Observations from a Hill

I chanced upon an old acquaintance from the Golden Era of Bethesda's bohemian period in the 1980s, this afternoon. He didn't remember my name, which is quite fine by me: much water has passed under the bridge and much grey hair grown - and lost - in the interim, and ego and self-importance are concepts best avoided. He is a Quaker. I have Quakers in my family tree. I would like to learn more about them, and how that line turned to more mainstream religion and why. As I age, this lost knowledge has taken on a greater importance for me. I started the family genealogy journey focussing on the line that my dad had begun in the 1980s and 90s: his mother's, and her connections with North Wales, Staffordshire and Australia. Since my first, tentative overtures I have dug deep into both sides of my immediate family's history and turned up some pretty interesting stuff across the piece. One strand of interest to me was the sudden [to me] appearance of Quakerism on the Southall si...

Following on from last night's post, I was musing over exactly what nationalised land could look like in practice, assuming a blank canvas with no Taliban-esque dissolution-of-the-monasteries style of wanton destruction or restitutional compensation to either fork out or ignore altogether. These questions remain unasked for the simple fact that land is still, simply, owned. How does a government address this simple conundrum: who gets to build and live/do business where and by whose say-so? The tacit understanding with regards to land ownership - despite historical facts to the absolute contrary - is that certain individuals, families and institutions have historical rights to such ownership: in the UK that starts with the Church and the Monarchy, who over the centuries, through force both physical and spiritual, imposed a web of private land ownership by deed of gift for favours rendered; a concept familiar in more modern times as racketeering and protection, cf the Cosa Nostra, C...

How long do we have to wait - it's now generation on generation already: over seventy-five years since that triumphant Labour win, post-war - before someone grasps the nettle of land-ownership? So many of our current problems in trying to unpick the Gordian economic knot left behind in these dying years of the most destructive economic experiment ever conducted: neo-liberalism; could have been assuaged for all time had the then new Labour government added the nationalisation of land to the social contract. They had the opportunity and the clout to have made it happen. They had a very brief window of opportunity and they blued it, and the land-owning gentry blew a sigh of relief in turn. Land. Our land. Tir ni, in Welsh; Wales and the earliest inhabitants of these lands - Y Brython, who lost almost everything to the various conquering hordes from across the channel - representing perhaps the very earliest examples of land theft from the commons by self-appointed gentry of whatever s...

I was watching the last knockings of a documentary from 2010 on some TV channel this afternoon about the making of the album that brought Black Sabbath their big break, taking the US by storm in 1970: 'Paranoid'. It was their second studio album, and the title single from it - apparently a make-weight throwaway to fill space on the record - went straight to the top of the singles charts at the same time that the album did likewise in the album charts. By chance, this evening I was watching one of my favourite YouTube channels, 'No Cover Charge', where the boys were over from Nashville visiting  the Marshall Amplification museum in Milton Keynes, and trying out some very famous, revered and loud Marshall guitar amps. The confluence of these two disparate media streams took me back to April 1970, when the fifteen-year-old me and a bunch of mates attended one of the first concerts by Black Sabbath in a major-ish venue. We had only just discovered the eponymous debut album...

OK - pictured is tonight's example of the great British culinary standby: the leftovers fry-up. The lamb chops and spuds are from yesterday's early supper with the boys and Irene, fried up with streaky bacon, and served with that most exotic of sauces, HP. After yesterday's marathon of food prep and cooking, today's supper was always going to be a bit of a throwaway, hence the above; however, despite the fact that the lamb chops really didn't survive the second cooking [no surprise there], the real star, as always, was the bacon. I don't eat it overly often and to me it's a treat rather than a staple, and so I really don't care if the bacon I eat from time to time is stuffed full of nitrates. Intuitively I know that slight exposure to such stuff does no real harm; but I realise in retrospect that my maternal grandfather's long-standing gastric problems - which led ultimately to his demise fifty years ago - were probably due in large part to his daily...

We had the the boys and Irene over for afternoon supper to celebrate Irene's upcoming birthday this week, and some of the wide-ranging conversation [as is our usual wont] and the variety of music we were listening to made me think about our collective family relationship with, and attitude to, the utterly dysfunctional world we inhabit alongside the rest of humanity. We as a family, by whatever means or happenstance, have always found our many and various paths in life without straying from some pretty core values, either politically or philosophically; religion not usually scoring very highly on our need-to-address board.  We try to be fair and kind where appropriate; fierce and excoriating of injustices committed by others, and as generous as personal limitations permit with those less fortunate. Our natural instinct is toward basic decency, but eschewing dogma and orthodoxy. I truly believe that this is the natural mindset of the vast majority of the human race. We are all, afte...