Observations from a Hill

In 1980, John Redhead, a then neighbour of ours in Bethesda, North Wales, whom we knew as an artist and little more, did the first ascent of the UKs first E7 rock route on North Stack, Ynys Môn: "The Bells, The Bells". As I didn't return to climbing until the mid-eighties and didn't engage with the climbing media, I was blissfully unaware of this at the time. By the time I got back into climbing, after a gap of around twenty years, I was approaching my thirties and had started to engage again with what the scene had mutated into in the interim, and learned that my now former neighbour was some kind of maverick legend in the game, and the route deemed, essentially, a potential death sentence to all but the most talented and fearless of climbers. In fact, it was a full six years before a successful second ascent of thing, and in all to date there have been, I think, only ten in the last forty -six years. What prompted my thinking about this was that I have been followin...

Numbers, numbers, numbers. So many numbers. When we were growing up as teenagers and well into our adulthood, it was the norm to have an internal mental stash of telephone numbers - family, friends, boyfriends and girlfriends; and entering the world of work, numbers related to your job. Most of us carried around in our heads tens or hundreds of the damned things, all of which could be recalled at will, rarely having to resort to a book for a reminder. How many people these days know their number? I know mine because I've had the same network connection since 2003, in the pre-smartphone era, and I still use my iPhone as a telephone , from time to time, a practice which looked as if it might be on the wane at one time, with a preponderance of users sticking to text and social media alone to 'communicate' with each other. Before 1983, there was no generally used device that could be called a 'mobile phone'; and it was not until the mid-1990s until they entered more gen...

I was very interested to read in the Weekend FT Arts of an exhibition of Mark Rothko's painting in Florence running currently. Not housed and concentrated in a single exhibition space, but distributed throughout three venues: the Palazzo Strozzi, the  Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana  and the Museo Di San Marco. I would dearly love to see these pictures in this latter context [above] as I'm of the opinion that of all twentieth century artists, Rothko is the most deeply and humanly spiritual of painters, and whose works sit most naturally alongside those of the great Italian quattrocento painters such as Fra Angelico. Rothko had the ability in his later paintings to bring the sublime into secular life in a way that few others have achieved. Religious belief isn't the central point of his work, much as I believe that religion, oddly, isn't a prerequisite for the spiritual experience of introspection in religious buildings either great or humble. Zen is zen, after all, and t...

I was just watching an interesting YouTube about the now long-retired British low-level strike aircraft, the Blackburn [later Hawker-Siddeley] Buccaneer, and its remarkable ability to fly at over 500 knots at sea level, as low as twenty feet. The video was a mixture of ancient film footage larded with AI slop [including the inevitable accompanying piss-poor machine-generated narration that infests just about everything online these days]. I won't mention the 'content' creator, but would simply point you to this video instead for a taster of what this aircraft could do. Obviously, as this was flown in domestic airspace in peacetime, it's not at a particularly high airspeed; but under the combat conditions it was designed for, it could routinely fly under ground radar and fighter cover at high speed, riding its own shockwave, which gave it an unusually high degree of natural stability in such a dangerous flight mode. I once had the privilege of seeing one of these things...

  I misnamed the Jeff Bezos space project in last night's post as Blue Horizon [since corrected], rather than Blue Origin. I think that at the back of my mind when writing last night's scribble I had the old Blue Horizon record label, which was dear to my heart in the late sixties, as it featured some of my favourite artists at the time - and ever since. It opened its doors to business in 1965 and featured a roster of mainly - the clue's in the name - blues-based music in relatively small release numbers, but had closed those doors completely by 1972. Pictured is my original copy of the first Fleetwood Mac album from 1968. I actually picked up this copy in the early seventies for about 20p from a bin of secondhand records in some cheap shop on Cape Hill, Smethwick. Copies of the record - weirdly, considering how relatively small its original distribution was and the short life span of the label itself - can still be got for around twenty-five quid online; less than the pri...

The casual observer from the past might be forgiven for thinking that the above blurry photograph was taken of the decisive moment of one of those tragically misguided thermonuclear tests in the forties and fifties that ushered in the Cold War and divided East from West. But no, this is a Jeff Bezos Blue Horizon Origin  [Freudian Slip: Blue Horizon was a now defunct record label] rocket ship exploding on its launchpad during what should have been a routine operation. This behemoth of a launch vehicle, alongside Elon Musk's similar efforts in this field is meant to usher in a 'new age' of space exploration by offering us mere humans the opportunity to colonise our one and only planetary moon; a place visited by a very few of our species in one very specific era of our history. But the question one has to ask is: Why? to what ultimate end is this frontiersman-ship directed at such huge expense, when our terrestrial, humanitarian issues are so pressing and in need of such eno...