Observations from a Hill

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 ...

  Pictured, sunflowers at Llanedwen, Ynys Môn today, part of Hooton's Farm Shop's sunflower trail; a touch of Provence in North Wales, and a welcome, momentary diversion... RIP Lady - a fine and lovely dog

I was reading a post on Medium earlier about what being a graphic artist meant before the days of desktop publishing software and Photoshop, let alone AI. The writer pointed out the broad variety of physical training, skills, experience and equipment required simply to do the most basic of design tasks. First and foremost was the necessity of possessing the actual ability to draw and paint: the fundamentals. All other techniques flowed from that underpinning. Since the advent of widespread computing power and the software to exploit it, new skill sets have grown up around it, transforming both the industry itself and its practitioners' praxis within the industry. I was minded about the type of school I attended at secondary level, and the subjects that were central to its curriculum, particularly in the pre-streamed first two years there. Ours was a technical school when I first started, and didn't start transforming itself into a more mainstream grammar school until I'd go...

OK - I wrote last year about issues with the water safety at the Nantlle quarries, caused by industrial waste dumping over the many years since the quarry's closure as a going concern. I was very guarded in my approach to the issue for a number of reasons, but in the light of the recent BBC TV toxic dumping exposé "Buried", hosted by Michael Sheen recently, I have to add to that previous post the rider that I accidentally had sight of a report commissioned in the late-1980s about the Twll Balast site above the Dorothea Quarry, where technical scuba and mixed-gas diving is popular, and where a significant number of fatal accidents have occurred over the last few decades. In that report - the copy I made sadly is no longer with me - it was stated categorically that the waters that have filled the Twll Balast workings since the quarry's demise are polluted with an extremely noxious cocktail of substances related principally but not solely to local plastics manufacturing...

I noted with somewhat grim amusement in today's bumper summer fun edition of The New Statesman, a piece by Nicholas Harris about the first Wetherspoon's pub to be opened outside of this archipelago, in Alicante, España. What makes this particularly of note is not the part of Spain chosen - pretty predictable given that it is a traditional holiday destination for package-holidaying Brits, but rather that it has been opened in an EU country. Consider the fact that the founder of the cheap booze at breakfast, lunch and dinner chain of pubs, Sir Tim Martin is virulently anti-EU and campaigned vigorously and vociferously for Brexit. What manner of business brain comes up with that combo, one might ask? First you and your political ilk manage to convince half of the population to vote for a restriction of their rights to free movement within Europe, and then later decide to open bloody pubs within the economic union you apparently loathe, to serve those very people. It adds to the co...