Observations from a Hill

So, the Tories want to scrap National Insurance. Over successive decades since its inception as a fundamental plank of the social contract between government and the electorate, this basic contribution - specifically implemented to fund the National Health Service and the State Pension scheme - has been bastardised and mutated into 'just another tax'. The problem is now that this view has been normalised for and internalised by a large section of the populous, just as the State Pension is now being characterised as a 'benefit', which implies that it is somehow negotiable and subject to means-testing. No, no, and thrice no! We all pay into the fund throughout our working lives, in order to secure a modicum of financial security on retirement: this has been and should remain non-negotiable, and something that we should all fight tooth and nail to maintain. These are our rights, paid for by us, out of our earnings: let no-one say otherwise. Apart from the fact that the fun...

OK, just about to sit down and watch the movie "The Numbers Station" starring John Cusack, released in 2013.We've seen it before, but I was prompted to dig it out again by a voicemail message on my phone earlier on today, while we were at lunch in The Bull Inn, Biwmares, Ynys Môn. It was from a number familiar to me as it keeps calling both my and Jane's mobiles and our landline on a regular basis. But as we operate a strict policy - as I think the majority of the population do now - of not answering any number unknown to us, the call always gets trapped by voicemail. In this particular case, the result is always a truncated message of a robot voice reading out a string of numbers without context or framing, like an email with no subject, an anonymous sender, and content that makes no sense whatsoever. In short, gobbledegook. I guess that the numbers represent some attempt to convey a return phone number, but it is always incomplete and without the necessary contextua...

Talking this afternoon about two of the greatest institutions we have left in this benighted archipelago, and we weren't talking about any of the august halls of academe or museums of the arts or institutes of science and technology, and certainly not of the houses of parliament. Far and away above all of them, The Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the Mountain Rescue Services, provide pretty much flawless service to those that need them in very often perilous circumstances, without question or hesitation. They respond immediately to calls for help from those in danger at sea or in the mountains: and as an inhabitant of an area immediately placed between both, their actions are in our consciousness daily. All of this - true service - is provided by skilled volunteers, who, for no reward other than that of helping a fellow human being itself, regularly put their own lives on the line in some of the most hazardous circumstances imaginable, freely and without expectation of rewa...

Just watched a YouTube by one of my favourite content makers, MusicIsWin, where he records finding an absolute steal of a guitar in a pawn shop in Johnson City, Tennessee: a 1955 Gibson Les Paul Junior. The asking price for this battered example was $8,500, which might sound a lot for a ratty looking plank, but in today's market is way under value. However, that wasn't the point of the piece: he didn't buy it, but left it for some other lucky punter to find and hopefully treasure and play, rather than simply monetise it. The Les Paul Junior was marketed as essentially a student or jobbing level instrument. A stripped down and cheaper version of the Les Paul itself, featuring a much simplified slab body, no bindings or decoration, a single P90 pickup in the bridge position, and cheaper tuners. A working guitar, no more, no less. Introduced the year before, in the year of my birth, these things now can fetch £10,000 and upwards: not bad for an entry-level guitar. Of course th...

I've written previously about potential systems and methods to assist in my continued learning and blogging processes, and that for the most part they remain untouched and unused. This is partly due to  shortcomings in the systems/processes themselves, and partly - probably mostly - due to my tendency to rely on a motley mixture of analogue and digital, online and offline stuff in a frankly ad hoc, pretty random kind of way: I have a messy mind to match the state of my desk [  for which , as it's winter, read dining table ]. My latest foray into such territory is a piece of software I've looked at many times before, but from which I was almost immediately turned off of at first look: Obsidian. This is free, runs on all main operating systems; Windows, MacOs, Linux, etc., as well as having mobile versions available, but it always struck me as as too obscure in its operation for my liking. As with all of these situations, my go-to is to find someone on YouTube to glean some i...

Pictured, tonight's repast of lamb, potatoes, and in my case, some token green stuff, served with a highly modified gravy, which started life as an M&S off-the-shelf jobby. Gravy, potatoes, broccoli, all good, although I forgot to put some of the fresh mint sauce that Jane had made onto my plate. Bugger. The weird thing about the meat, however, is that it was packaged as 'Butterflied Leg of Lamb', whatever that is supposed to mean. What it actually was, was a deboned fragment of [possibly - allegedly] leg of lamb, presented as a rather amorphous lump of flesh. The cooking time time specified on the packaging was around thirty to forty minutes at 200C, which to anyone with any experience of cooking such a large [700g] lump of meat, would obviously be seen as to be stupidly underestimated. I cooked this - with the usual trivet of garlic, rosemary twigs and lemon wedges and seasoned with oregano, black pepper, salt and lots of olive oil - for a good hour-plus, starting it ...

So, according to Sunak, the democratic base and ideals of our society are under threat by extremists. Really. An unelected Prime Minister with no democratic mandate to speak of, let alone the talent or motivation to do the job properly, has decided to play the default Tory card of the extremist 'other': in this case George Galloway in particular, for having the temerity to actually win a democratically decided byelection. Shock horror! People not voting for his party! So of course this is obviously a case of extremist shenanagens and collusion by the forces of evil against the establishment. Whatever you think of Galloway, and in my opinion he's an attention-seeking plonker most of the time, he is at least on the side of the angels on this one issue: Gaza. The fact is that the political establishment - both sides of the fence - has shown a collective, partisan timidity over this admittedly treacherous and sensitive situation, and in so doing has simply lost sight of the act...