Observations from a Hill

I was watching an episode of 'The Rest is Science' on YouTube this afternoon where they were playing a game of guess the origin of this or that noise from a selection of almost abstract and quite spooky-sounding samples. As one might imagine, given the click-bait-y style of this little scientific parlour game, the origins of these noises were all from normal and explicable sources, either natural or man-made in origin, and spanning some 150 years or so in their making. Various whale sounds - not the more familiar ones - icebergs calving and glaciers grinding the earth below the sea made up the bulk of the samples reviewed, but the earliest recording was that which surfaced a few years ago [2008] of the earliest known mechanical recording of a human voice, dating to 1860, of someone born in 1817: Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville, who captured his own singing voice in a waveform drawn on paper by his own invention, the Phonautograph, which he built and was patented in 1857. His...

I've pondered time and human memory much in these pages over the last five-and-a-half years of writing these daily scribbles; as much as a process of personal, philosophical introspection as anything else. As far as conclusions regarding the nature of either outside my immediate sphere of consciousness go, I have none. Life and my memory of what is past to me is still as mysterious as ever, which I guess in my philosophy is just how it should be: there is no goal to attain, so the striving for such is de facto negated and meaningless in itself. I pace [if indeed that's the right word or concept - I suspect not] my existence as an evolving series of life experiences: each phase of my past history and possible futures marked separately in my imagination as individual 'lives'. The overarching question that puzzles me is 'Why is time?' According to physics, without time matter cannot exist, and vice versa. Chicken or egg? What existed before time or matter came into...

Just a quick postscript on the Unhurried Curry before I forget. As expected, yesterday's afternoon feast at the boys' place left us without need of much food last night, so a quick snack grazed from the fridge sufficed. Tonight we tucked back into the two curries from the night before, and were both pleasantly surprised how much better - and hotter - they were than originally. Leaving them to mature cold brought out the complex spices in the mushroom curry and the potato and peas dish took on a greater depth of the warm and earthy spicing I'd given it: belter! I caught the news that the Labour government is trying to negotiate a deal with the EU for more freedom of movement for young students to study across borders as before Brexit, alongside other putative trading and climate agreements. All I can say is well done in advance and carry on; we need to rebuild the foreign student base that effectively supports university funding, and if this policy is close-coupled with a dr...

I was so focussed on last night's meal that I forgot about the sunset that followed it, pictured. I think we would have been treated to similar tonight, but by the time we had driven back from the top of the island it was dark here. The weather has been misty and overcast - very autumnal - here in the mountains, but Ynys Môn has been bathed in glorious sunshine all day, which gave our afternoon's belated Halloween lunch a slightly incongruous air! Nevertheless, a fine time was had by all and Leo and James put on a fine spread over three courses, including Jane's Cherry Upside Down Cake. We all dressed up - mandatory: those of us who turned up sans outfit were provided with something to wear - and I took an old prop plaster skull named Yorick [' ... I knew him, Horatio! ...' ] and a plastic Black Rat with a squeaker called 'Rattus Plasticus', that have been regulars in our family gatherings, every Halloween, for years. Yorick was still with me when we got hom...

Gratuitous food-post time again! We were going over to visit the boys for a Halloween lunch at the chapel today, but Number One Son had a migraine so we postponed until tomorrow. Anyhow, I also felt slightly under par this morning after yesterday's flu jab, so I wasn't too disappointed at the 24 hour delay. Instead, I cooked tonight's dinner this morning whilst Jane did some tidying up in the garden. Pictured, clockwise from left; a dry potato and pea curry, Basmati rice, and a very reduced mushroom curry. Both were very good individually, but worked especially well as an ensemble, even though neither of the curries turned out exactly as I had imagined at the outset; but there you go - serendipity in the kitchen once again - I might just make some homemade chappati to mop up the rest of it tomorrow evening, if we haven't already eaten too much over at Bethania...

Once again, we approach All Hallow's Eve; and you might say tonight is All Hallow's Eve Eve. Whatever. If I never see another bloody carved pumpkin again, I don't think I'll be sorely aggrieved at the loss: Halloween was never part of my cultural upbringing in any case. As to the spook-fest commercial jamboree that now infests these isles on an annual basis, all I can say is, frankly, bollocks to it all, and I don't mean that in an Ebenezer Scrooge kind of way. But then I'm not a person that grew up in an era when this relatively new invention and 'tradition' was extant. Halloween to us was not any particular thing: as children, we were getting ourselves tooled up for Bonfire Night at this end of October and looking forward to Christmas beyond that little milestone. I'm not going to humbug the whole thing, but in truth one can only be sceptical about the pecuniary motivations that fuel these re-invented traditions: children have long been targeted by...