Observations from a Hill

We watched 'The African Queen' again this afternoon, for the umpteenth time, a film that has been a constant part of my movie landscape for as long as I can remember, and one of which I will never tire of watching. I remember exactly where I saw it first: as a young child, one Christmas, at my nan and grandad's house in Rotton Park Road, Birmingham, the house in which I was born nearly seventy-two years ago. The film was, for many years, repeated on TV every Christmas Day or Boxing Day here in the UK, which in retrospect seems an odd choice of seasonal movie programming, given its setting and narrative. It's kind of hokey and arch in its delivery, but it's really carried by Katherine Hepburn's always wonderful performance and the presence she brought to the screen, no matter the rôle played. Bogart was simply Bogart as always; veering between underplayed to mildly frenetic, but always a joy to watch. We have a number of staple go-to old movies in this house; mos...

The kind of content I routinely watch on YouTube involves a fairly limited set of subjects: music, chess, history, engineering & science; mathematics to a degree, and of course, food . Of the latter I follow a couple of corking Indian cooking channels: Latif's Inspired, which is mostly devoted to Bengali-style cooking, and the Curry Academy, which covers, in the main, British Indian Restaurant [B.I.R] cooking. I watched a couple of their 'casts this evening, one from each channel. The first was from the Academy, outlining a method of cooking an authentic 1970s British Indian Restaurant base gravy, to a recipe from a chef who started his career and honed his craft in that decade: Chef Din. Now, as anyone who frequented B.I.R restaurants back in the day will attest, the curry sauces back then had a very particular flavour and texture that one seldom finds these days, and for which I, for one, harbour nostalgic longings for. I've written before about my first exposure to S...

I've mentioned The Lads here many times, and as recently as the other day: the extended group of [formerly school-] mates that continued long after we had left secondary education, until we became our own diaspora spread far and wide around the UK and the world. Some of us survivors of this once extensive clan still stay in touch via email, the boomer's choice of remote communication. We sometimes get to meet up in person, in ones and twos, although a much larger gathering was formed at the funeral our dear friend Johnny Kyte [blog posts passim]: with representatives a number of the 'sub-tribes' that formed the Venn diagram of friendships within the larger 'super' grouping that was 'The Lads', which, by the time we hit the pubs of Birmingham in earnest back in the early-mid seventies, became very much a larger, mixed gender grouping, as we all started relationships and most got married. We had an email round yesterday to that effect, as it is sixty years...

We went over to Ynys Môn today for a drive out with Carol & Kev who are staying in the cottage for a few days before the next paying guests arrive; fetching up at Pringles - one of the most godawful retail experiences imaginable and to which coach-loads of ageing and aged people [don't say a word] flock in their hundreds every day during holiday seasons. Needless to say it was not my idea, but a pint in the pub opposite before was sufficient fortification to soften the blow. I simply studied the many shelves of fine whiskeys on offer, decided that all were far too expensive for my current pocket and went and sat in the car as the sun turned to showers, listening to Radio Four. We had previously paid a visit to Hooton's farm foods, passing the fields of sunflowers on the way, and bought some veg for tonight's soup; and then went and ate our sandwiches in the car-park of Plas Newydd, before deciding that the café there was effectively a no-go area of similarly old people,...

It's interesting to reflect that the 'internet' - as we would over-simply characterise that huge, sprawling, multi-layered, complex and nuanced network - that we all take as much for granted as we do [at least in the more privileged pockets of humanity] electricity or running clean water - almost never came into being. By which I mean the World Wide Web; those layers of software abstraction and network protocols that seamlessly enable us to suck network bandwidth in the form of cat videos and AI slop. Oh, and some useful stuff as well. Its creator, Tim Berners-Lee had a hard time convincing anyone that his idea actually had any merit at all, and if the naysayers had had their way, the notion of the Web as we know it would have been still-born there and then. But by the August of 1991, the World Wide Web had just one thousand users - all at CERN, where Berners-Lee worked, and the first ever website garnered no more than around  ten visits a day.  This truly was the ground be...

I watched Andy Burnham's first turn addressing Parliament at the sharp end this afternoon, and I have to say I was impressed both by his confidence and the message he was keen to convey. It's interesting to reflect - especially in the light of Keir Starmer's decision to step down as an MP - that, although I voted for Starmer's leadership and was very sceptical about Burnham's challenge for that leadership, that I feel I've been completely wrong on both counts, and it's not an uncomfortable feeling: I like to admit my mistakes where I can. It's good to know you're in the wrong and it's good to admit the fact when faced with it. I was wrong to assume that Starmer's legal background would carry the day in debate: the converse in the political arena proved to be true: he has a good heart, but is no politician. I thought initially that Burnham's challenge was born of ambition and hubris, but I genuinely now believe this not to be the case. I a...