Observations from a Hill

  I was going to mention that I have a new [in fact, actually very old] strategy for hyperlinking documents in my ever-increasing collection of references and oddments, but more of that tomorrow. To be frank, it's now impossible to gloss over, skirt around or ignore the fact that Donald J. Trump, 'leader' of the free world and the man with the nuclear codes at hand that could most certainly be used to reduce the known world to ashes, is utterly and completely bonkers. Barking. Certifiable. Ready for straitjacket and padded cell. Delusional doesn't even come close as a description of this man: he has literally identified himself, in order of posts on his own social media platform as a) The Pope, b) A King in a fighter jet, and most recently as c) Jesus Christ himself. In days past, pronouncements such as these would have seen him burnt at the stake for heresy, blasphemy, or probably for just plain lunacy. The man is clearly deranged; but the most disturbing thing about h...

  Pictured is Jane Hilton's wonderful portrait of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch in yesterday's Observer Review. The subject of the photograph is one hundred years old. She survived Auschwitz and Belsen, coming to the UK after the Second World War to settle in north-west London, where she still lives. Without knowledge of context and her life story, we would simply be looking at a beautiful woman and gazing into strong intelligent eyes that speak of myriad, unfathomable depths of personal experience: a century of life and all which that implies and entails. What the image does not speak of is victim-hood or even, perversely, survival of the terrors that she experienced at the hands of the Nazis during her incarceration in the Second World War as a German Jew. Her gaze is defiantly of the present, a person very much in the now, and quietly reminding the world that true horror was once visited on the millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals and so many others that didn't fit within the st...

I've mentioned before how apparently trivial moments of choice and decision made without much thought can radically alter the course of one's life for the better - or if you're unlucky - for worse. I was thumbing through this week's House & Home section of the Weekend FT whilst half-watching one of those daft property reality TV shows and eating my lunchtime baguette of cheddar and pepperoni - yummy - when I saw a house for sale in the always maddeningly and ludicrously expensive property section of the paper. The place in question was in Bergerac, France [pictured]. The price? €1,250,000, which of course is so far outwith my reach and scope as to be entirely discountable, particularly at my stage of life. But it made me think: that kind of money was of the order that the property programme was talking about for very modestly-sized 1930s houses in Surrey. The French place featured in the FT plonked into the same county would currently fetch at least ten times as m...

As the weather beats an unseasonal tattoo of hail and sleet against my window, dragging us unceremoniously back into the depths of winter even as the bluebells are starting to bloom, I've managed a degree of internal warming due to the pictured pot of an experimental mushroom curry I made this evening. I started out, as usual, following someone else's recipe path and then, as always, found a virtual fork in the road to follow instead. I didn't hold out much hope for this one, but in the end I was pleasantly surprised at the lightness of the result, and pleased at the extra kick I'd given it with some whole fresh green chillis. All in all, not half bad for a kitchen oddments special. I've just opened a bottle of cheap claret, and I might just hazard a bowl of tobacco before I settle in for the evening...

When it comes to selling green tech and energy generation to the general public, I would say we've been using the wrong narrative to convince people with limited resources to buy into the the new low-carbon revolution. Everything hitherto has been framed in grand gestures and bleeding edge technology, none of which is affordable to most of us. £30-40k for a car? £10k for a solar installation? Heat pumps, ground source, passivhaus, triple glazing and the rest of it spell a second mortgage [if you're lucky enough to own your own place] even given any available grant support. Couple this with the largely shaky trustworthiness of pretty much global private outsourcing in the provision of the stuff, and you have a pretty solid recipe for general apathy regarding adoption, leaving the uptake of green tech to the fashionistas-with-the-dosh who oh-so-want to demonstrate their green creds in offsetting their otherwise ludicrously energy-profligate lifestyles. A re-framing of the basics ...

...But Oddly Normal... I'm not oft given to wistfulness: introspection and reflection, yes; but wistfulness strikes me seldom and strangely, as was so this afternoon. And the unlikely trigger for this impulse is pictured: a rather unremarkable old pigskin case of mine. This camera bag I bought on a day out to Coventry some forty-eight years ago, when Jane and I went to see the iconic Coventry Cathedral - the only time I've visited the place - and have a wander about what is actually a far more interesting city than most imagine. Like so many places, it was despoiled in the 1960s and '70s by the increasingly powerful road transport and planning lobby that tore so many of our cities and towns apart in the service of the motor vehicle at the expense of local populations and history alike; but in common with so many of these, Coventry has a rich history behind it to be discovered within its precincts. My response to digging out this simple camera case, though, was on  the surfa...