Observations from a Hill

News in The Guardian today about the charity the British Heart Foundation, which is reported to be shedding 150 of its shops across the UK as its net profits crashed out from £18.8m to £3.6m in the 2024-25 financial year. They blame an increasingly hostile retail environment and competition from online retailing for the losses and will be shedding hundreds of staff and volunteers in the proposed reshuffle. Never mind the fact that its CEO, Charmaine Griffiths, was awarded a £35,000 pay rise , more than most workers in the UK actually earn in a year; taking her remuneration to £268,239 for this current financial year or the fact that the charity's wage and pension bill amounted to £136m last year, with 180 of its staff being paid £60,000 or more per year. This picture of highly paid senior executives is played out across the entire charity sector in the UK. If these people were as good at their jobs as their salaries would appear to indicate, surely they would have predicted both th...

There used to be an adage during the Cold War: ' ...if you hear the four-minute warning, put your head between your knees and kiss your arse goodbye ...' On so many fronts at the moment we are hearing but not heeding four minute warnings every day of our lives. We've had a decade-plus of complete political inanity and insanity, with the Tories going full-tilt lemming over a cliff of their own making, and leaving the country in a post-Brexit swamp of rising prices and with a complete lack of our previously hard-earned freedom of movement between us and own nearest neighbours foisted upon us. Then they showed themselves to be the libertarian self-interested toss-pots we always knew them to be during the global disaster that was Covid, with so many of their number exploiting the gaping holes in the procurement process at our - great - expense; is it any wonder that the current Labour government is under siege at the moment, trying against all odds to mop up this mess? Unfortun...

Passing through the living room on my way upstairs to the bathroom and back this evening I caught a phrase emanating from a ten-year-old episode of Location, Location, Location: '...the bohemian area of King's Heath [Birmingham, UK]...'. They were viewing a flat in one of those glorious three-storey Victorian terraces that infest the area and which are firmly lodged in my memory and very much a feature of my youth. As I think I've mentioned before in these pages, there were two particular houses there that were multi-occupancy centres of just that King's Heath bohemia. To this day, over fifty years ago, we still count one of the residents of this hive of outré living as a very long-standing friend. Again, I've mentioned before about the 'Gerlan Bohemia' that accreted about us when we moved to Gerlan, Bethesda, and hooked up again with John, who had by then gravitated to North Wales to study archaeology at Bangor. We were visiting an old schoolfriend of m...

In 1980, John Redhead, a then neighbour of ours in Bethesda, North Wales, whom we knew as an artist and little more, did the first ascent of the UKs first E7 rock route on North Stack, Ynys Môn: "The Bells, The Bells". As I didn't return to climbing until the mid-eighties and didn't engage with the climbing media, I was blissfully unaware of this at the time. By the time I got back into climbing, after a gap of around twenty years, I was approaching my thirties and had started to engage again with what the scene had mutated into in the interim, and learned that my now former neighbour was some kind of maverick legend in the game, and the route deemed, essentially, a potential death sentence to all but the most talented and fearless of climbers. In fact, it was a full six years before a successful second ascent of thing, and in all to date there have been, I think, only ten in the last forty -six years. What prompted my thinking about this was that I have been followin...

Numbers, numbers, numbers. So many numbers. When we were growing up as teenagers and well into our adulthood, it was the norm to have an internal mental stash of telephone numbers - family, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends; and entering the world of work, numbers related to your job. Most of us carried around in our heads tens or hundreds of the damned things, all of which could be recalled at will, rarely having to resort to a book for a reminder. How many people these days know their number? I know mine because I've had the same network connection since 2003, in the pre-smartphone era, and I still use my iPhone as a telephone , from time to time, a practice which looked as if it might be on the wane at one time, with a preponderance of users sticking to text and social media alone to 'communicate' with each other. Before 1983, there was no generally used device that could be called a 'mobile phone'; and it was not until the mid-1990s until they entered more gen...

I was very interested to read in the Weekend FT Arts of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's painting in Florence running currently. Not housed and concentrated in a single exhibition space, but distributed throughout three venues: the Palazzo Strozzi, the  Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana  and the Museo Di San Marco. I would dearly love to see these pictures in this latter context [above] as I'm of the opinion that of all twentieth century artists, Rothko is the most deeply and humanly spiritual of painters, and whose works sit most naturally alongside those of the great Italian quattrocento painters such as Fra Angelico. Rothko had the ability in his later paintings to bring the sublime into secular life in a way that few others have achieved. Religious belief isn't the central point of his work, much as I believe that religion, oddly, isn't a prerequisite for the spiritual experience of introspection in religious buildings either great or humble. Zen is zen, after all, and t...

I was just watching an interesting YouTube about the now long-retired British low-level strike aircraft, the Blackburn [later Hawker-Siddeley] Buccaneer, and its remarkable ability to fly at over 500 knots at sea level, as low as twenty feet. The video was a mixture of ancient film footage larded with AI slop [including the inevitable accompanying piss-poor machine-generated narration that infests just about everything online these days]. I won't mention the 'content' creator, but would simply point you to this video instead for a taster of what this aircraft could do. Obviously, as this was flown in domestic airspace in peacetime, it's not at a particularly high airspeed; but under the combat conditions it was designed for, it could routinely fly under ground radar and fighter cover at high speed, riding its own shockwave, which gave it an unusually high degree of natural stability in such a dangerous flight mode. I once had the privilege of seeing one of these things...

  I misnamed the Jeff Bezos space project in last night's post as Blue Horizon [since corrected], rather than Blue Origin. I think that at the back of my mind when writing last night's scribble I had the old Blue Horizon record label, which was dear to my heart in the late sixties, as it featured some of my favourite artists at the time - and ever since. It opened its doors to business in 1965 and featured a roster of mainly - the clue's in the name - blues-based music in relatively small release numbers, but had closed those doors completely by 1972. Pictured is my original copy of the first Fleetwood Mac album from 1968. I actually picked up this copy in the early seventies for about 20p from a bin of secondhand records in some cheap shop on Cape Hill, Smethwick. Copies of the record - weirdly, considering how relatively small its original distribution was and the short life span of the label itself - can still be got for around twenty-five quid online; less than the pri...

The casual observer from the past might be forgiven for thinking that the above blurry photograph was taken of the decisive moment of one of those tragically misguided thermonuclear tests in the forties and fifties that ushered in the Cold War and divided East from West. But no, this is a Jeff Bezos Blue Horizon Origin  [Freudian Slip: Blue Horizon was a now defunct record label] rocket ship exploding on its launchpad during what should have been a routine operation. This behemoth of a launch vehicle, alongside Elon Musk's similar efforts in this field is meant to usher in a 'new age' of space exploration by offering us mere humans the opportunity to colonise our one and only planetary moon; a place visited by a very few of our species in one very specific era of our history. But the question one has to ask is: Why? to what ultimate end is this frontiersman-ship directed at such huge expense, when our terrestrial, humanitarian issues are so pressing and in need of such eno...

Some days it's so difficult to come up with a single idea for a post on this blog: sometimes a single-themed channel seems like it might have been a better idea to commit to, but there we are. I opted for this open-ended format out of choice and I'm committed thereto, for better or for worse; for good. So tonight is ramble territory; a stroll through the byways of the day, my thoughts, and unfortunately, the bloody news. First off, of course, is that hardy perennial of British conversational gambits: the weather. What on earth transpired today? We had been told of a gradual turndown of the heat of the last few days in the coming week or so, and it was so unseasonably hot yesterday at 32 Celsius, which predictably precipitated much atmospheric electrical theatricality last night; but today? From a warm, hazy start to the morning, the temperature reached a still pretty warm high of 26 Celsius by the middle of the afternoon; but by around seven-thirty this evening, the wind having...

Well it's been even hotter here in Fairview Heights today, with the mercury substitute hitting thirty-two Celsius late afternoon. We did some more kebabs on the barbecue: this afternoon's fire being lit in a jury-rigged affair built of otherwise redundant storage heater bricks atop my old Black and Decker Workmate, as the easy-to-light charcoal bag was too big for the the little kettle barbecue I used for yesterday's meal. I've used these bricks many times before for building temporary cooking structures: they are ideally suited for the purpose, as they hold heat wonderfully. I fully intend to build a permanent pizza oven with them sometime, now my collection has grown sufficiently so to do. My motto, like my dad's is not to chuck out anything that can possibly be of use in the future: it's a philosophy that works more often than not. After we'd eaten al fresco in the baking heat and cleared the patio table of our stuff, I decided to sit out there and read f...

  I was of a mind to pen something today about an article on Medium that I've been reading over the last few hours, about 'Euler's Identity', the celebrated 'Most Beautiful Mathematical Equation'. I've come across this before, but not until I chanced upon this particular piece about it did so much start to fall into place about the mysteries, as they seemed to me, of mathematics. I wish I'd had the person who penned the article as my maths teacher back in school; I think I might have made a much better fist of the subject than I did. However, I'll leave that topic for later as I'm knackered, it's hot, and I'm full of barbecued food, viz, the above kebabs in progress, served in a soft tortilla wrap with fresh salad, and in my case, Encona California Reaper pepper sauce. Yummy. Must stop now as I feel like a nap...  

Definitely the warmest day of the year so far, with the temperature in the shade outside our front door reaching 30°C this afternoon. The temperature here is always elevated because of the tarmac over thousands of tons of slate waste that form our patio: it's akin to a gigantic storage heater, throwing back all the heat it's built up during the day. However, the temperature in the bottom garden has stayed at an even 27°C all afternoon, anyway. We went over to Ynys Môn earlier to take a look at a Neolithic Burial Chamber that in all the years we've lived in the area, we've never visited: Barclodiad y Gawres, between Aberffraw and Rhosneigr, which is of particular interest because of the carved rock designs found within its structure. We figured that today being a Bank Holiday, visiting a Stone Age monument might be a way of avoiding the very many tourists that always descend on such occasions [can't blame 'em - this is God's own country, after all]; but what...

  Another diary post tonight, as the weather has finally caught up with the season's turn. Pictured, the far corner of the bottom garden, with the dilapidated old shed that I built with the help of my late friend JC back in 2003, just after we moved into the house. On the right in the foreground is the New Zealand Flax that I wrote about six years ago, during Covid , and not long after I started this blog. The Flax is flourishing, despite the enormous growth of brambles, lilac and nettles that surround it. It now stands eleven or twelve feet tall and looks in decently rude health. It forms a bit of the wilder part of our gardens, and is much visited by bees at the moment. I look forward to the return of the butterfly population after the the unseasonable dip in temperatures of late; they're another regular feature of our mildly unkempt but wildlife-friendly space, alongside the myriad small birds, mammals and amphibians that visit. We keep enough structure, however to please ou...

  Just a diary post tonight, as I've done a lot of driving today and am feeling somewhat jaded as a result. One thing, though is that at last, the temperature has climbed beyond ten degrees - twenty-two Celsius, no less - and the sun is now shining. It actually feels like the season is finally turning toward summer at last. Pictured, the infant Rhododendron by the little Adwy that I built many years ago between the bottom and side gardens, where once, weirdly, stood a curious, low slate barrier; one slab of which became my father-in-law's tombstone for his burial place at Crosscrake Church in The Lake District. He never saw this place as he died soon after we bought it, with his approval and some help, on the strength of some photographs we'd taken of the place when we were bidding to buy it, twenty-odd years ago. I think fondly of that final, if remote connection between us.

I'm a great fan and adherent of the absurd, particularly when the absurd is rooted in logic and arithmetical fact: viz. my ramblings on stupidly large numbers and combinatorial arithmetical series in general. This particular peculiarity I find exceptionally intriguing, however: The Menger Sponge. This extraordinary and most intriguingly feasible of objects exhibits two parallel and opposing arithmetical series that render it thus fascinating. A cube of definite, defined dimensions subdivided in such manner as to lose mass as it gains surface area by the simplest of algorithms, ad infinitum. I'll simply give you the link to the page on The Medium where I discovered this little beauty, as it explains this arithmetical nicety to a tee. Exquisite at once in both its simplicity and complexity, it opens up a universe of possibility of thought... 

  OK - as semi-promised last night, an update on the meal I cooked then, tonight. As you can see above I zsuzsed it up with half a dozen topped whole green chillis of the hot variety, more chopped fresh coriander and half a red sweet pepper in fairly large chunks. I just sweated this lot under cover until it was hot, and ate it with poppadum and plain chapati. Pretty damned good and I have to say, pretty spicy hot: those Kenyan greenies do have somewhat of a kick, especially when eaten as a vegetable! On another note altogether, I decided on a whim to check on the current whereabouts of my old university professor, Andrew Radford, from my brief tenure as a postgrad linguistics student at the then University College of North Wales, Bangor, in 1980/81. Sadly, it appears that he died some two years ago at the age of seventy-nine; the belated news of which actually coming as somewhat of a punch to the gut: not just that I held the man in great respect [he was given the chair at Bangor ...

  Lazy food post tonight: featured above, a kind of Mushroom Jalfrezi thing. There was a pack of mushrooms and some small sweet peppers on the vegetable rack, along with some brown onions and tomatoes. As the mushrooms were starting to sweat, I decided to use them today. My original thought was to try and recreate the fabled Dangerous Mushrooms I knocked off in the nineties, when we lived at Brynbella, as I had jars of both Patak's Vindaloo and Kashmiri Masala pastes in the fridge; the key ingredients for this fierce little invention. However, on opening the jars, I realised they were both definitely dangerous in quite another way, so I decided against that idea and consigned the contents of the jars to the food recycling caddy. Pictured is the alternative in progress: an improvisation, as usual, which turned out half decent in my book. I'll see how the rest of it tastes tomorrow and maybe let you know my opinion of it at twenty-four hours remove. Keep you posted...

Creator, Mind, Self, Chicken, Egg, Lens/Focus; a Universe out of Nothing, Eternity. Which came first, Creator, or the mind of the created? Belief in the [definite article deliberate] Creator presupposes 'mind' and a consciousness capable of creating the concept of belief, the subtext of which is that of faith itself: adherence to the tenets of universal certainties, created of mind itself. The human mind, which in itself would seem to originate at some time in the womb and which produces its first obvious fruit after birth, developing gradually throughout life and maturing to a point, one would expect, of self-understanding and awareness, to perish with us at the end of our being at death. Mind, obviously, is the sole domain of its owner - the 'I', without whom it simply can't, apparently , exist. John Donne's 'No man is an island, entire of itself...' only obtains in respect of one person's place in the corporeal world of society: in terms of mind, ...

How far down the rabbit hole can we get before we wake up to the fact that bean counters, bottom-liners and shareholder-value maximisers are weaponising tech in search of profit? Agentic AI is now being touted as a business model applying to every level of human activity, with few questions asked or checks and balances applied to its deployment. Software is software: created and implemented by humans, themselves inherently flawed. Software systems work until they crash, and very few don't crash at some point in their existence. The difference with AI is that it is self-replicating and self-healing by design: if it breaks, it can fix itself. With an LLM [Large Language Model] in isolation, this is part of its design brief, and perfectly OK, but when agency is brought to the table, multiple LLMs can collaborate and develop. The problem is that the humans who are the funders and developers of these systems neither understand nor care about their abilities to expand their sphere of inf...

It's interesting to note that social class, even to this very day in the UK, still has a hierarchical nomenclature still spoken and written about seriously. We as a population are still being pigeonholed by the media, the commentariat and the authorities as falling into one of two major societal divisions, each of which is further divided into sub-classes. Even now in the twenty-first century, you will be placed into one of the following categories according to this arcane and frankly bonkers system: A, B, C1; C2, D, E. You can see where this thinking both comes from and where its natural conclusion is. Roughly translated this equates to the rather more direct and offensive hierarchy of Aristocracy, Upper Class, Upper Middle Class; Lower Middle Class, Working Class, Lumpen Proletariat, that prevailed well into the late twentieth century, and a mode of thinking which we had hoped been broken by now. Indeed the phrase 'economically inactive' still persists to replace ' th...

After last night's little scribble about memory, I was minded to write about something else entirely, but then I had something left field pop into my mind: the 1954 FA Cup, which of course I was not alive at the time to have been contemporaneously aware of. What I did recall, however, was that the Baggies played Preston North End and won 3-2. Considering I wasn't even born at the time and would only attend Baggies' home games for but one - 1964 - season, it might seem a tad odd that I would home in on such a random 'memory'. But that memory was triggered by last night's posts and the remembrance of a lad called Ian Thistlethwaite, who, as a teenager was one of the coolest people I ever met outside of my actual social circle. However, my first interaction with the fellow was quite remote. When I was around nine or ten I was gifted a large collection of football programmes from someone my dad knew. Anyhow, a year or two later, my father had gotten to know Ian'...

The past is a crowded space. I've been blessed with almost total recall: some might consider it a curse, but I love it. I can still see, hear and sometimes even smell [that last is random in recollection, but it is nevertheless there] places, people and events from most of my long life, going deep, back into childhood. Even dream states from that childhood [blog posts passim] are occasionally brought forward into daily consciousness, sometimes at will, but more often than not by some external stimulus, which can be as random as the smell of the hedgerows, the sound of crows, or an email from someone from years past, now staying in touch as one old person to another, but connecting one teenage mind to the other through time's distant lens into the present, the intervening time falling away before it. The wonderful thing about having [almost] total recall is the ability to [almost] relive the past in my mind's eye, sometimes quite literally viscerally. This is not about nosta...

I apologise in advance for this incoherent ramble, but there's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I'm late to the keyboard tonight. The current existential crisis of socialism in this tiny group of islands we call home - and it definitely is a crisis - stems from a number of sources. First and foremost, of course is the [genuine and justified] feeling amongst the ordinary voting public that they have simply been left behind and marginalised: left out in the cold by a Labour movement that speaks in bold, sweeping terms of change and an improvement in the daily lot of the many, but which has thus far delivered little that can be seen on the actual surface of people's daily lives. This of course is the soft flesh from which populists like Nigel Farage leverage their specious views in fictitious defence of the vulnerable [majority]. Myth-making is the stock in trade of the empty-headed, and Farage is deeply embedded in that process; in the absence of any real politics, ...

Just an observation on where we currently seem to find ourselves in the political world of 2026 UK. We are at the moment only two years into a Labour government that inherited the poisoned chalice of a UK economy that had effectively been dismembered and its body parts scattered far and wide by a succession of Tory governments following the precepts of a political philosophy that by now should be outlawed at the very least as a dangerous drug or rather more as a lethal weapon of mass destruction. We all by now know what this heinous excrescence of a theory is called, and most of us are indeed very much the victims of its inevitable dire economic outcomes: neo-liberalism in all its forms and guises is the scourge of all but the very wealthy. Keir Starmer was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party by us, the membership; not because of his personality or charismatic qualities, but because of his skill set: a lawyer with a forensic attention to the detail of law and process: given t...

Pictured, mes amis, the closest I've ever got to my Holy Grail Madras curry at home: an absolute stonker, if I say so myself. This is the best curry I've made in my forty-six year culinary learning curve to date. I'm starting to understand . This is so Zen it's perfect: the realisation that no particular written recipe by however good a cook will allow you entry into the realms of food nirvana. Certain precepts, largely unspoken and often kept hidden, obtain here. I've cooked some pretty decent nosh over the years, but I've never really been satisfied with my take on South Asian cooking - one mutton biriani aside - until ths evening. I've always recognised the need for patience and taking one's time over preparing food, but have never applied this rigorously enough to achieve the taste result lurking in the back of my food memory [a vast store of taste]: until tonight. Thanks to much experiment, research and time, I'm almost there at the point when I...

Sunshine beim Wintergarten heno [there's a linguistic mix for you...] with a brace of wooden ducks and artificial flowers for colour. More important though, is the glass of Italian Primitivo in the foreground, or rather the goblet in which it sits. This venerable old wine glass is pretty much the last survivor of the 1980/90s heyday of the competitive cookery that cemented our friendship with Alan and Irene over forty -odd years. I've written recently about the origins of this long-standing tradition [blog posts passim, and in response to observations about the difficulties of navigating the archive of my scribbles, I'm thinking about mirroring this site in a more accessible form, so I will keep you posted if this thought train hits the tracks any time soon], but since Alan's illness and passing, these collective culinary endeavours have essentially withered and ceased themselves. This rather knackered, chipped and wobbly old glass was part of a set they passed on to us...

I was just watching an interview with one of my favourite guitarists, Robben Ford, on YouTube this evening. He was extolling the virtues of a 1960 Fender Telecaster that he bought some number of years ago, and which has been one of his go-to stable of guitars over the years: a blonde, rosewood-boarded, white-pickguarded beauty, now much road worn and very much played-in example of Leo Fender's genius. Pictured is my bastard-caster, which is now nearly fifteen years old, and which has undergone much modification and mutation in its short life. It started out as a Fender Modern Player, with a middle pickup, Strat-style, and a humbucker in the bridge position. It's a tad different now: Ever since I started to listen to music, I'd always wanted a Telecaster, and almost bagged one back in the early seventies, that was at the sweet spot of the marque: a sixties' model identical to Robben Ford's beauty of a guitar, which I couldn't finance at the time, despite what now...

We had our monthly lunch club today at The White Eagle at Rhoscolyn on Anglesey. We were a few short in number of our customary tableful, but a pleasant time was nevertheless had by all. I made my usual mistake of taking a starter before my main, which didn't leave my shrinking appetite enough room to finish up, but there you go. However, on our way into the restaurant I had noticed the outside chalkboard wasn't advertising specials or offers, but had on it a very familiar verse that at first I couldn't place, as in written form it was totally out of context for me. It only dawned on me a while later during the meal, that it was a spoken piece from a record by The Moody Blues: 'The Dream' from the album 'On The Threshold of a Dream'. Pictured, Jane's original copy of the vinyl from 1969. The Moodies, as they were known by most fans, were a Birmingham band formed in 1964, and their earliest sartorial image would have suggested a lounge act rather than a r...

Well, the voting for the Senedd elections is over and the count is done. No overall majority, but as expected, the vote has gone the way principally of Plaid Cymru and Reform. No other party came remotely close to either. I can't say I'm either surprised at the outcome, or even - speaking as a lifelong Labour voter who still casts a red ballot at every election - particularly upset at the outcome. Bemused perhaps at the ludicrous success of the arriviste Reform and their frankly ludicrous figurehead, but upset, no. We live in 'interesting' times, and the political scene at the moment verges frankly on the surreal; but it's where it is, and for the duration we're going to have to put up with whatever tomfoolery transpires.  That Labour's century long Welsh hegemony was under threat was glaringly obvious from the outset, and the more perspicacious of pundits read it just right: the dual Labour governments were more curse than blessing on either, particularly h...

Just a diary post tonight as I'm winding down from yesterday's drive and meal at The Cross Foxes [yesterday's post]. Pictured, the view from the cottage door this evening with the sun setting over Ynys Môn, and some promising cloud formations in evidence. The Clematis has really established itself on the arch over the past two or three years since we planted it, and is now trending westwards in its search for the sun. I've noticed that the Italian Cypress behind it has also taken a bit of a spurt of late, which probably means it's on its way towards the species' normal height of around seventy feet or so. Apparently, they have a slow growth period of several years before a final sprint home, so to speak. Anyway, the thing is looking healthy and happy enough, so bon chance to it, I say...

I'm minded to be careful about talking politics tonight, as there will be much such chatter going about tomorrow evening, post-elections, anyway; so I'll ignore the subject entirely for the duration. I had a topic vaguely in the offing for this evening's little scribble, but frankly I can't bring it to mind: an all too familiar scenario these days, and one which I'm damned certain is not unique to yours truly. I'll pour another glass and ponder for a while on the matter silently, in like mind as my eighteenth century Herefordshire quaker ancestors. Although I don't suppose they would have used the wine bit of such pondering for a minute... Wine poured, horizon scanned for inspiration, but nope, it's gone; and no amount of mental prodding is going to retrieve that particular thought process any time soon enough for today's epistle to the ether, so a reflection on Levi's jeans it will have to be instead. When I was growing up and jeans were the mod...

I was thinking of adding a rider to last night's post on agentic AI, but I think I'll leave that till later, as I've been kind of thrown into a little fugue on things past, prompted partly by memories raised from my mental depths by this afternoon's visit to the newly re-opened Tryfan [the pub formerly known as The Llangollen, or more usually just The Llan in days past], a reformed "boozer" that appears to be open for business with the rather sensible - to my mind - attitude that you have to be actually open for people to come in and buy drink and food - radical, eh? - and at predictable hours of the day and evening. It's early days yet, but they've started the Spring/Summer season by declaring themselves properly open from noon till late, seven days. They are also serving decent real ales alongside the usual trendy gassy stuff, to boot. Long may it continue and spur on the competition to step up their game: let's get the High Street going again; B...