Observations from a Hill

  Just a quick update on the kitchen project: the picture is testimony to the fact that you can never have enough clamps, no matter what. A shout out to Lidl for the ratchet clamps I'm using here; £4.99 for two medium sized and two tiny clamps: they're good quality, assembled in Germany and at that price unbeatable.  The piece I'm working on here is the support for the left-hand side of the unit, including the support for the sink bowl. There'll be two hidden access hatches under the sink so I can reach all the plumbing as necessary. Just starting to lay the first one at the bottom of the picture. I've also been trying to get my tools organised; putting another shelf up for the honing setup I made yesterday for sharpening chisels, plane irons, etc. I came across a completely different technique for honing blades than the one I knew: much simpler, no jig and better results: even my cheap Magnussen chisels come up razor sharp. I have to say I'm really enjoying the...

It strikes me that the government is rapidly losing its audience in the tragicomic drama that is Covid-19. Not only its audience but its stage crew; with a rebellion building from the back benches [various posts, this blog passim] via the 1922 Committee. The Cabinet's vacillations between doing the right thing, on the one hand epidemiologically and on the other to assuage the concerns of those in business and their employees, now simply looks from the outside like rabbit-stuck-in-a-headlight territory. Rather than sticking with a plan for either and seeing the thing through until the vaccines are out there in the wild, they're stuck forever in a feedback loop of indecision, losing the faith of all sections of the theatre's audience simultaneously. Trump has learned to his electoral cost the folly of theatre gone wrong; Johnson really needs to win over his own theatre before the catcalls start and the rotten tomatoes begin to rain down on his sorry cast from the stalls, circ...

  I've carried a pocket knife of some sort practically all my life.  I honestly don't know how people who don't, get by. By 'pocket knife' I'm referring solely to folding knives of one sort or another - jack knives, pen knives, etc. I just find them an essential tool for daily life. The picture shows some of the more traditional ones I own: left to right, an Opinel No. 8 I've had for over thirty years, showing considerable wear and tear. It was once lost in the garden at Brynbella Cottage in the mid-nineties, turning up rusty as hell and the blade seized in the handle. But a good clean and oil revealed that, although blemished, the steel was as good as ever and in common with all Opinels, when properly sharpened, you can shave with them. Second is an Opinel No.9, recently purchased which has seen no serious use yet. Next up, my oldest and most treasured knife: an army-issue knife/can-opener by Taylor of Sheffield from 1943, which bears the military Broadarro...

It's difficult to know where to look or how to pitch things at the moment. England's back in lockdown, at least until - for some areas, possibly not - the Xmas un-lockdown; which will no doubt see a New Year spike in Covid infections, blah, blah, etc. followed inevitably by yet further locking down, und so weiter, ac yn y blaen... Here in Wales, it looks as if we're back in some  kind of restrictive regime again from a week Friday. It wouldn't be so bad if the reported statistics we're getting daily were even vaguely consistent. One day we're told one thing, the next the opposite. Up, down, plateauing; ding, dong bell. We're just keeping our heads down until after Xmas and hope that someone, somewhere, hopefully with a modicum of authority and some degree of appropriate knowledge and expertise will just let us know what the bloody hell is actually going on. I'll be back in my workshop tomorrow; on my tod with Radio 4 and a load of sawdust. Let us know wh...

Birmingham: Britain's second city; despite more north-westerly claims to the title. But whereas one of those cities, Manchester, has been on the ascendant in recent times due to an increased media presence and a thriving University; poor old Birmingham, which was looking so promising recently: remodelling the much-maligned 1960s town centre, with its vehicle-centric, brutalist architectural vision of a 'modern' city centre; has seen a sudden, rapid decline in it's fortunes. This has been widely commented on in the media the last week or so and the closure of John Lewis' flagship store stands testimony to the very thing that was wrong with the City's recent regeneration: putting all of it's eggs in the corporate retail basket and mortgaging itself to the hilt with vanity projects. After the pandemic hit, there was no backstop to fill the gap; nothing. With hospitality in free fall and retail on its knees, there is nothing left to pay the bills. Sad though thi...

  Moving on from yesterday's post about Lo-Fi audio and music to Lo-Fi image making. Lomography is by now an established movement in photography, using usually cheap and nasty film cameras to produce images that have what would have been previously considered faults such as image and colour distortions; akin to the noise and distortion of Lo-Fi audio gear: the beauty being in the unpredictable nature of the resulting images just as it is with sounds produced on old gear. It all started back in 1992 in Vienna, with a bunch of students and the Lomo LC-A camera; a Russian device of dubious quality that was essentially a cheap knock-off of a Cosina CX-1. The nature of its poor optics meant that images were oddly coloured and often soft-focussed [read: blurred], but rather than considering these images flawed, the group took their visual eccentricities and ran with them to produce their own brand of photography. As with the Japanese Provoke group of the '60's, which I've men...

Lo-Fi really is a thing: I love it. During the 1980's, the constant push in music was for more and more fidelity, with technical developments mostly happening within the digital domain: crystal-clear audio, high headroom and frequency response ranging from nausea-inducing sub-bass to a top-end to frighten the bejeezus out of bats. This was the future. That was then, this is now. The sterility of the pure, digital approach under its own terms of reference sowed the seeds for it's own stagnation and the return to the noisy, warmly distorted retro world of the Lo-Fi. In truth, the love of the edgy un-pristine never really left the house; all through the rise of the digital era, artists and producers were using sampled sound; either digital, using nascent technologies like the Fairlight, or artists like Holger Czukay drawing on the traditions of Musique Concrete and Stockhausen, using tape, short-wave radio, etc. to create those dredged-up Lo-Fi textures that hark bark and connect ...