Observations from a Hill

  Here we go again: now it's large energy companies bemoaning their lot in this oh-so-difficult world. E-ON have been sounding off about how their website and call centres have been down because of the unprecedented traffic apparently caused by Martin Lewis in a tweet about meter readings and the impending price-hike in energy costs. Not content with unprecedented forecast profits - aided and abetted by this shameful hands-off Government and its now woeful Chancellor refusing to impose a windfall tax on these companies - they moan and whinge that their 'customer service systems' can't cope with the traffic. As if any modern 'customer service system' can cope with even moderate normal use by customers. Their systems don't function because they're outsourced at the lowest possible cost to the companies concerned, to firms running such tight margins that they employ people at bare minimum wage on crap 'contracts' and use systems woefully under-spe...

Doris Pooh the Younger is currently in front of the Liaison Committee, squirming on his customary brand of strangled semantics and facing questions over Partygate, even stooping to seeming unawareness of the by now matter of record issuance of the twenty fixed penalty notices by the Metropolitan Police. Carefully tiptoeing the fine line between ignorance and mendacity, neither of which is defensible, he opts instead to continue his stonewalling technique of hiding behind 'the ongoing investigation' by the Met to avoid answering a single direct question on the matter, several months down the line. Moving on to Ukraine, a basic question he should surely have had himself briefed on properly - how much of the £400M humanitarian aid pledged by his government has actually reached its intended recipients? - the bear could not answer, having no figures to reach for, despite his having been asked for them weeks ago by letter, and to which he hadn't bothered to reply. It's all we...

Pictured is the old Eko guitar that I've had for over half a century now: battered and worn, but still the best guitar I own, despite its humble pedigree. I shamefully admit that I still owe my mother the twenty-eight pounds purchase price, despite her having passed fifteen years ago: maybe in another sphere - who knows? The bit of copper pipe resting on the bridge of the guitar is a piece of 3/4" copper pipe which I cut two or three years before I had the guitar, as a bottleneck to play slide with. This featured on an old reel-to-reel tape recording that the late, and much missed Johnny G, and I made at school back in the sixties, one Saturday afternoon. We'd been given dispensation to use the school hall to rehearse in, and though we didn't have a bass player, we nevertheless made a noise that sounded good at the time to us: John on drums and myself on guitar. Unfortunately, the tape of that session has been mouldering in our derelict garage for nigh-on twenty  years...

Rats, ships: the moneyed under threat are seeking solace and financial protection within the sanctuary fold of a nation state where money is deified and all else subservient to it. It looks like the sanctioned Russian oligarchs have turned to the same people for help that our ridiculous government has, for different but inextricably related reasons, attempted to turn to. Oligarchs are welcomed with open arms to bury their money in UAE property, and Boris is knocked back in attempting to negotiate an oil deal with the UAE et al., a need precipitated by the very sanctions his government has levied on those same oligarchs. Says something about the moral compass of the UAE, don't it? At some point, the human race really has to start addressing the fundamental, functional flaw of amoral greed that is at the heart of most of its self-created problems. Not likely to happen, but one can only hope, eh?

What is one's tribe? Wherefore nationality? It's an interesting question, given that we all inhabit an isolated world of one, where all external input, stimulus or effect is mediated through our own, solitary and most definitely, individual perceptual apparatus. We can only experience our own experience - no-one else's perception can be the same: our experience is, de facto, unique to us. Yet we share commonalities of experience between us: agreed by intellect or base emotion to be shared amongst us in some way. The foundations of societies, religions and politics are based on these assumed social experiences, becoming the tenets by which we collectively associate with each other. Or not. Given the tenuous grip on 'reality' that our isolated, individual consciousness has, it would seem that assumptions of any shared reality are hopeful at best, and yet, over time, we've managed occasionally in our collective history, to transcend the boundaries of the individua...

It's the end of another gorgeous day here in Fairview Heights: a bucolic day of tree-cutting, garden tidying and dog-sitting. Oh, that it were the same everywhere, but alas, no. The world continues apace on what sometimes seems to be an ever-downward trajectory, where the only currency is, well, currency, and everything else would appear to be subservient to Mammon. A large - city -large - chunk of the Conger ice-shelf in Antarctica has parted company with the continent, Russian bombardment has now reached Lviv - fractionally outside NATO territory - and the world's economy is on the slide into another Great Depression. Which kind of takes the edge off today's little bubble of positivity, but hey-ho, as my old, now sadly deceased, Russian friend, Sacha used to say when asked how he was: "I'm alive!"

  As much as there is deeply unpleasant shit going down at the moment, just for a while, here in Fairview Heights, there is a little slice of paradise this afternoon. Sitting in the Wintergarten as the sun goes down, reading and listening to Nic Jones' album 'Penguin Eggs' with a cold beer; there is no better place to be. Unfortunately, not so for the inhabitants of Ukraine...