Observations from a Hill

I wrote a short piece on May 11th 2020 about the Birmingham Workhouse in Winson Green and its infamous Arch of Tears as it was locally known, where my Great-Great Grandfather, Godfrey Rudge died, a pauper, having moved from his birthplace in Rhiwabon [Ruabon] in Denbighshire to the Midlands to find work in the late 19th century. I've latterly found the Workhouse record of his stay there, and interestingly he is listed, alongside all the other non-English inmates, as 'Irish'. Godfrey spoke only Welsh and so I guess they just lumped him in with all the others as a matter of convenience. I bought the book pictured a while back to try and shed some light on the conditions the poor could expect to experience in the various lodgings in which they might find themselves forced to inhabit.  Mary Higgs was writing about her researches - including using incognito voluntary stays in various types of lodgings to garner objective observations - about vagrancy and the effects of The Poor ...

Teaching isn't just about facts. To take a rather hackneyed and frankly strained analogy of building a house; the finished edifice is something approximating to a body of knowledge, the bricks are the 'facts' that are bound together to form that edifice. However, the real knowledge that has to be gained through being taught lies in the understanding of how those bricks are made and the process by which they are bound together to form the whole. Without that background understanding we have no edifice at all. We can't build if we don't know how to make bricks [substitute your construction materials of choice: I prefer bricks; see blog posts passim on this topic], and even if there is a Desert Island Discs Luxury endless supply of magic bricks, if you don't understand mortar, how to make it and how to apply it; you still haven't got knowledge: you merely have facts. Teaching is about showing both the gaps between, and the relationships between, facts. Teaching...

I just want to briefly revisit some ideas I posted about in 2020. At the centre of my admittedly nebulous thoughts on the the matter is the question of the authenticity of the photographic record. As I've mentioned before, I wrote my degree dissertation on this very topic, asserting a counter argument to Roland Barthe's essay, "The Rhetoric of The Image", where he argued for the notion that a photograph has an innate, non-symbolic truth, due to its direct one-to-one analogue relationship to the subject photographed. My thesis was that there were already ample historical examples of 'tampering' with or enhancing images that stretched way back into the history of the practice. He alludes in his essay to the cultural connotations - he was using advertising imagery as his example - afforded by the various elements assembled in the advert he featured: the signification of colour, language, assemblage, etc., arguing that the photographic element within the advert so...

We really have moved solidly into an era of the politics of petulance and impatience. Here in the UK we used to at least give a government the chance of serving the four-year term out [barring wars or some other major factor] before deciding which way to vote the next time. Now it seems that waiting that long is just too much for the playground politicking that now prevails in this fragile archipelago's febrile atmosphere. Being invited to join political petitions these days is as routine as opening one's emails or making the morning tea. Most are unremarkable and for the most part worthy of at least some attention. But being asked to lobby for a general election just four months into the new government is surely political short-termism of the basest kind and which stretches the credibility of this [rapidly becoming populist] democratic service to its very limits. But here we are. There's one out there and it's caught fire. The fact that as I write this, some 2.8 milli...

OK - I was in my usual quandary about what to write about tonight, up until about forty seconds ago, when I put some more chicken - cf. last night's post - into the air-fryer. The thing I want to pass on, for what it's worth, is that I started this faintly odd exercise four-and-a-bit years ago for no reason in particular; but in retrospect might have been as a result of the pandemic's reality kicking in, and my subconscious telling me that I had almost never recorded anything that I had ever thought or done. To that date, I had only succeeded in keeping a diary for a few months, when I first fell in love, aged sixteen. Prior and subsequently to that period I tried, and failed, on numerous occasions to record my life and experience in written form. I guess that part of this failure was due to that singular characteristic of youth; particularly of our generation: invulnerability. We none of us felt at that stage in our lives that anything would ever alter; that we would alway...

  Been over to pick Jane up from the Stretton Fox at Warrington, just off the M56, this afternoon, so a lazy food post today. Pictured, tonight's repast of chicken drumsticks, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic paste, salt, pepper and chilli flakes, air-fried with the lemon shell for around thirty-five minutes. Nice...

Further to last night's post. We are not born with the ability to 'see' as we imagine it from the standpoint of a fully-grown human, and despite the exquisite construction of our two organs of sight, they are optically fairly rudimentary, consisting of a sole - albeit focusable - [optically] simple lens, an attendant variable aperture to compensate for changes in light level, and a hemispherical 'focussing screen' onto which the light entering the eye is focussed. A sort of highly developed biological camera obscura , if you will: a [spherical in this case] box or room with a small aperture equipped with a lens with which to realise an image of the outside world on the screen behind. So far, so simple, even given the millions of years of evolution that led to the development of our eyes from the prototype cluster of light-sensitive cells in a shallow depression in the skins of creatures long since extinct. But the fact of the matter is that we have to learn to see. ...