Observations from a Hill

I've scribbled very recently - and many times before - about the need for systems redundancy to provide resilience for the unforeseen. I should really take heed of my own advice once in a while, and being wise after the event really isn't good enough. I was about to pen today's little note when this bloody old MacBook decided the internet didn't exist any more. WiFi? Fine and connected, thank you very much: router working OK? Affirmative once again, confirmed by my iPhone, the TV and my Linux-powered MacBook Air. So, I tried the tack of booting up the old bugger into its Linux partition on the second drive. Still no joy: so I just turned the damned thing off, swore loudly at it and vowed to sling the thing into the garden at the earliest opportunity and let the moss turn it into a feature. Somehow, this veiled threat had some cosmic effect whilst I was firing up the Linux machine to check all else was well, and when I'd calmed down and revisited the old thing, all h...

There are some things which seem insanely simple on the surface and other stuff which appears beyond the ken of normal human beings. I'm minded tonight of two people: Richard Feynman and Captain Beefheart, both late of this parish we call life, God rest their genius souls; the hope being that on some Astral plane, they will be discussing metaphysics over red wine and bongos. On the one hand you have Richard Feynman, noble laureate in physics, and on the other, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart: in my humble opinion, geniuses both, but for such very different reasons. Physics, in my experience, was taught in the form of a series of abstract rules - a bit like our mathematics at school, too - rather than with any given insight as to how or why the rules actually existed. Abstraction in a vacuum is not especially helpful in learning any subject in my estimation, history being possibly the most heinous case of mis-education one can imagine, it usually being purveyed as a series of d...

I've mentioned - probably numerous times - that I have a connection with Stourbridge: that Black Country town which is now in the greater West midlands conurbation. Stourbridge was where I went to study Fine Art at Westfield College, and from where I got my degree in 1978. My association with the town had started a few years earlier, as we used to go drinking there, partaking of some of the most iconic of Black Country brews; in particular the Batham's bitter at the The Royal Exchange in the town, which was in itself notable in that the Exchange was the only Batham's pub that served that glorious pale nectar with a head - all other Batham's outlets sold it Bass-flat. For some reason, it was a [ very ] local tradition which was accepted by all those of us in the know, without question or demurral. And very fine it was too. One name that crops up frequently in the town's history is that of Foley. There is a Foley Arms at the top of town, and a few miles down the road ...

It's funny how the oddest connections rear their heads when trying to come up with these nightly scribbles. I was just watching a Rick Beato YouTube interview with Joscho Stephan, the guitarist who currently inhabits the world of Gypsy Swing, or Manouche and carries the torch for the genre, alongside other greats such as Birelli Lagrene; the style of jazz guitar that was made internationally famous by the late, very great, Django Reinhardt. In a post from a couple of years ago , I mentioned a trip to France back in 1983 with John and Sandra, not long after they got together as a couple. We travelled down to their place near Aberystwyth on the train, and the following day the four of us drove across to Ramsgate for the ferry to France. From the moment we left Wales, to the moment we fetched up at the little Gîte we'd booked in the tiny hamlet of Saint-Jean le Vieux, and all the way back again, the soundtrack to the journey was dominated by Django, also mentioned in this other  ...

Picked up on a piece in yesterday's i Paper about Ernest Marples, the transport minister under the Conservative government headed by Sir Alec Douglas-Home,  having served as a minister in the previous Tory government under the leadership of Harold Macmillan. An example - exemplar, even - of what my friend David so pointedly characterised 'working-class Tories', as in "... do you understand fookin' working-class  Tories, Kelvin? Do you? ..."; then as now, I fucking don't.  Marples was the eyes, ears and mouthpiece of the road transport lobby, despite his often reformist and reforming policies regarding roads and traffic law, many of which were sound then and remain so to this day. Nevertheless, the combined effects of his influence and infrastructural ideology, along with Doctor Beeching's proposed - and accepted - 'reforms' to the British rail network, led to the effective destruction of any serious alternative to the hegemony of the road tran...

It's at times of the season such as this when awareness of the fragility of modern life becomes particularly acute. We've at least got more than one way of heating ourselves, should the electricity grid fail, as it has tonight in north-west Anglesey: the whole of that quadrant having gone down for some reason; we have a wood-stove that will keep us warm in any case, should it happen here, too. But then, our wood supply is getting shorter, and the top of the hill here is still pretty treacherous after a couple of days of snow: it's not desperate, and I've still got some timber left to cut in the garden, and we do have our excellent little corner shop for supplies five minutes walk away; but you never know, do you? Makes me think of the lack of redundancy in so many many modern systems these days, the most obvious in the time of electrical outages being communications: now the hard telephone dial-tone has almost completely been done away with, none of us have that simple ...

  All night it fell, and when full inches seven It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven; And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare. Robert Bridges 1844-1930

OK - digressions on time aside, I can feel yet another battle with an energy company coming on. We had a monumental campaign against our previous electricity supplier [we don't have gas, which simplifies matters] over a period of a couple of years or so regarding over-charging and illegal back-billing. We won, despite the ombudsman's eventual ineffectuality: they were found to be demonstrably in breach of practice, energy regulations and basically, the law; and we settled for a line in the sand on the billing and a token payment in lieu of compensation for the ludicrous amount of effort we'd expended in proving we were right and they were wrong. I should have charged consultancy rates for the two us and sued for the inevitable non-payment thereof. However, as I said, a fresh conflict is brewing over our frankly gargantuan monthly electricity bills: £300 +, when there's only two of us old folk living here, anyone? I have never fully accepted the ludicrous sums that this ...

Another year's turn and already the New Year is now just This Year. The future passes and the past accumulates. The arbitrariness of the New Year's celebrations themselves mirrors those of sundry religious festivals - including Christmas itself - despite its less spiritual nature and history: what marks the start of a New Year? Depends where you are of course, but logically the year's turn occurs at the Winter Solstice, already long gone by the time we link hands, sing in Scots' dialect and fall over drunk 'till morning comes [other modes of celebration are of course available]. It also depends on your global location as to how significant this time of the year is: the experience of the annual changeover is very different in Northern Europe, where most of these traditions come from, than it is in say sub-Saharan Africa or Polynesia. But continuing the theme of the last two day's posts, it seems fitting to close out this rhetorically threefold digression with a r...

Pictured, a Coles - actually an original STC - 4038 ribbon microphone [blog posts passim], designed by the BBC in 1953, and which has featured and still does feature in innumerable recording sessions and live music performance over the years and to this very day, over seventy years on. This particular example is a very low serial numbered version, so I would guess is at least as old as I am, which is not young [ahem!].  These things have a storied history, having been used in countless BBC radio broadcasts for both voice and music: in the old days, orchestral concerts were broadcast live from single examples of these microphones slung by wire over the orchestra pit at many venues throughout the UK and beyond. I still remember the one flying solo above the stage at Birmingham Town Hall back in the 1970s, probably out of use even then. These venerable devices are still prized amongst recording engineers across the industry today for their transparency and transient response and their...