Observations from a Hill

Today, the year finally seemed to be turning itself towards the sun again, with a tentativity of Spring somehow about its face: at least in this tiny Welsh corner of this meridian-fixed archipelago, anyway. I always think, about now, that those who seek out more temperate watering-holes in which to over-winter, only returning in Spring, somehow miss out on this magical transition out of the bleakness of Winter. Life is surely about contrast: seeking out a uniformity of climate ultimately denies one the fulfilment of a long-awaited need for warmth and comfort. On the other hand, unfortunately, I've just witnessed the appalling Trump/Vance/Zelensky press event from the Oval Office: all I can say is that Trump and Vance came over as the very worst kind of playground bullies in the most unseemly display of arrogance and hubris I've witnessed in my seventy years of existence. This was about as reasonable and diplomatic as a cage-fighting bout: an utter disgrace and deeply disturbin...

The great thing about getting human-readable copy out of my blog's XML backup dump file is that I can easily review some of the stuff I've written since I started the thing in March 2020; and what's even more satisfying is that I get to actually read loads of stuff I've no recollection of writing. OK, like with most of life and one's memories of it, I remember a few of the landmarks pieces I've scribbled; but they represent only a tiny fraction of the - to the date of the last backup, anyway - one thousand nine-hundred and twenty posts I've put out in the last five years. I've been manually going through [the first five or six months of 2020, thus far] the files and trying to curate them into categories for later assembly into longer form pieces, including a miscellany of my random musings on life, the universe and everything, and collecting together the poetry I've penned thus far [this will be heavily edited and revised, as most of it was written i...

I downloaded an AI app the other day, out of curiosity - I can't remember what prompted it - called Claude , of all things. I must have read or seen something about it on the net: possibly YouTube, but who knows. Anyhow, I decided to throw at it a project I'd set for myself some time back but not done a damned thing about: a bit of code to parse out the content from the XML file dump of this blog, so I can edit some of this stuff together in long form as I've hinted that I would like to do before [blog posts passim]. I have written an XML parser before, many moons ago, in PHP, but to be honest, as I said about the router lift project last night; life's too short, blah, blah, blah; so I gave Claude the task of writing an application, not in PHP, but in Java, that would run from the command line on Linux. In around fifteen seconds it returned a piece of code that worked straight off the bat.  Realising that the output still contained some inline formatting HTML in the con...

  Back on the 'maker' track tonight: I wrote a while ago about my purchase of the router plate in the picture above, and how I intended to make my own 'lift' for it, due to the high cost of the commercial items. However, I found one on Amazon - naturally:  and equally naturally, it's of Chinese manufacture - for just twenty-five quid, so I thought, why not? Life's too short to peel a grape or reinvent the wheel, so here it is, in situ on said plate with router attached. However, as usual, I can see some modifications in the offing to improve on the off-the-shelf items; and I need to manufacture a suitable table to house the thing. But here, I have a definite plan to use the T-tracks on my table saw to act as a support for the router surface, much as I did with my little bandsaw, so that the table-saw acts as the base for the router when it's in use, but the whole kit and kaboodle can be stored away when not needed. Keep you posted on progress. Also this Spri...

Such is the febrile nature of European politics in particular and world politics in general these days, that Jane saying she never thought she would ever be even remotely glad to see a conservative political party elected to office, came as no surprise this morning.That she was prepared to make an exception in the case of the German election results just shows you exactly how bad things have got in world politics. I have to say they represent a welcome but very tiny mote of sunlight in an otherwise forbidding, sepulchral political firmament: however, the fact that the AfD came in second having bettered their previous vote by some considerable margin is still cause for concern and should warn against any complacency on behalf of the upcoming governing coalition, not to mention the rest of Europe and the UK - can't speak for the US, they've got their own mountain to climb - over the coming months and years.

I was hoping to hit the ground running after our mini-break in the blue-remembered hills of Shropshire [I've always felt it somewhat strange and a little sad that A. E. Housman never actually lived or indeed spent much time at all in the County so feted by the poet in "A Shropshire Lad"], but the sight of Elon Musk wielding an enormous, bright red chainsaw in drumming up the mob's affirmation for his 'efficiency' drive has left me feeling kind of queasy and rather unbuckled me from what I imagined was actually the world I live in. This kind of stunt is what normally gets youthful protesters bad press - cf any number of environmental protesters locked up for 'stupid' stunts - but Musk is fifty-three-years-old, ferchrissakes, and the richest man in the world. And yet he still acts like a juvenile finding its feet in its strange new world of adolescence: a man-child who also takes horse tranquilliser on a regular basis. Classy. Maybe that goes some way t...

Got back from our break in Shropshire this afternoon, which despite both of us going down with the lurgy, was very pleasant indeed. We arrived to lovely blue skies and pleasantly warm sunshine in Fairview Heights, as pictured above. The Bishop's Castle market wasn't on, having been displaced by the craft fair for this week's arts festival, and as we'd already been around it earlier in the week, didn't linger long. A quick browse of the books at Yarborough House, and we duly made tracks for home. Apart from a couple of random and unnecessarily slow passages, the drive home was actually very pleasant, with a brief stop halfway for fuel and a sandwich. All in all, as prosaic as it all was, quite painless. Normal service to be resumed on the morrow: nos da for now...