Observations from a Hill

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...

I can't imagine what it must be like for the millions of sane, right-thinking Americans living in Trump's Truman Show version of their country right now. I wrote last night of the cohort of mad, bad, old 'strong men', of whom Donald Trump is the 'daddy' and archetype. Mere hours ago, the president of the most powerful nation in the world decided it would be perfectly acceptable to oversee the repatriation of the bodies of six US soldiers returning from their deaths in Iran wearing a white USA baseball cap from his own campaign merchandising store to the ceremony. Even Fox News couldn't countenance being responsible for broadcasting images or footage of this insult, preferring instead to use stock footage from his first term of office. When tasked as to why they did this, however, they asserted that it had been inadvertently done, rather than admit that even they were outraged by their president's comportment on such a solemn occasion, or more likely that...

Even disregarding the immediate human impact [which we can't and shouldn't] of the current wars being waged in the Middle East by what is becoming an axis of the most hawkish of nations in the West, the US and Israel, we can't avoid the wider geopolitical issue of energy supply and what will become in the coming months and possibly for years hence a major factor in economic decline across the globe, most particularly in the West itself. Waging war in the Middle East has always carried with it the intrinsic threat of systemic economic damage: energy supply lines in the form of crude oil are directly impacted by the geographical vice that the Middle East holds over the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal. Whilst we are still stupidly over-dependent on fossil fuels arriving at our refineries to supply industry and domestic fuel needs, we are beholden to those countries that surround that narrow sea passage trading normally and without duress of conflict. When that narrow line ...

Pictured, today's experiment: a kofta-kinda-curry. It turned out slightly odder than I would have predicted, but it wasn't too bad on the whole, as jazz cuisine goes. I'm going to have to think on some more about this one, but there are some basically good ideas in there that just need some tuning. I'm only posting this because I've spent the day either wrangling electrical wiring or watching the Six Nations: two great matches, I have to say; which have occupied me to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. Given the perilous and parlous state of the world at present, that qualifies as a bit of welcome relief, methinks...

Just a brief - and arguably gratuitous - food post tonight, as it's half-time between Wales and Ireland in the Six Nations this evening, and the game's getting pretty tight. I'm not holding out my hopes for a Welsh victory, but that's not really the point. Pictured, my gratin of last night's leftover veggie bake thing, which, to be fair, could have fed the five thousand: there's still a load left as I write; so I imagine a cold collation of at least some of it for lunch tomorrow; we'll see: either that, or I'll freeze it for future consumption. Anyhow, the stove's lit, the living room is warm and the game is about to resume: just time for a bowl of tobacco and back to the vicarious fray...

  I won't say that tonight's post is an entirely gratuitous food post, as I put some work in today in the garden, and indeed into the roasted veg pictured. But I have to say that the absolute star of the meal is featured in the little clay ramekin top left: shout out to Lidl for their cheese and chorizo bake. Utterly scrumptious and a fine top note to add to a plate of Mediterranean roasted vegetables. Yummy. And now I'm full, tired and retiring to the sofa and the wood-burner's warmth with a glass or six of decent red wine...

Randomly tonight, I chanced on a small guide to the rules for the card game of cribbage; a game I used often to play and which, as far as I know, is still the only card game legally playable in UK public houses. Which made me think back to the 1970s and The Lads [blog posts passim] playing crib at The Lamp Tavern, in Dudley, now in the larger metropolitan conurbation of the West Midlands. The Lamp has a special place in my beer-drinker's heart as it was the place where I was introduced to one of the finest ales ever created at the hand of mankind: Batham's Best Bitter, a decently strong beer, even by modern standards, at 4.3% ABV [that's OG 1043.5, old school]; so four pints at lunchtime on a Saturday was a bit of an undertaking, if you were to make it out for the evening session, which we always did, naturally.  Batham's brewery was founded in 1877 and had establishments ranging from the pub that housed the brewery in Brierley Hill: The Bull & Bladder, otherwise kn...

I came across a pre-release academic paper yesterday that, even though I haven't done more than scan it, and to be frank the absolute substance of it, mathematically, is beyond my ken, made me ponder on the glorious phenomenon that is human consciousness itself. As a species we are capable of the most astonishing achievements of engineering and science, coming up with not only an understanding of why things are the way they are, but also how to manipulate the phenomena we've observed and analysed to our own ends. Add into that the fact that we have created art, music and culture independent of physical need simply because we can, is testimony to a species not simply dependent on the need for survival itself. That we are capable, equally, of being an intemperate, unthinking and venal species is also, unfortunately, a simple fact, but one which does not naysay the depth of our creativity. The paper in question, however, despite its complexities of argument, posits what is essent...

  Gratuitous food post tonight. The state of the world is beyond bearing at the moment and I really can't be bothered to try and make sense of any of it at this juncture; so, pictured is tonight's repast of jazz chicken curry and naan. Even though I've got all the base notes I wanted to include in the sauce, including ginger, green chilli, amchoor, etc., it still erred on the sweet side of what I had intended. Nevertheless, it ate well and this time was of my own invention and therefore not a porkie on my behalf, and so I can honestly lay claim to its invention. I've still a long way to go until I find my holy grail - the Brummagem Madras - but the joy I guess is in the quest itself. I was musing earlier on how pathetically limited the lives of stupidly-rich people must be; when they can afford anything they see at any time. No searching, no questing, no lusting after the unobtainable, and no imagination or personal creativity. How fucking boring must that get: all tha...

So, Trump's gone and pulled the trigger on the Middle East, and started what might just be the prelude to the World War that so many have speculated that one day would emerge from the region: who knows? Whatever the ultimate outcome, Trump has bought himself time and breathing space to divert attention away from his domestic politics and personal problems, not least of which is the Epstein Files issue, and the divisions that are starting to show in his MAGA base. Does he actually care about the purpose or outcome of his invasion? Of course not. Will his oft-voiced 'plans' for regime change in Iran actually happen? Of course not: the Iranian regime has been planning for the eventual death of its ageing leader and his replacement for some time, and they have sufficient powers of governmental control to seriously limit any potential popular uprising of their critics, as they have demonstrated so brutally in recent weeks and months. It is unlikely that much in the way of domest...