Observations from a Hill

Prefabs, Wake Green Rd. Birmingham     Remember prefabs? The post-war solution to rehousing those displaced after the bombing? Prefabricated in factories, these kit houses were quick to erect and sprung up in various guises and designs all over the UK in the years immediately after WWII. They were only meant to be used and last for a matter of months, a few years at most, but some lasted many years longer - I still remember them into my early adulthood before I left Birmingham.     In recent years, Jane & I have been banging on about affordable, energy-neutral housing, or rather the lack of it. We have - Covid apart - a triple long-term crisis on our hands: virtually no housing affordable to first time buyers, no social housing policy to speak of and an absolute dearth of ecologically sustainable building design & manufacture in the mainstream: it's all well and good highlighting the Grand Designs style of eco-build; but by and large, though no...

The Generation Before -Youth I realised that part of something I put out the other night was almost a poem. As that's something I've not done in the fifty years since the dog(gerel) days of my youth and as it was about those days, it kind of seemed appropriate to round it out [in a meta kind of way] - so here it is: It Was Redolence of plucked grass stalks chewed And country meadows explored; Of bombsites in ruined Smethwick streets, The Cut: The Feeder, The Soho Loop, The Soap Hole; Of parks, bandstands and bike rides: Black Patch Park, Warley Woods, Summerfield: Lazy adolescent days spent smoking and talking - talking , When and wherever we found ourselves: The invincible years of youth.

Project Mayday     Back to domestics. Started this one a couple of days ago. Basically I had a request from Jane for a potting table. As we're now turning into a cross between Capability Brown & Monty Don, it seemed like a reasonable request in the back-saving department.     As always, I try to see the easiest path to a goal, so I dug out of the studio the bottom half of a knackered old dresser that I'd been using as a bench, or not using, as the studio up till recently has been floor to ceiling with crap. And given the size of the bloody thing, that's an awful lot of crap. Anyhow, I managed to unearth it and with the help of a bog-load of timber offcuts from the work I've been doing on the cottage next door, I've built the above. It just needs a bit of sanding and a lick of paint and it's ready to use. Happy Days! The list of stuff that I want to get done is endless - I'm turning into the old man. Not a bad thing - if I could be half the bloke he...

Well there we are, I've just posted my 60th entry since Lockdown, so this is number 61 and an excuse to post a random photo of my beloved maternal grandparents and referring to post #60 - a poem to youth. Comeclose and Sleepnow it is afterwards and you talk on tiptoe happy to be part of the darkness lips becoming limp a prelude to tiredness. Comeclose and Sleepnow for in the morning when a policeman disguised as the sun creeps into the room and your mother disguised as birds calls from the trees you will put on a dress of guilt and shoes with broken high ideals and refusing coffee run alltheway home. Roger McGough

John Martyn - a life lived... Listening to a rather fine album of Beatles' covers by the inestimable Al DiMeola, as recommended by the Brummie/Welsh contingent in Spain - Mr. JGJ - I'm minded of the inspiration behind so many of the Beatles tunes; in this particular instance, Strawberry Fields. Childhood. Adolescence. Redolence of plucked grass stalks chewed and country meadows explored. Of bombsites in ruined Smethwick streets, the Cut, the Feeder, The Soho Loop, The Soap Hole; of parks and bandstands and bike rides. Black Patch Park, Warley Woods, Summerfield and latterly, lazy adolescent days spent smoking and talking when and wherever we found ourselves. The invincible years of youth.     We were riffing on the selfie-generation earlier. One night a couple of years ago, we were taking a drink in a bar in Bangor; nice trendy kind of place, not an eatery or an old-fashioned pub (not that you can find one of those any more,) but a modern bar. On the table next to ...

The Edge of Snowdonia     I was just randomly musing on where we are currently, on life's path, if you like: as you do when time is plentiful and things aren't quite as you ordered them at the checkout of youth. We chose to come and live in this extraordinary place quite by happenstance. A meeting up with Jones bach for a long weekend in Carneddi turned into a lifelong love of North Wales and home.     I travelled up in September 1980 to sort out our cottage rental for when I came up to Bangor University to do Postgrad Linguistics in the October. The Best of Myles - bought at Bookland in Bangor September 1980     Forty years have passed - well in September at least, since we upped sticks from Birmingham and moved here in a tiny van with all we could carry, two cats and Pete & Sheila - Pete driving. An eventful journey, to say the very least, we eventually disembarked and set up camp in Braichmelyn; to be our home for the the n...

The Mappin Wall No.6 - Tom Phillips 1974     Tom Phillips' conjectured pictures, Blow-Up! - both reference the amplication of image into image into image...the raising of the noise floor to the point where the original image disappears into the abstract and both the denoted presence of the subject captured in the original, mechanical/chemical process and all connoted references simply give themselves up to the residue.     This is interesting. The information - the pure data are still there, but the context is lost. The waymarkers of form and context are lost. Hence, sense is lost. Abstraction from denotation - no data are actually lost, but the focus is narrowed and the noise intrudes. Reality is transformed, but reality it nevertheless still is - part of a mechanical/chemical process of facsimile that until the advent of the digital era was taken by most to be, at heart, an inviolable imprint of the real. I'm back in the territory of 'The Rhetoric o...