Observations from a Hill

Stranger. Someone hitherto unknown. An outlier from outwith one's social zone, marking a space of unfamiliarity and unknowingness. Threat or no threat? This is the deep-rooted psychological dichotomy vested in our subconscious by our visceral and ancient instinct for survival. Fight or flight? Argue or parlez? The stranger in fiction and particularly in Hollywood movies is often characterised and read merely as threat or at least someone to be held cautiously at arms-length for fear of some dire personal outcome, narrative permitting. Yes, we've all experienced that nape of the neck feeling with the sound of ever closer footsteps behind us on walking alone on a dark night; waiting for whomever those footfalls belong to pass harmlessly ahead of of us. When I was growing up in the city, this was not an uncommon sensation, and it was only on moving to shall we say, a far less populous environment, that these feelings, though still there, were much attenuated and more manageable. B...

  A couple of things that I read at lunch today kind of gelled into some form of weird gestalt. In this week's New Statesman, the disturbing if unsurprising fact that in 2024, internal documents from Meta '... suggested it was serving fraudulent ads to it's users 15 billion times a day, accounting for more than 10% of [Meta's] global revenue. Press Gazette reported that Meta appeared to be making more from publicising online scams than the entire news media makes from legitimate marketing...' The other piece was in today's Financial Times about Peter Thiel, the tech billionaire and PayPal co-founder [the other being Elon Musk] and the man behind Palantir Technologies, and his trip to Rome to lecture on the antichrist, challenging Pope Leo XIV and the papacy itself in the very seat of world Catholicism. As weird a confluence of images as all of this represents, especially in the light of the fact that this is supposed to be the modern era - remember progress and ...

Gratuitous food post tonight: pictured, Rhug Estate organic shoulder of lamb, potatoes and tenderstem broccoli, with a gravy of the pan juices, plain flour roux, deglazed with sauvignon blanc, and let down slightly with the broccoli water. The lamb and potatoes were cooked with lemon, garlic, sea salt and black pepper, with rosemary and fresh bay leaves from the garden: not half bad, if I say so myself. I even made crisps from the potatoes skins, with a hefty dose of chilli and sea salt, as an appetiser. All in all, a reasonable end to a day's dog-sitting duties here at Fairview Heights... 

Well, the Six Nations has gone out with an absolute bang this year, with all the participants raising their game to the very highest level imaginable for this three-match "Super Saturday". No mediocre or lacklustre performances in evidence at all today, and even though Wales walked away as bottom of the table again, their squad won against a very credible Italian opposition today to their absolute credit. Ireland played an absolute blinder to close out Scotland after their momentous win against France last week, which ensured a race for the line between the Shamrocks and Les Bleus at the end of it all. To say it went to the wire is probably the sporting understatement of the century: a last minute penalty kick by Ramos wresting the title away from Ireland's grasp at the death of a game exhausting to watch, let alone participate in. As for the rugby? An absolute joy to watch: proper rugby football, that harks back to the glory days of the game, making it once again the tru...

We live in a crumbling collection of connected cottages housed in a plot of land of around a quarter of an acre - more than sufficient to manage by ourselves - which, at our time of life seem's a tad counter-intuitive, and which raises the question why stick with it, especially as we're situated at the top of a steep hill that gets steeper and steeper toward the very top, where we live. Frankly, that question has never really entered my mind as I am still counting my lucky what-sits that we found and managed to buy this house in the first place, well into middle-age. Why am I so particularly appreciative of the fact of living up here in Fairview Heights? I think to answer that, you have to revisit my childhood and the house that I grew up in and only left at the age of twenty-three. I can't nay-say those twenty-three years in any way, as number 16, Winson Street in Winson Green, Birmingham was, in it's day the legendary locus of 'The Lads' [blog posts passim]; a...

It's been a perfectly foul day here today; in fact it was perfectly foul all last night, as it is perfectly foul now, at gone seven in the evening; the awful winds having given way to torrential rain in their wake. We were dog-sitting today, and even Lady, a Black Lab Collie cross not given to reticence about the weather, decided that curling up and sleeping was by far the best option to take. So, apart from a short morning trip to the council recycling centre to offload more stuff from our over-burdened estate, we've also spent the day closeted in Fairview Heights with little inclination to venture forth. Given this extended break from garden clearance and general property maintenance, I've been starting in on my latest OCD-backed project of trying to organise and catalogue my modest library of a couple of thousand or so books and my accumulation of loosely-filed documents and pulled references; all of which help to feed the maw of this blog, and serve as a pre-internet [m...