Observations from a Hill

  OK - it's going to be a completely lazy and gratuitous food post weekend this weekend. Tomorrow we feast for our son's birthday; and I won't reveal which one for reasons of my vanity rather than his. Pictured is the mis-en-place of the basic ingredients of a dish which I will spend half a day cooking tomorrow. To this a great pile of spuds will be added, along with sundry other flavourings and spices, oils and wine. The star of the show of course will be the wonderful piece of meat seen here acclimatising in the enormous cast iron pot in which the thing will be cooked, very slowly , on the morrow. The recipe called for a whole leg of lamb, but we went one better and bought 'lamb' from one of our local Halal butchers in Bangor; clue: this ain't no Spring Lamb just a few months old. Nah, this is the real deal. Could be mutton, but probably hogget: either way, way tastier than the over-priced stuff you get in Waitrose or Marks. This piece weighed in at just shy o...

We - collectively and severally - today have been musing on the issue of personal empowerment and the rights of the ordinary citizen: rights that most people appear to think that they don't possess. Most people below a certain age in the UK seem to subscribe to a fatalism that belongs in the pre-enfranchisement era; that they simply have no recourse to the law on their own behalf and have as a consequence, no voice in the world. Alongside this misapprehension there co-exists a sense of entitlement to material wealth no matter the circumstances; that somehow the disenfranchised are entitled to exploit the inequalities inherent in our current models of society despite the law. This polarised view of personal empowerment lies at the heart of our problems, politically and economically.  The politics of envy are always pitted against the politics of greed: the kind of crass simplification of a society best left to the Daily Mail's of this world: stupid, foetid and vile in equal meas...

I would hope to think that by now that even the most trenchant of climate-change deniers might just be having the teensiest of second thoughts about the absurdity of their position vis-à-vis the blindingly obvious evidence that surrounds them in contradiction of their head in the sand stupidity. Were it not for for the climate-induced tragedies that occur with geometrically increasing frequency, it might seem reasonable to them to pass it all off as merely part and parcel of the normal cycle of meteorological flux. But it ain't so, folks. We have ceased merely to be looking at the loaded gun pointed at us: we are staring simultaneously down both barrels pressed against our eyeballs with both triggers about to be released. The awful events in Nepal are just the latest evocation of a planet in rebellion against its inhabitants: along with wildfires, flash-floods can be directly attributed to the long-term actions of industrialised mankind. Yes these events do happen naturally and oft...

  We were watching re-runs of Rick Stein's India this afternoon and one of the featured recipes was a wonderful-looking Chicken Biryani, which reminded us of the only Biryani I've ever cooked , just after the first Covid lockdown had eased, and just before I retired from the world of toil. We just couldn't remember where I'd got the recipe for this version of the dish from, and I came to the conclusion that it must have come from the above-pictured book, which I bought over forty years ago. Then I rediscovered the post I wrote in 2020, linked to above, which gives the true origin of this wonderful recipe. I have to say that the prep was long, the cooking easy but stressful and the result totally amazing, so for those who don't own this book I would suggest getting hold of a copy just for this one alone: "The Curry Guy" by Dan Toombs published by Quadrille. Just be sure to get some good lamb - and lamb it has to be in my book - from your local Halal butche...

I was quietly watching a gentle climbing video this evening of a couple climbing a classic Lakeland slab route, going at about HVS 5a [look it up if you don't know UK trad grades], which was about my sweet spot grade back in the mists of time when I still climbed. I could do more technical stuff on the climbing wall or on boulders, but on actual crag climbs, that was the grade where I was most comfortable. I first came to North Wales at the age of about thirteen with two of my uncles to climb on Tryfan in the Ogwen valley here. My journey to discovering my roots in North Wales hadn't yet started by a long chalk, and it was to be another twenty-three years before we would up sticks and move here. Subsequently I took up climbing again as I turned thirty, and spent a few - in retrospect short - years going through the grades from VS to low-level Extremes, towed by my mate Bryan at the sharp end of the rope. I led a few of the easier things, but not much, being happier in seconding...

  I wrote the other night about Twll Balast [Pen Y Bryn Slate Quarry in the map shown], as I did last year . I remade my FOI request  to the council as I had no recall of receiving an actual reply, save acknowledgement of receipt of request, at the time. It could be that Mail simply shunted it into outer space, as it has a disturbing habit of doing from time to time, but whatever: the council came straight back with a reply and attached reports. The oldest was a W.S Atkins report [at least the executive summary thereof, commissioned by Arfon Borough Council the late eighties, and the slightly later report I mentioned in rather scathing terms the other night, by Environ, commissioned this century by Gwynedd County Council. It looks like I made too many assumptions about the nature off this later report, as it has more depth [pun unintended] than I had previously assumed. I have read the nearly fifty pages of it this afternoon, along with the Atkins' executive summary of their ...