Observations from a Hill

Here we are again at the turn of yet another year. There was a time when the wind-up to midnight's chime would have started mid-afternoon, with the lacing up of a far-too-loud sound system in the confines of a small terraced house in Winson Green, Birmingham, and my father shoring up the floor of the front room from below in the cellar with baulks of timber, to support the weight and dancing feet of the later-assembled throng. We could pack thirty to fifty people into our little house for a party in those days: two small rooms, eleven-foot square, and a kitchen of half that width to accommodate the lot; well into the early hours of New Year's Day. Fifty years on, and many, many more such parties under our belts, we find ourselves far less inclined these days to even stay the course of the evening, let alone to the hour of midnight. We might watch a bit of Jools Holland, as has been the case for the last couple of decades or so: occasionally to the end and Big Ben's chimes;...

Liz Truss - almost certainly taking the historical biscuit as our worst Prime Minister of all time - believes in 'small' government. What exactly does that mean in the twenty-first century? If government has any remit or even purpose, surely it is to govern, otherwise the word and the concept itself is a non sequitur and invalidates itself. The problem is with thinking such as that of the Truss axis of the Right, is that they still imagine that ultimate power and authority by right subsists with a ruling elite, by dint of status. In medieval times this equated to the most well-equipped bullies, aided and abetted by a religious establishment that existed in a foul symbiotic relationship of succour, support and mutual benefit with the self-appointed 'masters of the universe [as small as it was to them at the time]', which eventually elevated itself to the Divine Right of Kings. These days, the Kings have been shunted into a ceremonial if still enormously lucrative [throug...

So, our ex-PM-but-one is giving Sunak, the current - and probably yet again, interim - PM, a hard time over his reticence to 'get things done' in implementing the UK transition to an energy regime that will include more nuclear power. Never mind the fact that Johnson promised the earth and delivered little on so many things, much like his successors; but consider the facts: nuclear power was delivered on the ticket of unlimited, practically free electricity: a lie promulgated to cover for the underlying motive of nuclear weapons development.  During the course of its history, though, in real terms, the energy produced has been significantly more expensive to produce and control, and the technology itself has precipitated a sufficient number of major radiological 'incidents' of potential and actual lethality to render its use questionable at best. Add to these issues the unassailable fact of the impossibility of dealing with the long-term [effectively endless] disposal o...

Nice piece in the i  'My View' comment section by Ian Dunt today, ripping one out of the news that we can now officially sell wine in pint bottles again, hooray! Trumpeted by the Minister for Enterprise as '... Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this...'. It turns out that Boris Johnson's notion that - [measuring using Imperial units is an] '... ancient liberty...' - ignores the fact that the Imperial system was only instituted in 1826 and that his subsequent review of weights and measures initiated in 2016 revealed on consultation that less than one half of one percent of those asked even wanted to return to an entirely Imperial system, and that over eighty percent of the sample were enthusiastically content to continue as we currently are with the metric system. We could of course, as I've alluded to in blog posts past, return to the [ actually ancient, Bozza !] "English System", which of course uses lines, barleycorns, pol...

  One of the bundle of presents that Jane bought me for Christmas was the above book. A slim volume, but in itself a much more substantial story of Welsh industrial history. I've read a good chunk of it today, and intend to finish up with the next reading. The industrial history of North Wales is obviously of great interest to me, given our family origins. The appalling treatment meted out to working men and their families by the landowners and their accomplices in pursuit of profit in the coalfields and slate quarries informs my politics and attitudes to authority to this day. I'll let you know more about the events recorded in this little book as soon as I finish it. It makes a good companion to "What I Saw At Bethesda" [blog posts passim], and the parallels between the two are there to be drawn, as they are a microcosm of the greater struggle of the working classes against the combined forces of privilege and capital.

  Looks like we'll be eating charcuterie, salad and cheese for a while, having seriously over-catered for yesterday's Christmas lunch. Our numbers and appetites have dwindled over the last few years, but our calculations on the food front are still based on the hordes of gourmands & trenchermen we used to feed in the heyday of The Gerlan Bohemians. A cold collation tonight of yesterday's lamb, Greek salad, various salamis, hummus, olives and Manchego cheese will stave off hunger - ha! - without filling me up to the painful degree yesterday did!

The aftermath of lunch - the lamb actually - natch - tastes better for being cold on the bone! We've had a fine Christmas afternoon. A couple of drinks in The Bull Inn, Bethesda, followed by far too much food for the five of us; and later, pudding and a quiz with a couple of visiting friends, later on. These days, yuletide festivities tend to be curtailed to the late afternoon or early evening, but I guess that's the way of things as one ages. Still, a New Year awaits, and there's more to look forward to: onward!