Observations from a Hill

The past is a crowded space. I've been blessed with almost total recall: some might consider it a curse, but I love it. I can still see, hear and sometimes even smell [that last is random in recollection, but it is nevertheless there] places, people and events from most of my long life, going deep, back into childhood. Even dream states from that childhood [blog posts passim] are occasionally brought forward into daily consciousness, sometimes at will, but more often than not by some external stimulus, which can be as random as the smell of the hedgerows, the sound of crows, or an email from someone from years past, now staying in touch as one old person to another, but connecting one teenage mind to the other through time's distant lens into the present, the intervening time falling away before it. The wonderful thing about having [almost] total recall is the ability to [almost] relive the past in my mind's eye, sometimes quite literally viscerally. This is not about nosta...

I apologise in advance for this incoherent ramble, but there's a lot of stuff going on at the moment, and I'm late to the keyboard tonight. The current existential crisis of socialism in this tiny group of islands we call home - and it definitely is a crisis - stems from a number of sources. First and foremost, of course is the [genuine and justified] feeling amongst the ordinary voting public that they have simply been left behind and marginalised: left out in the cold by a Labour movement that speaks in bold, sweeping terms of change and an improvement in the daily lot of the many, but which has thus far delivered little that can be seen on the actual surface of people's daily lives. This of course is the soft flesh from which populists like Nigel Farage leverage their specious views in fictitious defence of the vulnerable [majority]. Myth-making is the stock in trade of the empty-headed, and Farage is deeply embedded in that process; in the absence of any real politics, ...

Just an observation on where we currently seem to find ourselves in the political world of 2026 UK. We are at the moment only two years into a Labour government that inherited the poisoned chalice of a UK economy that had effectively been dismembered and its body parts scattered far and wide by a succession of Tory governments following the precepts of a political philosophy that by now should be outlawed at the very least as a dangerous drug or rather more as a lethal weapon of mass destruction. We all by now know what this heinous excrescence of a theory is called, and most of us are indeed very much the victims of its inevitable dire economic outcomes: neo-liberalism in all its forms and guises is the scourge of all but the very wealthy. Keir Starmer was elected to the leadership of the Labour Party by us, the membership; not because of his personality or charismatic qualities, but because of his skill set: a lawyer with a forensic attention to the detail of law and process: given t...

Pictured, mes amis, the closest I've ever got to my Holy Grail Madras curry at home: an absolute stonker, if I say so myself. This is the best curry I've made in my forty-six year culinary learning curve to date. I'm starting to understand . This is so Zen it's perfect: the realisation that no particular written recipe by however good a cook will allow you entry into the realms of food nirvana. Certain precepts, largely unspoken and often kept hidden, obtain here. I've cooked some pretty decent nosh over the years, but I've never really been satisfied with my take on South Asian cooking - one mutton biriani aside - until ths evening. I've always recognised the need for patience and taking one's time over preparing food, but have never applied this rigorously enough to achieve the taste result lurking in the back of my food memory [a vast store of taste]: until tonight. Thanks to much experiment, research and time, I'm almost there at the point when I...

Sunshine beim Wintergarten heno [there's a linguistic mix for you...] with a brace of wooden ducks and artificial flowers for colour. More important though, is the glass of Italian Primitivo in the foreground, or rather the goblet in which it sits. This venerable old wine glass is pretty much the last survivor of the 1980/90s heyday of the competitive cookery that cemented our friendship with Alan and Irene over forty -odd years. I've written recently about the origins of this long-standing tradition [blog posts passim, and in response to observations about the difficulties of navigating the archive of my scribbles, I'm thinking about mirroring this site in a more accessible form, so I will keep you posted if this thought train hits the tracks any time soon], but since Alan's illness and passing, these collective culinary endeavours have essentially withered and ceased themselves. This rather knackered, chipped and wobbly old glass was part of a set they passed on to us...

I was just watching an interview with one of my favourite guitarists, Robben Ford, on YouTube this evening. He was extolling the virtues of a 1960 Fender Telecaster that he bought some number of years ago, and which has been one of his go-to stable of guitars over the years: a blonde, rosewood-boarded, white-pickguarded beauty, now much road worn and very much played-in example of Leo Fender's genius. Pictured is my bastard-caster, which is now nearly fifteen years old, and which has undergone much modification and mutation in its short life. It started out as a Fender Modern Player, with a middle pickup, Strat-style, and a humbucker in the bridge position. It's a tad different now: Ever since I started to listen to music, I'd always wanted a Telecaster, and almost bagged one back in the early seventies, that was at the sweet spot of the marque: a sixties' model identical to Robben Ford's beauty of a guitar, which I couldn't finance at the time, despite what now...