Observations from a Hill

  “Time passes. Listen. Time passes. Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night.”   I was talking earlier on, of a reference made in an old episode of the TV series "Lovejoy", to the famous 15th Century Prague Astronomical clock, and the prevailing superstition - and fear - of that period, that clocks actually create time itself. The thing is that up until the era of mechanical timekeeping - and you could go a good bit further back in history to pseudo-mechanical methods, I guess - we simply regulated our daily activities in a purely analogue and instinctual sense: daylight and the season's turn being the only means by which one was aware of 'time'; all tied to itself and our being, and not abstracted to the 'measured' time of the clock. Intuitively, on a human scale, the only correct interpretation of time, if such exists, is the human, existential one: the fact that human i...

  Diary post tonight, as I'm getting sleepy with the heat of the woodstove this evening. Spent some time today finishing the wooden brackets for the sound treatment panels to be installed at Bethania for vocal overdubbing purposes. These little things will support the four acoustic panels needed to kill as much of the room reverb as possible: combined with a fine Sennheiser shotgun microphone and good EQ, this lot should make a very difficult post-production job a little easier. I'd give more detail, but I know nothing, and would probably be shot at dawn if I did and dared to tell...

Been listening, on and off, to the BBC radio dramatization of H.G Well's "War of the Worlds" on Sounds this last week or so. I read the original in school over fifty years ago, and have seen and listened to just about every adaptation of the story since. The stand-out for me, though, revisiting the original text again, is not the tale of Martian invasion itself, or it's prescience in presaging so much of the World War that was soon to actually occur; but rather the realization that the plot essentially centres around London and its immediate environs of the Home Counties, with the Thames at the centre of it all. Not a lot has changed, has it? We - well, those in England at least - still cleave to a metro-centric bubble here in the UK, where wealth, privilege and success are gravitationally attracted to the capital, at the expense of the least well off - the non-rich majority - of its inhabitants. Almost no-one can afford to rent, let alone own, property in many parts...

  No politics tonight. Just eaten more of my curry from two nights ago, having just watched the movie "21" and now listening to Frank Zappa's album 'Chunga's Revenge' and enjoying a glass of Argentinian Malbec (Trivento, from the local Tesco's Express). This album will always remind me of the front room of 16, Winson Street [blog posts passim], my home from the age of about two days until I left at the age of twenty-three. I remember borrowing the album at the time it came out, but I can't remember who lent it to me; I suspect it was my mate Clive, or maybe Jeff. Anyway, many decades later, I revisited the record by buying the CD; and in very recent times found an original copy of the vinyl in decent nick on eBay. Not a bad album at all, and I still estimate Zappa as one of the most important musicians of his era. Having said that, as I've said to so many people over the years; given the Desert Island Discs rescue choice, I'd always take Beefhe...

  How lowest common denominator of the Tories to attempt to deflect from their many current woes by resorting to their native default positions: law 'n' order and the war on 'drugs'. Not only are they content with demonizing desperate people attempting to find sanctuary in this archipelago - planning all manner of inhuman incarceration and deportation schemes for the poor sods - they are now going to 'crack down' on anti-social behaviour. Yes, that tired old catch-all that saw much service in the Thatcher years of the 1980s: basically, just find some minor irritant to amplify into a demon of society-threatening proportions, with the cynical aid of the gutter press on the right. Just what 'demon' are they now focussing on - given a gut-shot economy, education, health and social services in total disarray and in danger of imminent collapse: their own government so riven with corruption and grift as to resemble the Cosa Nostra or Yakuza, rather than any kin...

  Tonight, an improvised sort of Saag Murghi kind of thing: a chicken curry with spinach, mopped up with the excellent naan bread that M&S are now selling, randomly , from their snacks rack, alongside - well - crisps and stuff; having seemingly run out of stock of their usual fare on the curry shelves. However, not a bad repast at all, and a pot which I'll inevitably tweak for better effect tomorrow, no doubt, as it will be just me eating it, so I can up the green chilli ratio a bit! Being at the stove-front today brought to mind all those thousands of shared meals from the last forty-plus years that we've cooked and enjoyed, and drove home just how few we are now. Our number has dwindled, for reasons both geographical and mortal, essentially to a handful. Sad, but inevitable, methinks. Still, onward and upward...

  Yesterday, I posted my 1200th, ahem, post, almost exactly three years ago to the day that I started this blog, which coincided with the first Covid lockdown in March 2020; hence the - now kind of redundant - subtitle, "The Lockdown Tapes". I didn't have any expectations as to how this would develop, if indeed develop is what it's done, which is not exactly: more mutated into the diary I think it currently is, and rightly should be. A space to vent, opinionate about and comment in; but moreover, a daily discipline to focus on for a few minutes to an hour each evening. The resolution I set myself at the outset, though, was to write at least one post a day, come what may, and no matter how I felt. So far, I've kept to this regime and intend so to continue for as far into the future as I'm around to do the thing, and which my tech will allow. I've covered all manner of ground thus far, from the trivia and minutiae of daily life, to the diverse and more abst...