Observations from a Hill

The truly unique thing about the written and printed word is its persistence, resilience and resistance to tampering. Unlike the digital domain, which is subject to failure at all of these points. A book or journal can be damaged - by fire, water, insects, fungi or very often just rodents - granted, but text in the digital realm has an especially tenuous, often evanescent existence by comparison to more corporeal forms of storage. The very language of the text itself is actually key to its resilience. Written or printed language is the direct analogue of the spoken word expressed at one, very slight remove, for storage and later retrieval. In more recent history, analogue audio recordings have provided us with a slightly less removed analogue of human communication. The same applies to film and video. But with the digitisation of either text or speech, film or video, we enter a realm of total abstraction where the medium of storage is essentially disconnected from the content being tra...

OK - yet another throwaway food post, as I'm completely fashed and this laptop seems to want to keel over at any moment. Pictured is tonight's pork and potato sort of Goan curry. I was going to be creative and do something from scratch, but laziness kicked in and I bought one of those semi-fancy curry kits. Now I have to say that the basic premise of these particular kits is pretty sound: a dry masala to temper in the oil or ghee to produce the bedrock flavours; a base sauce in which to flavour the meat and/or vegetables and a final sauce to complete the cooking with. The issue I've always had with these kits is the instructions, which parallels most of the issues I've had with South Asian cookbook recipes aimed at the British [non-Asian] cook: timings. They, of a piece, try to conflate cooking times to suit a modern, fast-food attitude to producing food. In the case of South Asian food, for the most part, this is almost always a recipe for raw-tasting and frankly disa...

  I was watching a really wonderful documentary earlier, on YouTube, from a series of TV programmes titled 'Parts Unknown' by Anthony Bourdain, which culminates in his eating at the table of Paul Bocuse, in the latter's hunting lodge after they had spent the day duck-hunting for the pot. Bocuse was one of France's fêted Chefs de Cuisine, and a culinary hero of Bourdain's personally. It's a wonderful programme overall, but the final, informal setting is one of plain good cooking and eating in the company of friends: good food, good wine and good company. Over the last half century I've spent many an hour similarly, and cooked and eaten thousands of such meals in good company, accompanied by much quaffing of drink. Anyway, what did I cook for myself this evening, as I'm flying solo for a few days? The above pictured cheese and streaky bacon toastie with HP Sauce. Not quite wild duck spit-roast over an open fire, but a damn sight easier to prepare and not ...

The world is arguably, and some of us would assert demonstrably, in the most perilous state that it has been since mankind evolved. Hyperbole? I really don't think so: climate change is now accelerating at a pace predicted by climatologists just a few years ago; a rate of change so fast that extreme weather events normally restricted to Africa and the Indian subcontinent are now commonplace across northern Europe. This year has seen catastrophic wildfires taking hold across Spain, Italy, Greece, France and the UK. Drought has been declared similarly widely across the continent, making fighting these fires increasingly difficult. Is there any significant rainfall in the offing for us? Not as far as the meteorologists can foresee: we're looking at similar conditions for the next month or so at least. On the international politics front, how many wars are being waged at present and for what reasons? The Middle East, Ukraine, what next? And what will the antagonists party to and in...

Spaces within spaces, or, I suppose more correctly, volumes within volumes, in a house, have always held more fascination for me than open-plan living. A house to me should be a cabinet of curiosities writ large, with places to explore and definitely more than one staircase. Which I suppose is what attracted me to our home of twenty-plus years, here at Fairview Heights [just to jog the memory, my rather twee little appellation for our humble abode arises from the name of my great-great aunt Annie's house in Herefordshire, Fairview ,  twisted through the irony of John Peel in his nickname for his place: Peel Acres]. I like an edifice with corners. And cupboards. And cubbyholes. I like bookcases full of books, slightly too much over-stuffed furniture and bizarre knick-knacks, souvenirs and collections. I guess at heart I'm a kind of Victorian, mediated by an Abstract Expressionist aesthetic: living amongst a semi-organised clutter of things of occasional interest bound together b...

I suppose anyone from the UK of my age - born in the 1950s - and class: working - can remember folk coming back from early-days package holidays to Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy, etc., and saying that it was lovely, but 'all the food is swimming in oil'. Ah, how our tastes and palates have changed in sixty-odd years. I know I'm starting to get a bit like a stuck record here with these repeated gratuitous food posts, but whatever; this is worth sharing. Pictured is tonight's pasta sauce in the making: and it's principally comprised of olive oil. Lots of it. As I posted, I did a simpler version of this the other night for myself, but the above goes something like this. Very gently sauté down half a dozen of those tiny, ripe salad plum tomatoes, quartered, with a clove of mashed down garlic, some flat-leaf parsley and a couple of basil leaves, salt, pepper and a pinch of chilli flakes in a goodly quantity of extra virgin olive oil, with a splash of cider vinegar until...