Observations from a Hill

This is not some fanciful rendering of a Japanese landscape, but rather the view from our house in Rachub the other night at around nine-thirty in the evening, at the setting of the sun over Ynys Môn. Or is it?  I must say that the camera/software on my iPhone is truly astounding: to get anything like an image such as this on film would have been practically, though not totally, impossible, in the days of film or nowt photography. Of course, this manner of imaging the world about us begs some questions, which frankly are not always obvious and probably lie more within the ambit of philosophy or psychology than any particular photographic practice per se. Are we depicting exactly what's out there or is it a confection mediated through many layers of software abstraction and rendered likewise via many layers of hardware? Both, of course; and here's the thing. This process of abstraction is exactly parallel to that human process that translates the 'real' onto the flatten...

Well I have to say I feel properly wrung out by the [Gentle]men's final that ended this year's Wimbledon, and I was only couched out and drinking beer watching on TV. Close to being one of the best finals I've seen yet, Yannik Sinner came out of it as a worthy winner after four often brutally athletic and very hard-serving sets: I guess that singles tennis is as close to gladiatorial combat as we get these days, especially at the elite level. Centre Court kind of resembles a genteel amphitheatre, where egos and aspirations are put to the sword to the [usually] polite baying of the mob -  sorry -  spectators. Top stuff and all very entertaining in any case. Which leaves me with a bit of a vacuum where my nightly post should be. It's been another hot day today, although a large chunk of the hottest part of the afternoon was obviously spent in the semi-dark watching the final. Although the temperature outside is cooling nicely with a gentle fresh breeze to help things alon...

Just as an aside, my weather app is telling me that the ambient outside temperature here is 22˚C, when in fact, it is 25˚C  and relatively cool here in my semi-dark dining room/office, and 29˚C outside in the shade on the patio. I wish I could figure out where the BBC and Apple apps get their meteorological data for around here from. Anyway, to heck with that: suffice to say it's hot enough for up here in Rachub whichever way you look at it... We had our - usually monthly, but of late more occasional than truly regular - lunch club today, over at the Sea Shanty in Trearddur Bay. We were ten today, a good even number for a change, and our son's very oldest friend [toddler to his baby] was up from London to break the usual odd number of attendees at table. Notice that I use the phrase 'up from London'. This is a quite deliberate, personal inversion of the more usual turn of phrase, which to my mind is so unfortunately culturally loaded and oh, so metro-centric. Anyhow, th...

Whilst assembling my usual additions to a bog-standard Pizza Express American [Pepperoni] pizza tonight - anchovies, chilli flakes and extra oregano - I got caught up in reflection on times past, as this particular pizza topping combination harks back over forty years to my days working at Birmingham University; and reminds me of the possible life paths left behind in favour of the one I chose and where I find myself at this moment. As I've said before, I had a secure job and career path ahead of me at the University: I was looking at getting my own department and the the Senior Photographic Technician's post in Civil Engineering, and had also secured the teaching of a night class in photography, locally: all effectively by the hand of my boss, Arthur Burgess - lovely man - who oiled the wheels on both counts. The lunchtime pizzas I ate in abundance in those days were as far from the real deal as are the Pizza Express excuses for the estimable Italian fare of legend are today. ...

  Time for another gratuitous food post. Pictured, kebabs in process this evening on yet another jury-rigged temporary barbecue hearth: those redundant storage heater bricks really do make a good barbie as they help to create a fierce  and long-lasting heat. I'm currently using charcoal made in local woodlands at a place called Parc Y Moch, from the eponymously titled company - run by some local lads - that produces it. Fine stuff it is too, if somewhat more expensive than your usual filling station commercial stuff: but it is a by-product of actual woodland management, so win-win. I've yet to get around to starting a more permanent build: a garden pizza oven would be a good project, but I'd need to consider where to site it carefully as it would be quite an obtrusive structure. We've loads of space here, but not much is actually on the flat, so we'll see. I suppose there is something to be said for temporary structures after all, as it's easy to tailor an oven ...

I caught an advert for Range Rover just now which made me reflect on how much the design of current cars - particularly the blocky SUVs and Chinese EVs - takes from the extreme styling cues of the 'out there' design magazines of the late 1960s, when impossibly large alloy wheels and ultra-wide, ultra low-profile tyres were simply that: impossible to realise in the real world given the then current technology and manufacturing techniques. These, and most other design cues then, came from the fever dreams of sci-fi, and were signifiers of the inevitable future of the automobile. It may have taken sixty-odd years to get to it, but the future as imagined when I was a schoolboy - so far adrift from any kind of reality back then - appears to be now, in the second quarter of the twenty-first century.  The irony is that it just looks normal and rather prosaic now...