Observations from a Hill

OK - pictured is tonight's example of the great British culinary standby: the leftovers fry-up. The lamb chops and spuds are from yesterday's early supper with the boys and Irene, fried up with streaky bacon, and served with that most exotic of sauces, HP. After yesterday's marathon of food prep and cooking, today's supper was always going to be a bit of a throwaway, hence the above; however, despite the fact that the lamb chops really didn't survive the second cooking [no surprise there], the real star, as always, was the bacon. I don't eat it overly often and to me it's a treat rather than a staple, and so I really don't care if the bacon I eat from time to time is stuffed full of nitrates. Intuitively I know that slight exposure to such stuff does no real harm; but I realise in retrospect that my maternal grandfather's long-standing gastric problems - which led ultimately to his demise fifty years ago - were probably due in large part to his daily...

We had the the boys and Irene over for afternoon supper to celebrate Irene's upcoming birthday this week, and some of the wide-ranging conversation [as is our usual wont] and the variety of music we were listening to made me think about our collective family relationship with, and attitude to, the utterly dysfunctional world we inhabit alongside the rest of humanity. We as a family, by whatever means or happenstance, have always found our many and various paths in life without straying from some pretty core values, either politically or philosophically; religion not usually scoring very highly on our need-to-address board.  We try to be fair and kind where appropriate; fierce and excoriating of injustices committed by others, and as generous as personal limitations permit with those less fortunate. Our natural instinct is toward basic decency, but eschewing dogma and orthodoxy. I truly believe that this is the natural mindset of the vast majority of the human race. We are all, afte...

I was watching a YouTube of some old climbing footage this afternoon - in particular of a climber called Jimmy Jewell in a 1980s documentary by Alun Hughes - who was most well known for his solo climbing [unroped to the uninitiated] exploits. I never knew Jewell but I did know at least a couple of his close acquaintances from the era. Jimmy died soloing Poor Man's Peuterey, at Tremadoc in North Wales: a relatively easy [graded severe] route for him. What made me think watching the film though, was that, even up until relatively recently, getting decent, editable footage of climbs has not been straightforward.  The interest in filming climbing for a more general audience really only dates back to the 1960s, in particular with the second ascent of The Old Man of Hoy by three parties of climbers. The first, repeating their first ascent of the previous year by their original route; and the second and third opening up two new lines of ascent. The original 1966 party was Chris Bonington,...

My repast tonight: it might not look much, and my presentation falls well short of any known benchmark in the food photography department, but trust me, this is one of the tastiest little treats I know of. Devilled sardines on toast, courtesy of one Fred Whowell, probably now late of this parish: a student dish that he carried with him probably from boarding-school days, wherever he was from or educated; he had a faint northern accent but was decidedly quite posh. Essentially, one takes a tin of sardines in tomato sauce, mashes them up in a bowl with chilli powder, spreads the mixture on toast - it has to be white sliced toast, well buttered - and grills the whole shebang under a hot flame. Tonight's variant on this much personally employed theme involved mixing a good teaspoon of Encona Carolina Reaper sauce with the fish before grilling, then garnishing the finished result with a sprinkling of  Kashmiri Chilli powder. And very good it was too, and to be frank very healthy. Oh, a...

Anyone who has read these pages for any length of time will know that whilst I was a very early adopter of digital technologies, I also cleave to the analogue world that we seem to be leaving behind us at an ever increasing clip. All well and good - I mentioned last night that the invention of the smartphone has pretty much democratised the possession of enormously powerful tech throughout a large part of the globe - when it's all working smoothly and seamlessly, which to be fair it achieves ninety-odd percent of the time. When it does go wrong, however, which it does, this huge basket of metaphorical eggs we carry in our pockets and rely on for just about everything in modern life, suddenly turns into an unmade omelette without pan or flame to cook it. Reliance on digital-only living is precarious and depends on huge interconnected support structures, power supplies and networks simply to function. It is not a chain that can be broken but a huge net easily shredded given the right...

It's a strange thing, but our understanding of and our relationship to computers has passed from one of distant observation in the sixties and seventies: as in the film "Billion Dollar Brain"; via vague familiarity during the eighties, with a mainly business-based association through work and maybe youthful hobbyist tinkering, to now, when computing has pretty much been subsumed by the 'White Goods' ethos, particularly in the realm of the smartphone, which most users would never consider in the same light as a 'computer'. Despite this lack of regard for the depth and complexity or the rich history of the technology that most folks simply and naively take as 'my internet, my socials, my camera', the fact is that current smartphones have more processing power than the first supercomputers, developed in the 1970s, costing the equivalent of billions of dollars, affordable only by governments and the military. Today's iPhone, costing around a grand,...

It's extraordinary how we are stuck in a doom-loop of political/economic nonsense. There are few who are willing to engage with intelligence the true nature of world politics/economics and the relevance of external forces on our own domestic situation here in this now isolated and benighted archipelago of ours. In last week's New Statesman, the estimable young commentator Will Dunn - a man very much after my own heart in such matters - outlines the very poisoned chalice that is the Chancellor of The Exchequer's rôle in the day-to-day running of the UK's finances. In short [you should just chase down his piece in full as I'm not going to précis his article here] he points out some salient facts about exactly how much or little direct influence a chancellor has on the country's economic progress. The bottom line is that it is a thankless task, as most of the key influences on a country's economy are untouchable from their office, and pretty much all external. ...

  The is the first in an occasional series based on the "Boring Postcards" book I mentioned the other week. Pictured - well I think it's probably self-explanatory - the New Jersey Turnpike around sixty years ago. Now, disclaimer: I've never been to the States in my life, and whilst like most of my generation I grew up on a diet of Americana - movies, comics, music and garish commercial graphics - I've never really wanted to go over the pond to see it first hand. Given my age now, and the current febrile state of the USA's politics under Trump, I'm as unlikely now to go there as I was when I was an impecunious youth back in the era this postcard was first published. However, as the title of this post alludes, this particular bit of US freeway holds a semi-mythical place in my heart, in that as a young teenager I listened to Simon and Garfunkel's album "Bookends" almost daily; usually just side one, with a very occasional foray into the flipsid...

There is much to be exercised about in the news this week, even aside from the continuing military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East. The botched execution of Christa Pike in the state of Tennessee for one. If there was ever an argument for ditching the death penalty - and there always should be, in my opinion - this is it. The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Part 1., Article 1 paragraph 1 . states: '..."torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such [a purpose as] punishing him (sic) for an act he (sic) or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed...' The end of the paragraph carries an unfortunate apparent caveat in '... It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or accidental to lawful sanctions...'. This sufficiently vague statement could be taken to mean, e...

Just a very quick throwaway food post tonight - and not even about anything I've bothered to cook for myself, either. I decided on a whim late this afternoon to just get a takeaway Indian from the Sitar in Bethesda. After much faffing around to find a working cashpoint [the place is still delightfully cash-only after thirty years and several owners], I went for a swift half of estimable Welsh cider at Y Fic [the old Victoria pub], before picking up my simple repast of Chicken Madras and two chapatis. Whereas when Abdul - the original owner of Sitar - was in charge of the place, the Madras had all manner of things in the curry, including loads of green pepper chunks [not complaining], this Madras was a totally Old Skool plain and hot Madras Chicken with a vengeance: a 1970s-style B.I.R [British Indian Curry] in all its glory. Having said that, it wasn't perfection, but pretty damned close enough for rock'n'roll, and it certainly packed a hefty punch of chilli. To be perf...

Funny thing, memory. I had two possible topics in mind for tonight's post, but both now escape me totally: I made the mistake of not making an immediate note of either when they occurred to me in the first place. Note-taking is an essential tool in securing stuff in memory. Failure to not remember things is not simply a feature of growing older, as most would take it [for granted, even], but rather a baked-in feature of who we are as a species; psychologically we are a need to know organism: we retain in minute detail all of the stuff that is necessary for our survival. Have you ever doubted that you would find your way back home or any other important place, for that matter, at least when sober? Until any of us enters a period of physiological and mental decline, we retain all of our internalised geographies and topologies in some form: we learn to map our environment instinctively from birth, as do all creatures on this Earth. Disease aside, we never forget this stuff. But when i...

Despite my best intentions from the outset of every day, I invariably leave the posting of my trivia in these pages until the very last possible minute, which I guess sums up the modus operandi of my life generally: deadlines I feel instinctively are there to be pushed firmly against, in order to gird the loins, put fire in the belly and sweeten the eventual closing of the chase. O! but were life itself were so urgent and so pressing. Oft-times true in usually distressing manner, but for the most part as commonplace and I would hazard, mundanity in itself. Tonight's scribble is no exception. Up against the wire yet again with nary an idea to my name. However, I was reading a piece in my partly-read Summer Edition of The New Statesman about time . Time, of course is something I return to time - ahem - and again here, and I could be accused of being so exercised because of my advancing age and the rapidly contracting reservoir of my personal supply of the stuff; but it's simply n...

Rachub, what a place. Of all the places we've lived, this little burg is wholeheartedly the sentiment encapsulated in its name: Yr Achub; literally 'The Rescue' or perhaps better translated as a refuge or sanctuary. For that is what this place is: a place to find peace and respite from the world beyond, either as refugees from without or as returnees to a lost heritage re-found. To casual visitors, this hodge-podge of narrow streets and tiny terraces can seem mean in the harsher seasons of autumn and winter; grey, slated roofs over blue-grey stone or pebble-dashed walls streaked with rain and moss, uninviting at best at first sight. But the place itself invites and welcomes people: the interiors of the small cottages and terraced dwellings hereabouts; the people that live within their confines, welcome people to come and stay. To make homes and form friendships; to find a welcome bulwark against an increasingly hostile and baffling world. The world here is smaller and gentl...

I may have written at some point about my choices of the best albums of all time for me - a perennial exercise for those of us who actually have experience of the art-form that is the 'album'. I usually cite Van Morrison's 'Astral Weeks' as the absolute apogee, an opinion which I still hold and cleave to: never bettered, impossible to improve upon and simply perfect. I also always include Frank Zappa's 'Hot Rats' in my list - not perfect, but close. My list of favourite albums could fill a book, but tonight we were watching a Netflix documentary on the inception and formation of Led Zeppelin, and I remembered how bloody influential the first [eponymous] Led Zeppelin album was on me and my mates. The first time I heard it was on the John Peel programme on Radio One immediately after its release in the UK; when the estimable Mr. Peel played the entire album, end-to-end, with no break or commentary, so gob-smacked was he - as were we - with the record. A tr...

As promised, a cooking aftermath post. Pictured, tonight's repast of mutton chop, very slow-cooked with potatoes and carrots, etc., finished with some cream, olive oil, more paprika, and parsley. All served with a couple of hunks of halfway decent bread. Not bad, if I say so myself and I have to say the mutton really does have some heck of a flavour to it; and cooked for so long and so slowly - absolutely obligatory - it falls off the bone like chuck steak. The potatoes and carrots are soft but hold their form, and the sauce has most of the flavours I intended it to have. However, I won't finalise this recipe and post it until I've done some tweaking, as there are definite improvements I want to make to it. However, it wasn't a bad meal: the aftertaste of the thing is a good indicator of its potential to enter my roster of staple go-to's. The only thing that would stop me making it regularly is the absolute dearth of mutton available from normal outlets these days. ...

Pictured is today's  expérience culinaire: a sort of Balkan-ish mutton stew, featuring four large mutton chops purchased from the inestimable butchers in Bishops Castle as we were leaving for home yesterday. I browned the [floured] chops in olive oil and butter, then sautéed the potatoes [salted and just brought to the boil and drained], half a dozen whole cloves of garlic, a diced Romaine pepper, one chunked brown onion, one sliced red onion and three carrots cut into decent-sized chunks with hot paprika. Once everything was browned and softened, I transferred it to a suitable pan for the oven; deglazed the skillet with red wine and added that and vegetable stock to the pan with the meat and vegetables. I cooked the lot for around one and a half hours on a very low heat, then let it rest in its own juices. Tomorrow I'll separate the meat and vegetables from the sauce, thicken it and return the solid stuff to it and cook it down for a further hour or two on low. More jazz cooki...

OK, so the final post of the holiday. We drove back from the cottage in Shropshire today, and took it upon ourselves for once to stop at Chirbury. We've always meant to look at this little hamlet, but have invariably hurried through the place. Anyhow, the church interior pictured is of the twelfth century Priory Church of St. Michael the Archangel. From the image I took, it looks as if my choice of very wide angle lens has optically distorted the supporting columns to either side of the aisle. However this is not the case: the columns do indeed lean towards the walls at either side. Disconcerting, but I would guess, given the church's antiquity, not of any immediate concern or threat to visitors in 2026. Worth a visit, as I think it might be to make one to The Herbert Arms, just across the square. Re-opened and refurbished after some considerable time closed, the Grade 2 listed pub was always one which never seemed to be open whenever we passed by. Methinks next visit to Shrops...

Our last day in Shropshire today; John left for home in Aberystwyth this morning and we drove over to Ludlow to have a mooch around. After coffee and croissants we perused the market's offerings and I bought the above-pictured volume from the Oxfam shop. A splendid volume of prosaic US postcards collated into a collection by the late English photographer, Martin Parr [1952-2025], whose whimsical takes on ordinary life always tickled and amused whilst being quite barbed, in a very genteel, English way.  The beauty of this splendid little tome is that it offers no qualifying or explanatory textual context, reminding me of the splendid BBC2 TV programme from around 1968 - which I'm sure I've alluded to before - which without fanfare or announcement would simply start; no title sequence, no graphics, no context. It would then present an apparently random and quite surreal series of art and socially referenced mini pieces [visual articles?], with the only faces to camera being ...

Sometimes one has to stand back and observe events from a higher viewpoint in order to gain true insight into any complex confluence of events: seeing the whole rather than the components enables deeper understanding of just what is happening at component level. Nowhere is this more true than where our natural environment is concerned, and particularly in the case of the aquatic environment, currently in sharp focus in the media here in the UK. Yes, individual pollution events can be investigated at the micro level, although enforcement appears to be practically non-existent due to under resourcing, lack of funding and poorly or cynically drafted legislative tools. But whilst each incident, however serious its characterisation, is a cause for concern, very often it passes by little-remarked and un-dealt with until it fades from public view and concern. It's only when we pull back and take a systemic overview that the overall impact of pollution can be seen for what it is: a pressin...

Pictured - a tiny visitor to the conservatory here in our temporary home in Shropshire - a Wren, somewhat bemused and disorientated, having flown into a structure that it obviously couldn't quite fathom the without from the within. We left it to its own devices with both doors open and eventually it figured out an exit strategy and joined the rest of the throng of small birds feeding around the small wooden arch nearby. Aside from the usual garden birds and the small squadron of Wood Pigeons that all feed there, we had a couple of spectacular visits by a Woodpecker which obviously resides quite close by: a flash - literally - of colour and movement that reminded me of the occasional, exotic and glorious visits made by Jays to our garden back at home in Fairview Heights... 

  Powis Castle today: a visit to the gardens, museum and café only, as the castle itself is currently closed for rewiring and general refurbishments. We first joined the National Trust on our initial visit to the place thirty years ago, and the gardens are always a joy to see, more sculpture than landscape: Land Art initiated centuries before the late twentieth century term was coined. The upkeep of the gardens alone must cost an absolute fortune, but I guess that's part of the point of being a member of the Trust in the first place. At least these days the hoi polloi get to see and appreciate the artistry of their peers from former times, and not just the landed and monied who started the project in the first place. However one views these grandiose statements of wealth and privilege in terms of historical social inequality and injustice, the wanton abandonment or active destruction of such places would deny the part that the far less privileged artisans and labourers, who actuall...

Coffee and cake this morning at Berry's Café in Church Stretton, and very nice it was too. We had a good mooch around the antiques emporium in the town, looking for one of those very large Willow pattern meat dishes with the juice/gravy/sauce well at one end, for next Christmas Day's lunch, at which we aim to either repeat the haunch of hogget extravaganza, or maybe even push the boat out for slow-cooked beef ribs. We haven't decided on the meat yet, but have our sights on the right and proper receptacle from which to serve it. Unfortunately, this time we struck out in our search. I remember one such dish in the family, growing up, but in those days the only size cuts of meat we could afford would all have fitted in the sauce well of the thing, and so it was always consigned to decorative rather than practical usage...  

Our first visit of the week to The White Horse in Clun [blog posts passim] this lunchtime. Eschewing a full Sunday roast, having already had coffee and cake at the newly-reopened Poppy House Café in Bishop's Castle - very good espresso and a slice of cherry Bakewell - we opted instead for our continuing favourites from the pub's Light Bites menu: in my case the above sausage and chips; good honest pub grub, well cooked from great produce and in a portion small enough not to render one speechless with bloat. As always, their locally-sourced sausages were great and the chips homemade, not frozen. I washed mine down with a pint of the inestimable Clun Pale, brewed on the premises: a beer without equal by my measure, and one of the cheapest pints you'll find anywhere. The pub is open at all proper pub hours, has a great landlord in Jack, and most importantly has that particular comradely atmosphere found only in a pukka British public house. And as I've mentioned once or tw...

  Just a brief throwaway diary post tonight, as is my usual custom when relocating to Shropshire for a short break. The blue remembered hills are still here, and for the time-being at least, so is our little bolt-hole off the beaten track down here. How much longer the place will be available to rent, we can't be sure, as the owner is ten years older than us, and we ain't young ourselves, folks. Still, here we are again for a few days, so I'll keep you posted as we do and see stuff at the epicentre of my family's origins and their travels to and from the greater part of the Midlands over the last centuries: the Marches straddle the border between England and Wales, with Welsh speaking Oswestry in England and English speaking Welshpool in Wales. From Gloucestershire to Denbighshire via Shropshire; my lot certainly got around a bit in the old days...

I'm a kind of glass-half-full sort of bloke: an eternal optimist, and a believer in the basic humanity of our species. I'm also a realist with a keen sense of historical context: as a species, aside from great art, music and literature - the good stuff - we've also inflicted great harms on ourselves as humans, and on the home planet we all share, rent-free, from the Universe itself. The ultimate social housing project. Except that socialism has never been good enough for the more selfish and venal amongst us. So we continue to tread a path that will ultimately destroy us all. This is the currently-trending parallel narrative of the 'threat' of A.I to the our species and death by the 'others'. By the the way, it's interesting to note that this dystopian narrative arc includes only us and our creation; Artificial Intelligence. It ignores the vast majority of creation that exponentially outnumbers us here on Earth, and which almost certainly would be better...

  Just a quick one tonight, literally - at least that is in terms of food: what else could I possibly be referring to at my age? - I've been assembling a raft of inspirational recipe ideas to try recently in my on-going grail quest to recreate a good, old-school, British-Indian, West Midlands curry-house Madras at home, and I've parsed out a number of techniques that I think I can assemble into a decent simulacrum of said dish from. I think a few days in the kitchen might suffice to secure my ultimate goal, now so armed. However, in the meantime I would like to offer a word of praise to a homegrown [Welsh] brand of readymade south-asian-food-alikes. Pictured is the wrapper from a particularly decent butter chicken that has formed the last two evening's repast for me. I have to say that I would have passed it by on the shelves of the local Tesco Express were it not for the price reduction. I have to give it its due and say that for the money and convenience it was pretty dam...

To anyone who has studied Fine Art - properly, and at a practical level - there are two species of art-related persons that provoke a righteous animus amongst our number. Critics and dealers. I am struggling to [re?]watch the programme about a lost Leonardo that could [have been?] be worth gazillions of dollars on the market if proven 'genuine'. Two things spring to mind about this: one, was Leonardo da Vinci, as he is widely credited, 'the greatest painter of all time'? Two, does this painting have anything to offer to the history of art, apart from its putative connection to Leonardo? Firstly, Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath - admittedly of genius - and his principal focus was on the natural sciences. His painting, although highly accomplished, was effectively a sideline, and he was as experimental in its physical execution as he was in other areas of his endeavours. One of the reasons his paintings have survived in such small numbers is that he experimented wildly w...

There's design and then there's design: some design is timeless in its purity, some is just of its time and will go through the cycle of good v.s bad, fashionable v.s unfashionable, liked v.s vilified as bad taste. Some things last, others simply are in the moment until their revival at a later date. I'm motivated in this thought by a repeat of a Grand Designs episode tonight of a Thames-side build that caused a lot of ruffled feathers amongst the neighbours of the designers/builders of their new home there. I've no particular beef against the final outcome of the build, but will it endure as design? Probably not, but then again, the 'traditional buildings' surrounding their home are to be fair a motley lot themselves, some even exhibiting between-the-wars mock-Tudor half-timbering, not exactly authentic in itself, and which I can imagine Pevsner or Betjeman in their day coruscating the very existence of in both prose and poetry. What I would criticise about the...

What a news week for shock, horror! stories. And I'm not talking about proper news such as the Middle East or Ukraine, either. On the one hand you've got Reform's £72,000,000 windfall, courtesy of two people with more money than sense, who are both in the business of making even more money out of non-money: ain't Crypto wonderful? And Haaland's wrongly-allowed goal by the VAR in the Manchester derby this weekend. Whilst neither are now undo-able retrospectively, there are to be frank, quite simple solutions available to prevent either from occurring again. On the political donation front, just cap donations and electoral spending for parties across the board: level the playing field, and secondly ensure the rigorous nationality/residency rules to cut out stupid loopholes. As to the footie; fit GPS trackers to all players, officials and the ball, and track the lot in real time; use the data to assess automatically the validity or otherwise of decisions made under thi...

  We've had a very full day here today. We went over to Nantlle Vale to have a look at the old quarries there and walked miles through the ruins and jungle-like tramways and tunnels. To paraphrase our visiting friend Sarah: an Angkor Wat for the Industrial Era; nature reclaiming its own from the spoils and spoil-heaps of the decades of mineral extraction that enriched the land-owning classes in this, our country of Cymru: Tir Ni [Our Land]. The place is at once magical and a tad intimidating: danger lurks everywhere in the precarious slate tips and derelict buildings, and as I've mentioned before, no more so than in the flooded quarry hole of Twll Balast, a toxic waste dump simply waiting to become a major environmental issue, and already a suspect in issues affecting bodies of water adjacent to it. Anyway, that's another subject which demands closer scrutiny and another day on which to address it. We went from there to the Cwellyn Arms at Rhud Ddu for a drink and drove Num...

This has got to be a diary post tonight as I'm totally fashed [reference: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess] and frankly beyond it all. We've had an old friend staying in the cottage and tonight's meal was underscored by conversation comprised of the collective memory of at least three generations of the family, anchored in the presence of my mother-in-law, now ninety-nine years of age. The existence of so many people hinged on the chance meeting of said mother-in-law and her to be beau on the craggy excrescence of Crib Goch, so very many years ago in the 1940s. That she survives to this day, as do her offspring and subsequent generations, is a testament to the human spirit. Long may we prosper...

Number One Son and I were talking earlier about AI forms of English, and how the tropes that A.I uses in its use of the language are detectable, given that one knows something less than trivial about the stylistics of normal human usages. There is a piece in the Weekend FT of 29/30th August by Elaine Moore on this very subject. NOS pointed out that such odd stylistic traits are possibly now re-entering human speech through a process of normalisation through exposure - errant feedback loops, anyone? [cf. blog posts passim] - which in turn will be further internalised by the LLMs that are feeding off our own usages of the English - or any other language, for that matter - regurgitating and amplifying said tropes on the way. All well and good whilst there are still those of us around who know differently; those of us born and raised before the A.I era. But: What about those who are being born into this era of mutant and mutated knowledge, who will have no other context in which to frame w...

  OK - pictured, one of the images of dry-aged beef that I intended to use for last night's post, but was thwarted from using because of whatever weird server anomaly obtained with Blogger, which was preventing me from uploading locally-stored images from my computer. I still don't know what is causing the issue, but for a brief window, and using a different browser, having cleared all the caches, blah, blah, blah, &etc., I managed to insert the above in this page. However, I'm not holding my breath that the underlying cause of this glitch is actually being addressed. We shall see; but in the interim I'll continue to post as best I can, whilst setting up a parallel site on my own server space with Gandi.net; whose services, based in France, I've been using for ten years now, with no real hiccups or stress. Once I get the ghost site working I'll parallel the two up for a while before finally migrating to the new one and possibly maintaining this one as a back...

There is no planned image on tonight's post because Blogger seems to be having a sodding fit tonight, so here we are. I only seem at the moment to be able to load up previously used images from blog posts past, so here's one of a steak that I've already consumed: I think it might be my retirment day meal. However, imagine, if you will, large and expensive cuts of dry-aged beef on display in one of the better retail meat establishments... I've just subscribed to a butcher's YouTube channel, which seems like probably the least likely statement I might normally have contemplated uttering. But there you go: the prospect of watching a butcher carving up half a ton of prime Scottish grass-fed ninety-day beef in over half an hour of video might not appeal to many, but I do like beef and I do like to watch a craftsman at work. The piece I watched was  this one , and its content is self-explanatory and worth the watch, especially if you buy your meat from the supermarket. Th...

A.I has its uses, undoubtedly; it can simplify workflows, generate images and videos from the written ideas of human content producers which can be genuinely creative, given that the person prompting the A.I model[s] has at least a modicum of creativity themselves. Think brush, paint, canvas, klutz vs. brush, paint, canvas, artistic sensibility. As always with machines and tools of any sort, human skill will always be necessary to initiate a creative and worthwhile process of production in order to lead to a useful or aesthetically pleasing outcome, itself a function of need outwith the scope of any A.I 'awareness'. Without human prompting, what would an A.I model produce in the vacuum of its own virtual space, left to its own devices; and why would 'it' care, assuming that the concept of 'caring' meant anything to 'it' in the first place, except as an abstraction of that very human concept? The problem for A.I is that it genuinely does live [quasi-exist...

As I've mentioned before, I read the Financial Times; always at the weekend, and once or twice in the week. Where other news outlets are politically biassed to a greater or lesser degree, the FT generally sits at one remove from all of that. It follows only the money and reports on what politics is doing to the world of money: "Without Fear and Without Favour" to quote its strap line. Hence, you often come away from reading it with an interesting and illuminating basket of views, almost, as it were, from the sidelines. From today's copy: Pete Hegseth, the US Defence Secretary, seems to be doing his level best to bring the US armed forces to its knees, fuelled by his President's continued 'adventures' in the Middle East and having sacked or forced out just about anyone of worth and/or experience from the military side of US government; which inevitably exacerbates the now stupendous debt mountain being accrued by Trump and his administration as they burn th...

We watched 'The African Queen' again this afternoon, for the umpteenth time, a film that has been a constant part of my movie landscape for as long as I can remember, and one of which I will never tire of watching. I remember exactly where I saw it first: as a young child, one Christmas, at my nan and grandad's house in Rotton Park Road, Birmingham, the house in which I was born nearly seventy-two years ago. The film was, for many years, repeated on TV every Christmas Day or Boxing Day here in the UK, which in retrospect seems an odd choice of seasonal movie programming, given its setting and narrative. It's kind of hokey and arch in its delivery, but it's really carried by Katherine Hepburn's always wonderful performance and the presence she brought to the screen, no matter the rôle played. Bogart was simply Bogart as always; veering between underplayed to mildly frenetic, but always a joy to watch. We have a number of staple go-to old movies in this house; mos...

The kind of content I routinely watch on YouTube involves a fairly limited set of subjects: music, chess, history, engineering & science; mathematics to a degree, and of course, food . Of the latter I follow a couple of corking Indian cooking channels: Latif's Inspired, which is mostly devoted to Bengali-style cooking, and the Curry Academy, which covers, in the main, British Indian Restaurant [B.I.R] cooking. I watched a couple of their 'casts this evening, one from each channel. The first was from the Academy, outlining a method of cooking an authentic 1970s British Indian Restaurant base gravy, to a recipe from a chef who started his career and honed his craft in that decade: Chef Din. Now, as anyone who frequented B.I.R restaurants back in the day will attest, the curry sauces back then had a very particular flavour and texture that one seldom finds these days, and for which I, for one, harbour nostalgic longings for. I've written before about my first exposure to S...

I've mentioned The Lads here many times, and as recently as the other day: the extended group of [formerly school-] mates that continued long after we had left secondary education, until we became our own diaspora spread far and wide around the UK and the world. Some of us survivors of this once extensive clan still stay in touch via email, the boomer's choice of remote communication. We sometimes get to meet up in person, in ones and twos, although a much larger gathering was formed at the funeral our dear friend Johnny Kyte [blog posts passim]: with representatives a number of the 'sub-tribes' that formed the Venn diagram of friendships within the larger 'super' grouping that was 'The Lads', which, by the time we hit the pubs of Birmingham in earnest back in the early-mid seventies, became very much a larger, mixed gender grouping, as we all started relationships and most got married. We had an email round yesterday to that effect, as it is sixty years...