Observations from a Hill

The world is arguably, and some of us would assert demonstrably, in the most perilous state that it has been since mankind evolved. Hyperbole? I really don't think so: climate change is now accelerating at a pace predicted by climatologists just a few years ago; a rate of change so fast that extreme weather events normally restricted to Africa and the Indian subcontinent are now commonplace across northern Europe. This year has seen catastrophic wildfires taking hold across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and the UK. Drought has been declared similarly widely across the continent, making fighting these fires increasingly difficult. Is there any significant rainfall in the offing for us? Not as far as the meteorologists can foresee: we're looking at similar conditions for the next month or so at least. On the international politics front, how many wars are being waged at present and for what reasons? The Middle East, Ukraine, what next? And what will the antagonists party to and in...

Spaces within spaces, or, I suppose more correctly, volumes within volumes, in a house, have always held more fascination for me than open-plan living. A house to me should be a cabinet of curiosities writ large, with places to explore and definitely more than one staircase. Which I suppose is what attracted me to our home of twenty-plus years, here at Fairview Heights [just to jog the memory, my rather twee little appellation for our humble abode arises from the name of my great-great aunt Annie's house in Herefordshire, Fairview ,  twisted through the irony of John Peel in his nickname for his place: Peel Acres]. I like an edifice with corners. And cupboards. And cubbyholes. I like bookcases full of books, slightly too much over-stuffed furniture and bizarre knick-knacks, souvenirs and collections. I guess at heart I'm a kind of Victorian, mediated by an Abstract Expressionist aesthetic: living amongst a semi-organised clutter of things of occasional interest bound together b...

I suppose anyone from the UK of my age - born in the 1950s - and class: working - can remember folk coming back from early-days package holidays to Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, etc., and saying that it was lovely, but 'all the food is swimming in oil'. Ah, how our tastes and palates have changed in sixty-odd years. I know I'm starting to get a bit like a stuck record here with these repeated gratuitous food posts, but whatever; this is worth sharing. Pictured is tonight's pasta sauce in the making: and it's principally comprised of olive oil. Lots of it. As I posted, I did a simpler version of this the other night for myself, but the above goes something like this. Very gently sauté down half a dozen of those tiny, ripe salad plum tomatoes, quartered, with a clove of mashed down garlic, some flat-leaf parsley and a couple of basil leaves, salt, pepper and a pinch of chilli flakes in a goodly quantity of extra virgin olive oil, with a splash of cider vinegar until...

OK, so yet another food post might seem a tad excessive, but here's the thing: if you can't be arsed to create, invent or otherwise extemporise a meal, let alone follow a recipe, the next best thing is to turn to the comfort food of one's childhood. Viz the above: the aftermath of tonight's meal - I couldn't even be bothered to photograph the finished article as I simply wanted to eat it: a Fray Bentos steak & kidney pie with baby Maris Piper potatoes roasted in beef dripping. Properly nostalgic working-class nosh from my childhood. The Fray Bentos pie occupies a place in that unique pantheon of readymade foodstuffs that serious, professional chefs will always cleave to when they simply want comfort and convenience after a hard day's work. No-one wants to bake a sixty-four layer puff pastry from scratch, to be perfectly honest, and the pastry on these things is always nothing short of wonderful. Other items of note on the roster are: Heinz Cream of Tomato S...

Two gratuitous food posts on the trot I'm afraid: tonight's repast of rolled breast of lamb marinated in garlic, lemon juice and olive oil; stuffed with dates, rosemary, flat-leaf parsley, cardamom and bay leaves; rolled and slow-roasted for a couple of hours and then zapped on high for half an hour. We just ate it with mash: the meat was finger-food and as fatty and garlicky as you can imagine. Interestingly, the stuffing contributed little: the overriding tastes being lamb and garlic. Room for future experiment, methinks. As a very cheap [used to be free in times past] cut of meat with oodles of flavour, I would recommend it to diehard lamb fiends, but not to anyone who's a bit picky about their food: dainty it ain't, and it requires a bit of dextrous chewing to get the best of it. My go-to for satisfying anyone with a taste for sheep, however, will always be shoulder: far superior to leg of lamb in every way. Make it hogget or mutton, and you've got some serious...

  This seemingly insignificant portion of  food was my supper tonight. And let me tell you, it was more than a sufficient amount of sustenance for your humble narrator. It was also delicious and totally ad hoc, having been improvised on the spot. I did my back in earlier today, and both Jane & I were generally jaded by this evening, with Jane opting for Brie and crackers. As we were watching Stanley Tucci's programme on Italy and food, I thought I might rustle up something simple but tasty for myself in a kind of Italian vein with whatever I could find in the kitchen cupboards. Pictured is the result: tagliatelle with olive oil, flavoured with tomato, garlic and chilli. And not half bad it was, too...

It's astonishing how the attitudes of 'free-marketeers' change when genuine competition rears it's threatening head; falling back to a default position of civil [and oft-times criminal] litigation in order to protect their slice of the market and bury the competition at all costs. The bigger the company, the harsher and usually more successful the action. Apple is currently getting in a lather over OpenAI's in-progress hardware stream of business via its acquisition of io, the Jony Ive co-founded design studio. Apple claims that io has been nicking trade secrets and their intellectual property via former employee's 'remembered' and documented knowledge of Apple's hardware development. None of which has currently been shown to have a great deal of substance, and would seem to be based on normal levels of pre-emptive commercial paranoia. This attitude of course is not without precedent, many, many times over in the history of corporate capitalism. I wa...

  Pictured, tonight's meal on the barbie, featuring my ad hoc construction of Black & Decker Workmate and various bits from one of our old storage heaters: the galvanised steel front plate and the bricks therefrom forming the hearth, and an old roasting tin forming the lid. Cooking utensils hang conveniently from the handles of the Workmate, my old welding gloves acting as PPE in handling the hot stuff, and various other bits and bobs serving to increase or moderate the heat. Cost? Bugger all. Result? Pretty much the same as any purchased BBQ. On the food front, the kebabs hiding and cooking under the roasting tin were purchased from the butcher in Llanfairfechan and were lamb & mint. We ate them with salad in pitta bread, and in my case with a good dollop of Encona Carolina Reaper hot sauce. Whilst not for the faint of heart or the inexperienced, this sauce is, I would hazard, not as fearsome as the reputation of the eponymous chilli itself portends, but perhaps I'm no...

  It's time to write my diary and it's time to write this post: measuring time by action and in so doing denying its passage in favour of the moment: this very Zen thought occurred to me as I was writing those [in themselves, locked in time] words, or maybe momentarily after. But now the sentence is writ and the moment gone and posted to the cloud. But I'm still here. In the moment. For now...

The old cliché about 'joined-up thinking' actually has much more substance to it than those that employ it for empty rhetorical effect could ever know [pictured, a graphic from Six Sigma (US) which I think demonstrates my point nicely with or without the spelling and grammatical errors]. The problem we have in so many areas of life and our economy and politics is fragmentation of intent through poor planning and outsourcing; through bad management, reactive thinking and lack of strategic coordination. The big irony at the heart of it all is that blind centralisation of resources is at the very heart of the issue: the very thing that was meant to streamline and make efficient all of the necessary services that drive our society has achieved its diametric opposite; replacing actually [organisationally and cost] efficient service structures, such as the NHS, tax, transport, urban infrastructure and repair; public transport, social services, public amenities, &etc. &etc: ...

  We've decided to try and keep track of the various creatures that inhabit/visit our garden, starting with the Lepidoptera. Pictured, the first entry in this informal catalogue, which got itself trapped in the dining room/study this morning: a Speckled Wood [northern race]:- Parage aegeria. As I've said before, we're pretty well blessed with a garden that teems with wildlife, although the very hot spell recently has quietened it down somewhat. I've seen but one Hummingbird Hawk Moth so far, and the butterflies, apart from the above pictured have been mostly whites of various types; Peacocks, Painted Lady's and Red Admirals. The bee population has reduced a tad of late, but we still have plenty of the precious little pollinators around in this neck of the woods, compared to a lot of places, so no immediate concern is required. One thing that strikes is both the number of blackberries we have and how ripe they already are. The birds have already harvested most of our...

So, the World Cup is over for another four years: there you go. Last night's Final was a bit of a curate's egg to be honest, with one side making an effort to win the game by actually advancing into their opponent's half and - shock, horror! - trying to score goals. Meanwhile, the opposition fannied about in their own half, rarely venturing out of its confines, and for ninety minutes doing bugger all than try to draw fouls and the occasional corner, as if the only chances they fancied were set-pieces. Spain played damned well to little reward until extra time. Argentina played the kind of negative football that gives this game such bad odour to us fans of rugby union: diving and play-acting for the officials [thankfully in this case to little avail] rather than actually indulging in playing the game. It really was a noisome spectacle at times. In the end, it panned out as it always should have, with a very well deserved trophy for Spain. At the match's conclusion, when ...

Ah, the idyll that is the bottom of our garden on a fine summer's eve, cooking cheeseburger on the barbie. Two things immediately spring to mind with a third thought in tow: firstly, the charcoal I'm using, which I sourced locally [blog posts passim] from Parc Y Moch via Spar. When I bought it, I paid what I thought was a rather premium price to support a local micro-business; but it has turned out to be quite the economical purchase, as this is now the fifth or sixth fire I've made from the bag. Compared to the apparently cheaper, garage-bought easy-light stuff, it pans out to be a much cheaper option and makes a rather more superior barbecue fire to boot. Secondly, tonight's burgers have proved a considerably better repast than the very meagre luncheon-of-which-we-partook at The Bull in Biwmares this afternoon. Granted, my pint of Bass ale was at its best, but alas, the food was not. Given that the new summer Sunday menu is so - ordinarily I would hazard, creditably -...

Jane brought my attention to a piece on the front of today's Guardian newspaper regarding the intended funding of very-right-leaning 'think'-tanks across Europe, including some in the UK, by the US government. One principal beneficiary in the UK would be the 878 group, which includes such luminaries of the UK far-right as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Toby Young; having amongst its advisors Dr. Radomir Tylecoat, former Rees-Mogg special advisor. The central tenet of this 'non-partisan' group of 'thinkers' seems to be more of the usual right-wing fare: '"...focus[ed] on advancing fundamental freedoms."'. Exactly what are these 'fundamental freedoms' supposed to be, one may ask? On past reckoning the kind of people involved in this kind of organisation would seem to espouse a very partial and partisan idea of 'freedom'; that of the freedom to exploit privilege, contacts and insider information to pecuniary gain. That of the freedom to t...

It's very much a time of Hello, Goodbye, to echo the Beatles' song from 1967's Magical Mystery Tour EP and film; in particular, hello to the incoming Prime Minister in the person of Andy Burnham, which feels positive indeed, as he represents the kind of values that I hold to be true: a balanced world-view that sees further than pure state socialism and into the real world of small business and the High Street, whilst maintaining the core values of socialism itself. There have been many goodbyes to well-known public figures of late, but today's news of the death of Sir Garfield Sobers is the one of note for me. A true cricketing legend and personal hero of mine from the sixties and seventies, he elevated the role of the all-rounder to almost mythical status; along with Kallis, et al, he was one of the very best cricketers of all time, and formed part of the backbone, the very sinew, as captain, of the greatest West Indies test side of all time during the golden era of th...

As I said last night, I'm keeping posts short and sweet due to my current optical challenges - wearing two pairs of stacked spectacles to replace my knackered readers is not exactly conducive to writing much more than a shopping list at best. Just finished watching 1979's 'Zulu Dawn', one of those Cinemascope epics featuring a - literal - cast of thousands in the making. It's interesting to note that we now don't tend to step outside of the narrative bubble whilst considering films of this nature and wonder just how these cinematic scenes of mass hand-to-hand human conflict or whatever else is being depicted were created. We simply now automatically assume the intervention of CGI and don't trouble to marvel at the epic played out before us. It strikes me that our blasé acceptance of this layer of technological fictivity has somehow numbed the wonder that we naturally had when we knew for sure that, despite the fact we were watching a fictional narrative, a l...

Well, it's a glorious evening here in Fairview Heights: I've cooked Sheesh Kebabs on the barbie, welcomed some new guests to the cottage and discovered the delights of Radio 3 Unwind: the perfect accompaniment to an early evening in the garden. However, the footie beckoned at eight o' clock, despite it being England - the country of my birth, not of my heart - playing Argentina for a place in the final of the World Cup. A physical, hard-bastard kind of game thus far, it's pretty evenly pitched and could go either way. Anyhow, I'm currently optically challenged - my optician's appointment is ten days away, and I'm on improvised reading tackle for a while, so I'm keeping these posts as short as possible to save my eyes. O, the joys of old age! Whatever, pictured is a scene taken from my BBQ at the bottom of the garden this evening. Keep you posted on domestic stuff: the football will look after itself...

Just a very quick diary post tonight as I am not really in the mood for much else, having lost a lens from my remaining functioning pair of prescription reading glasses, which means I'm going to have to go to the bloody opticians tomorrow and spend yet more money simply to get around things that are frankly just irritants, like my damned hay fever. Still, I haven't been tested since before the pandemic, so I guess it's about time to go: faits accompli, mes ami: n'est pas? So, pictured is a scene from this evening, chez moi. Keep you posted on the opticals... 

This is not some fanciful rendering of a Japanese landscape, but rather the view from our house in Rachub the other night at around nine-thirty in the evening, at the setting of the sun over Ynys Môn. Or is it?  I must say that the camera/software on my iPhone is truly astounding: to get anything like an image such as this on film would have been practically, though not totally, impossible, in the days of film or nowt photography. Of course, this manner of imaging the world about us begs some questions, which frankly are not always obvious and probably lie more within the ambit of philosophy or psychology than any particular photographic practice per se. Are we depicting exactly what's out there or is it a confection mediated through many layers of software abstraction and rendered likewise via many layers of hardware? Both, of course; and here's the thing. This process of abstraction is exactly parallel to that human process that translates the 'real' onto the flatten...

Well I have to say I feel properly wrung out by the [Gentle]men's final that ended this year's Wimbledon, and I was only couched out and drinking beer watching on TV. Close to being one of the best finals I've seen yet, Yannik Sinner came out of it as a worthy winner after four often brutally athletic and very hard-serving sets: I guess that singles tennis is as close to gladiatorial combat as we get these days, especially at the elite level. Centre Court kind of resembles a genteel amphitheatre, where egos and aspirations are put to the sword to the [usually] polite baying of the mob -  sorry -  spectators. Top stuff and all very entertaining in any case. Which leaves me with a bit of a vacuum where my nightly post should be. It's been another hot day today, although a large chunk of the hottest part of the afternoon was obviously spent in the semi-dark watching the final. Although the temperature outside is cooling nicely with a gentle fresh breeze to help things alon...

Just as an aside, my weather app is telling me that the ambient outside temperature here is 22˚C, when in fact, it is 25˚C  and relatively cool here in my semi-dark dining room/office, and 29˚C outside in the shade on the patio. I wish I could figure out where the BBC and Apple apps get their meteorological data for around here from. Anyway, to heck with that: suffice to say it's hot enough for up here in Rachub whichever way you look at it... We had our - usually monthly, but of late more occasional than truly regular - lunch club today, over at the Sea Shanty in Trearddur Bay. We were ten today, a good even number for a change, and our son's very oldest friend [toddler to his baby] was up from London to break the usual odd number of attendees at table. Notice that I use the phrase 'up from London'. This is a quite deliberate, personal inversion of the more usual turn of phrase, which to my mind is so unfortunately culturally loaded and oh, so metro-centric. Anyhow, th...

Whilst assembling my usual additions to a bog-standard Pizza Express American [Pepperoni] pizza tonight - anchovies, chilli flakes and extra oregano - I got caught up in reflection on times past, as this particular pizza topping combination harks back over forty years to my days working at Birmingham University; and reminds me of the possible life paths left behind in favour of the one I chose and where I find myself at this moment. As I've said before, I had a secure job and career path ahead of me at the University: I was looking at getting my own department and the the Senior Photographic Technician's post in Civil Engineering, and had also secured the teaching of a night class in photography, locally: all effectively by the hand of my boss, Arthur Burgess - lovely man - who oiled the wheels on both counts. The lunchtime pizzas I ate in abundance in those days were as far from the real deal as are the Pizza Express excuses for the estimable Italian fare of legend are today. ...

  Time for another gratuitous food post. Pictured, kebabs in process this evening on yet another jury-rigged temporary barbecue hearth: those redundant storage heater bricks really do make a good barbie as they help to create a fierce  and long-lasting heat. I'm currently using charcoal made in local woodlands at a place called Parc Y Moch, from the eponymously titled company - run by some local lads - that produces it. Fine stuff it is too, if somewhat more expensive than your usual filling station commercial stuff: but it is a by-product of actual woodland management, so win-win. I've yet to get around to starting a more permanent build: a garden pizza oven would be a good project, but I'd need to consider where to site it carefully as it would be quite an obtrusive structure. We've loads of space here, but not much is actually on the flat, so we'll see. I suppose there is something to be said for temporary structures after all, as it's easy to tailor an oven ...

I caught an advert for Range Rover just now which made me reflect on how much the design of current cars - particularly the blocky SUVs and Chinese EVs - takes from the extreme styling cues of the 'out there' design magazines of the late 1960s, when impossibly large alloy wheels and ultra-wide, ultra low-profile tyres were simply that: impossible to realise in the real world given the then current technology and manufacturing techniques. These, and most other design cues then, came from the fever dreams of sci-fi, and were signifiers of the inevitable future of the automobile. It may have taken sixty-odd years to get to it, but the future as imagined when I was a schoolboy - so far adrift from any kind of reality back then - appears to be now, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.  The irony is that it just looks normal and rather prosaic now...

It's 21:15 in the evening, and I've just woken up from an hour's dozing in front of the tennis after dinner. I still have no particular thoughts in mind for a topic for this post, which is annoying. I started earlier to pen something about the awful Farage creature, who is now stooping to new depths to justify his mis-use of valuable oxygen and to maintain his spurious position in UK political life. He is obviously of the opinion that his voters that are too pig thick to notice his new and mind-bogglingly facile ploy: resigning as an MP to force a by-election and then standing for another parliamentary seat in said contest, all the while continuing to whine about injustice and how hard done-by he is. You really couldn't make this one up. The saddest thing is that taking his fans as complete idiots might well be a winning ploy, despite the insanity of the idea. Even more worrying is that two  all of his potential opposing parties have said that they won't field a can...

Graduation Day at Bangor University today: pictured, our son-in-law Leo, who has just graduated with a first-class honours degree in data science; his second [first] degree from Bangor University, his first [first] degree having been in psychology, some years ago. We're all [I think understandably and justifiably so] proud of his achievements: and he ain't done yet: there's more to come with a research Masters next year and hopefully his Doctorate to follow soon after. Given his drive and hard work, I don't see much in the way of his achieving both with ease. A top day for us all as a family, and also another feather in the cap of a great institution that three of our family have attended...

It's Sunday and gratuitous food post time! Being much exercised by Wimbledon at the moment, and what with Leo's graduation tomorrow and guests arriving throughout the next ten days, I feel at least some way justified in this rather meagre and mundane offering tonight. Pictured is a kind of mongrel Sunday roast, involving sumac roasted poussin, olive oil roasted potatoes, boiled tender-stem broccoli and a fairly standard gravy. I thought there might be a taste clash between the Middle-Eastern and British flavours, but I was pleasantly surprised that it all worked pretty harmoniously as a piece. There you go. Back to the tennis and my wine...

A question that seems often to be asked, no matter the context, is where is the next big idea coming from? It's such a commonplace question that no-one actually questions the question itself. What exactly is a big idea, anyway? The history of the financial markets is littered with the debris of failed 'big ideas', from the South Sea Bubble to the dot.com boom and bust, and one presumes onward to the inevitable collapse of the hyperventilating AI scrimmage currently taxing the tiny minds of market traders worldwide. No, these are not only not big ideas, they are not really ideas at all; merely fashions posing as ideas: trends from which to make a fast buck before getting out and onto the the next gravy train. Snake oil, no more, no less. The true reality is that really big and significant ideas emanate from small but incisive insights, often in the unguarded moments of unfocussed thought that we usually characterise as daydreaming: these days much-derided as un-productive t...

Pictured: today's further progress in taming and shaping [which I started a few weeks ago] of the smaller holly tree that stands guard at the bottom right corner of our bottom garden. The intention was to denude the thing of its lower branches and their foliage and to leave a tall, sculptural 'lollipop' that will still provide a singing platform for blackbirds [blog posts passim] whilst allowing us to see at least some of the view out west towards the boy's home on the horizon on Ynys Môn. So far, so good, and the work hasn't been too difficult, as holly is easily thinned out from near ground level: my ladders having been only really used as steps for the most part. I've just got to take out the last of the lower straggly bits and finish taking the fresh sprouts of new foliage from the lower trunks before they get established. Holly really is one of the great survivors of the plant world: it's practically indestructible and returns from even the most brutal ...

My interest was piqued this afternoon by a post on Medium regarding the number nine. Now the content on Medium varies from the rigorous to the fantastical, depending on how the algorithm interprets the direction in which you want to go based on your reading habits. The stuff I get back I try and filter before actually reading a post, to at least partially game the system as much in my favour as possible, and avoiding the more hysterical crap that can appear in your inbox if you're not careful. What interested me was not the old arithmetical party game of multiplying any number by nine and adding the digits of the product together sequentially until the number is reduced to a single digit and - ta-da! - revealing the number nine; intriguing though that particular numerical phenomenon happens to be. Rather, the author of the post relates that her birth year similarly reduced by addition of individual digits similarly results in a result of nine, both in the Gregorian calendar we use ...

I referenced my dad [yet again] in last night's post, and something turned up today that made think of the old man with psychological reference to myself. Anyone who knows me knows that I ain't the tidiest person when it comes to most things, despite my reverence for, for instance, library catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System, to name but one small area of interest to me. When it comes to my own personal spaces; my desks, workshop, etc., I tend to accumulate stuff until it becomes uncomfortable to work in the space: at which time I will clear up, re-organise and move on, probably to frustratingly lose track of some momentarily important thing or another. With other things, though, I am somewhat OCD. Anyway, I drove up to the Stretton Fox to pick Jane up today on return from her visiting family in Carnforth; a trip I do many times a year at the moment. The Fox is conveniently halfway for a rendezvous and is a pleasant watering hole for an hour's break and a welcome pint o...