Observations from a Hill

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...

OK, budget week here in Blighty: what do I make of it? Well, I certainly didn't think it was as bad - read indifferent - as most of the pundits who immediately piled in to characterise it as a smudget. The reason I say it was not bad is that we all know from past experience that Labour governments are damned if they do and damned if they don't; and usually inherit a totally poisoned chalice after the exit of the previous Tory government. Blair got a relatively easy ride of it, riding an economic uptick and following a bland Tory outing within the relative safety of an EU cocoon. This time around, Labour have faced the legacy of fourteen years of complete Tory ineptitude, greed, lobbyist self-interest and frankly utter bloody lunacy, culminating in the most febrile half decade in world politics since the Cold War. To say that the current government has little fabric to work with is understatement on a grandiose scale: they have fuck-all resources to work with in the economic vac...

OK - pictured is a rather poor self-portrait I painted in 1987, sat on our landing floor - randomly for the purposes of this post - which we've recently freed from the hegemony [the floor that is] of the hideous inherited fitted carpets that we've put up with for the last twenty-odd years. My point in this juxtaposition of disparates is that of uncovering the past. In the case of the picture, it is one of the few remaining pieces of my work I have, and certainly not a piece I would exhibit, flawed as it is [and not in a good way]. It was an attempt to emulate historical oil technique - glazing - in modern acrylic paints, and was not entirely successful, although I still think the basic likeness was passable to this day. In the case of the floorboards, the one on which the picture lies is a nineteenth century nine-inch board that runs the complete depth of the house, examples of which are a joy to find. We'll repaint the boards over the next few weeks in perhaps a dark blue,...