Observations from a Hill

I wrote the other day about The Great Bishop's Castle Power Outage - actually it lasted little more than an hour, but brought the town to pretty much a standstill - which made me think: how much survival resilience do we actually have, here in the second quarter of the twenty-first century? Answer, practically none. As soon as the power goes down, pretty much every aspect of our lives goes down with it. Which is actually kind of worrying. We were subjected to a freak power outage in the mid-nineties, when we lived in Brynbella, down on the A5, on the outskirts of Bethesda, at Christmas. An ice-storm - a very rare phenomenon in the UK - had taken down every wooden power pole across the tops from Aber. We were amongst a very small number of properties that were still fed with electricity from this very old circuit across the mountain. Suffice to say, we were without power from Christmas Eve, through Christmas Day and beyond: we gave up and drove to the Midlands to stay with parents o...

I had a thought [shit happens, I know] this morning about chasing down some of the history surrounding our software development back in the '90s/00s: viz the VBase/InfinitImages days of yore. I then thought, why not chuck some questions at Claude AI and see what comes back? So, mindful of the fact that a carefully formed prompt or question posed to a LLM will elicit more sense than a stupid question, I simply stated the following: ' In the 1990s there was a Photoshop plugin called FotoPage which has disappeared from sale - can you research this for me? '. What followed was very interesting, as the AI came up with exactly correct details about both the product and our development of it, and found an archived, compressed version of one of the range on the Tucows archive. It correctly returned the chronology of the software's development, up to and including its year of demise. It then went on to accurately analyse the two principal technical reasons why the product(s) eve...

The late, oh, so great, Alex Harvey sang, or rather er habt sprechgesang gemacht '...another tree dies of shame...' on the 1975 Sensational Alex Harvey Band album, "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" in the song "The Tale of The Giant Stoneater". Like so much of the SAHBs output, the lyrical content and intent of the album's songs is so genuinely right on in the original meaning of the phrase - please don't use the term 'woke' in this context - and carries forward to the present day prescient warnings from over half a century ago: the radical shift to the right and neo-liberalism was a mere twelve/eighteen months in the future from the album's release. The environmental and political issues that have dogged us persistently since then are still as thorny and unresolved now as then. I picked up on a linguistic parallel to this today in a book review in this week's New Statesman. In Sophia Smith Galer's new book, "How To Kill a Language...

  Our recent stay in Clun and many visits to The White Horse Inn [blog posts passim] prompted me to ease myself back into my family tree researches after a break of over a year - or is it two? Tempus does fugit without due warning at my age. A realisation struck me about the apparent mobility of family members across the Marches, the Midlands and Wales back in the nineteenth century which, given their poverty, I'd always wondered about; when the penny dropped: the railways. Also, when you look at the map, all the areas of concern to my familial archaeology are within relatively short distances of each other, and connected by what was then a comprehensive rail network. Pictured is my latest little acquisition: a facsimile of Bradshaw's Guide of the 1860s, which I bought to try and flesh out some of the travel background of the time. Using this with some of the other books of railway history I have to hand, I hope to get a better flavour for the movements of people at the time in...

I realised today that I, for the first time in my life, had failed to keep up with current technology: specifically, AI. The move from from chat-based interfaces to multi-modal agentic models over the last few [months, to be honest] has taken me rather by surprise. I've always taken some pride in the fact that I can always [at least cursorily] keep up with things techno-logic-al, and I find for the first time in my life that I've been blind-sided by the breakneck speed of developments in AI and its deployment in real-world situations. I aim to catch up; even at my advanced age there is simply no excuse for laxity in these matters: current knowledge should not be the exclusive domain of the young, don't you know. Anyhow, I decided to dip my toes a little further into the - as yet - little-known waters of agentic AI, and posed a question that models my undergraduate thesis' inquiry [although my dissertation was a good deal longer in the end]: “I need a discursive essay of...

Still feeling a tad jaded and disoriented after our return from the short break in Shropshire last week; yesterday was a long day, and I started today after one of those fevered returns to sleep early this morning which evinced a dream from which I still haven't quite escaped the clutches. However, I opened this week's New Statesman just now to a review of Sebastian Mallaby's recently published book "The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, Deepmind, and the Quest for Superintelligence" [Allen Lane, 480pp £30.00]; and interesting reading it makes, too. Asked by Mallaby if he thinks AI will 'be a bigger change than the Industrial Revolution', Hassabis likens AI more to that most radical human evocation of self and the realisation of such; the making of handprints on a cave wall, tens of thousands of years ago: the very first externalisation of our inner selves; the genesis of human culture and civilisation embodied in an abstraction of self in communication wi...

Just a diary post tonight as I've been on the move since the crack of sparrow's fart today and what with the drive home, unpacking, and generally coming down to earth here in Fairview Heights, I really can't bring any depth of thought or perspicacity of perception to the table tonight. We had a good journey back from Shropshire with wall to wall sunshine for the majority of it, save some mist before we left the vales for the main roads back home. When we started loading the car around 07:00 this morning, the temperature was just three degrees celsius, and the car was white over with frost. By the time we crossed the border into Cymru, however, the temperature had risen to a very balmy eighteen celsius. The rest of the day has been glorious, and the garden has started to make its voice heard in our absence: our Clematis arch has started producing blooms [pictured], and will look an absolute picture in the coming week or so. Much work to do in the garden, but the weather look...

' Clunton and Clunbury, Clungunford and Clun, Are the quietest places Under the sun...' :  A. E. Houseman's much loved poem "A Shropshire Lad" sums up the rather laid back nature of the small Marcher town of Clun in South Shropshire to a tee: it's quiet, all right, and there's no denying the fact. In fact, on some days of the week there is seldom a soul to be seen on the streets. Occasionally, there is a flurry of infeasibly large vehicles passing through Market Square, both commercial artics [sem i- s for our American cousins] and agricultural vehicles, monster EVs and Harley Davidson's in convoy. In fact, on reflection, the place is quite often somewhat less than quiet, these days, vacillating between these two states of quietude and clamour. One thing that is definitely quiet in these times is the river Clun [pictured, from on the old bridge that connects the two halves of town], that flows through the heart of this ancient settlement, overlooked b...

We went over to Bishop's Castle this morning with the intention of getting a bit of food shopping done and maybe grabbing a sausage baguette and coffee from the The Happy Bap, an excellent little eatery specialising in rather fine sandwiches; only to find the entire High Street shut down by an unexpected and very localised power outage. The only two places able to trade - [no electricity, no lighting, no Epos to take payment: all food chillers and freezer cabinets would have to be closed off to conserve low temperatures] -  were Rosie's vintage clothes and curios shop [she takes only cash and the sunshine was providing ample light], and the local filling station, which I assume was either functioning on back-up generators, or fed from a different circuit [unlikely] to the rest of the High Street. A hapless queue was forming at the door of the Cooperative, waiting for the [electric] doors to open, to no avail. Apparently no advance warning was issued, so one can only assume that...

Today we drove over to Leominster for a mooch around the many antique shops there. As I've mentioned before, my Southall family has ties to Leominster as well as Bishop's Frome, with a possible connection to the large Quaker presence in the area going back some two or three centuries: Leominster is a major meeting place, and the Southall name is writ large in Quaker records concerning Herefordshire families. I've yet to confirm the connection, but it seems to me from records I've seen that it is likely there. We bought an excellent sandwich from a little deli in the centre of town, and sat in the square in the sun to eat it, before walking down to look at the Priory, not far from the square [interior, pictured]. From there we picked up the car and drove to Leintwardine for a drink at The Lion, a place we've eaten at several time before [recommended]. As we were leaving, I realised that I'd left my day-sack on the bench where we'd eaten lunch, which contained...

Despite watching the Mandelson debate live on TV - during which there were more ill-formed questions than logical, and where only a couple of them actually got close to getting to the nub of the issue - I've arrived at a point in the evening, Mastermind and University Challenge grand finals behind me, a belly full of steak pie and halfway though a bottle of Malbec, where I really can't be arsed with trying to synthesise my thoughts on the so-called scandal playing out in government at present. Suffice to say I have some strong opinions on the subject, but I'll leave them for another day, as, to be frank, I'm fashed. What I will say is that we had a good day out to Ludlow, followed by a pint of Clun Pale over the papers at The White Horse, when we got back to Clun this afternoon. So, snooker on the box, snacks, and finishing my wine are my present priorities, and so I bid you nos da!

We went over to Acton Burnell Castle today: we've visited the place before [blog posts passim], but our companions had never been to the place, and we fancied another trot over there, anyway. After a wander around the castle ruins and taking in the sight of some of the magnificent trees there, we decamped to the adjacent St. Mary's Church, a grade one listed building dating back to the late thirteenth century, which was unmolested and unmodified until the late nineteenth century when some renovation was necessary and some minor additions were made, including the addition of the small, Victorian tower. For the most part, however, the place wears its Medieval origins on its sleeve and it is all the better for it. Pictured, original Medieval tiling around seventeenth century headstones in the floor of the north transept. A lovely and peaceful place for those with or without Christian faith, it speaks mostly of human history with all of its manifest oppressions and freedoms, wealth...

Day two of our break down here in South Shropshire. Spent a couple of hours in Church Stretton scanning the charity shops and the antiques emporium that are our usual stamping ground there. Back to Clun and out for an early evening meal at The White Horse [blog posts passim], where I had a very creditable chicken curry with boiled rice and naan bread [double carbs, I know] and a couple of pints of their home-brewed and inestimable Clun Pale Ale [also blog posts passim]. Jack was on top form as mine host, and who features in my top four or five landlords - probably, no, actually occupying the top spot of my top five - it has been my pleasure to have been served good ale and banter by in my over fifty years of drinking in the more traditional ale houses of these lands. I also rank The White Horse as close as it's possible to get to the absolute ideal public house, something George Orwell could only fantasise about with his fictional alehouse 'The Moon Under Water' in his 1946...

Here we are again in Clun for a few days break, and the sun has broken through the gloom and precipitation, with blue skies and a slight breeze; albeit starting to chill down a bit this evening. Pictured the Hospital Gardens around the corner, the old almshouses, which I've mentioned before in these despatches. The last time we were here was at the tail end of last summer, when hot weather had given way to autumn winds and rain, and the place looked more blasted heath than cottage garden. Spring bulbs are blooming everywhere and the place has been nicely tidied up after the winter ravages. Anyhow, we're off to The White Horse [blog posts passim] soon for a couple of pints and hopefully a live band. Keep you posted...

If I hear yet another Tory quack on about issuing new licences for new North Sea Gas exploration as the panacea for our energy woes, or some twonk spouting utter guff about deploying new nuclear developments to stem the tide of our increasing energy insecurity, I'll scream and start hitting things. There is one simple reality behind these follies: too, late, too damaging, too expensive. The only possible beneficiaries from any such developments are the corporates who are vested in these obsolescent technologies, their shareholders, and the speculator vultures who constantly circle the markets looking for carrion from the fallout. If I hear yet another vested pundit shrieking hysterically that the sun doesn't always shine and the wind doesn't always blow, I'll equally start screaming and hitting things. Anyone who lives in the British Isles knows full well that both of these meteorological phenomena actually occur with regularity, often in - surprise, surprise - a synchr...

I'm still searching for a referencing methodology that suits my scattergun approach to learning and organising the accumulated data that I amass daily; and as I prefer to work mostly in analogue, enhanced by digital aids, I decided I'd go back to basics and give the old heuristic approach a go once again, and throw in my old college favourite, the slightly unhinged collage approach: pulling together references between articles, papers, books and images using photocopies, scissors, Pritt Stick and highlighters, as well as hand-written scribbles, to cross-reference from one to many and back again. As you can imagine, this will have no actual formal structure, but it will include URLs, Dewey Decimal classifications, i.p numbers and just about anything that seems appropriate at any given moment. The idea - vague though it is - is roughly to 'organise' my stuff in such a form as suits me, but which might give others a glimpse into my world of thought at some point in the fut...

  I was going to mention that I have a new [in fact, actually very old] strategy for hyperlinking documents in my ever-increasing collection of references and oddments, but more of that tomorrow. To be frank, it's now impossible to gloss over, skirt around or ignore the fact that Donald J. Trump, 'leader' of the free world and the man with the nuclear codes at hand that could most certainly be used to reduce the known world to ashes, is utterly and completely bonkers. Barking. Certifiable. Ready for straitjacket and padded cell. Delusional doesn't even come close as a description of this man: he has literally identified himself, in order of posts on his own social media platform as a) The Pope, b) A King in a fighter jet, and most recently as c) Jesus Christ himself. In days past, pronouncements such as these would have seen him burnt at the stake for heresy, blasphemy, or probably for just plain lunacy. The man is clearly deranged; but the most disturbing thing about h...

  Pictured is Jane Hilton's wonderful portrait of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in yesterday's Observer Review. The subject of the photograph is one hundred years old. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen, coming to the UK after the Second World War to settle in north-west London, where she still lives. Without knowledge of context and her life story, we would simply be looking at a beautiful woman and gazing into strong intelligent eyes that speak of myriad, unfathomable depths of personal experience: a century of life and all which that implies and entails. What the image does not speak of is victim-hood or even, perversely, survival of the terrors that she experienced at the hands of the Nazis during her incarceration in the Second World War as a German Jew. Her gaze is defiantly of the present, a person very much in the now, and quietly reminding the world that true horror was once visited on the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and so many others that didn't fit within the st...

I've mentioned before how apparently trivial moments of choice and decision made without much thought can radically alter the course of one's life for the better - or if you're unlucky - for worse. I was thumbing through this week's House & Home section of the Weekend FT whilst half-watching one of those daft property reality TV shows and eating my lunchtime baguette of cheddar and pepperoni - yummy - when I saw a house for sale in the always maddeningly and ludicrously expensive property section of the paper. The place in question was in Bergerac, France [pictured]. The price? €1,250,000, which of course is so far outwith my reach and scope as to be entirely discountable, particularly at my stage of life. But it made me think: that kind of money was of the order that the property programme was talking about for very modestly-sized 1930s houses in Surrey. The French place featured in the FT plonked into the same county would currently fetch at least ten times as m...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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