastern conflict, and how slowly they return to 'normal' when the reversal happens just as quickly, as the markets wipe their metaphorical brows in relief. Its just like marvelling at the speed at which daily outgoing financial transactions leave one's bank account compared with credits back into the same. Funny that, ain't it? Anyhow, not wishing to dwell on the barely fathomable nature of the larger world of politics and economics this evening, I'd like to offer the observation that we discovered a rather fine eatery that has been staring us in the face for years, unwittin...