Observations from a Hill

Pictured - I guess weirdly, if I'm honest - are my boots. On the left my current daily wear, and to their right, my originals. The astute observer will note that, apart from age and wear, they are identical. The original pair I bought ten, maybe fifteen years - more likely the latter, I really can't remember - ago. The new ones are just broken in and in constant use. They are German-made, and go by the brand name Waldläufer, or ranger; literally, a forest walker in English. To say they are superb is a bloody understatement: they are comfortable from the first wearing - when I said that the new ones were broken in, I really should have said christened by the outdoors - they are lighter than any boot this durable has a right to be, and wear like carpet slippers. Both pairs were bought from Dick's Discount Shoes on Anglesey; the originals costing around eighty quid, discounted from well over a hundred, but still not cheap.  Their replacements last year were a hundred and thirt...

Sodium Chloride, NaCl, the chloride of sodium: Common Salt. It is comprised of two highly reactive and dangerous substances: an alkali metal, sodium, and chlorine, a halogen whose vapour can kill or maim anyone inhaling it and used most violently in The First World War as a chemical weapon that left a lasting legacy long after the war ended, with the residual fear of its and other chemical substance's re-use in future conflicts carrying over into The Second World War in the form of universal gas protection measures for both combatants and civilians alike. In the form of their combined salt, however, these two fearsome elements are tamed for the good and this most abundant of materials - salt - is central to our lives and our very existence, providing essential body-chemistry-balancing chemicals that ensure that our bodies continue to function normally. I remember my uncle Edgar, who was a keen amateur chemist and experimenter coming one day into their parlour in the house in which ...

One place from my childhood still sticks fondly in my mind, sixty-odd years on: Snow Hill Railway Station in Birmingham: the Great Western Railway's hub in the Midlands, and a magnificent structure, to boot - pictured, the incredible glass-vaulted booking hall that fronted the place. Across the street, its facade reflected across Colmore Row, the entrance of the Great Western Arcade, a Victorian shopping arcade stretching from Colmore itself to Temple Row. Of course, over the years this architectural continuity has been been rather upset by progress, with the implied connection between station and arcade subsumed by years of messing around with Brum's inner-city road infrastructure; never to great end, but always serving the profit motive of the Midlands road transport lobby, aided and abetted in the sixties by Dr. Beeching's rather specious findings about railway efficiency [the roots of neoliberalism made flesh before we even knew it even existed?] When I was a kid, we us...

Just watched a fascinating little documentary about the Svans of Svaneti in Georgia, a mountain-dwelling folk of the Caucasus. At the time of the making of the documentary [2012], the lifestyle of the Svans was very much still rooted in its ancient history, with a primitive agriculture and a society very firmly based on common and collective values and mores. The incursion of modern life was obvious to see in the occasional satellite dish and a mobile phone mast at the centre of the village that was the subject of the documentary, as were the mostly modern clothes worn by all. Their society was [is] a strictly communal one based around those essential components for a rural, agrarian and isolated [snowed in for six months of the winter] community to survive: family and continual work, religion, pagan ritual, and alcohol. The Svans speak their own, unwritten language, but are all bilingual in Georgian, itself a language that bears no connection with any of the known language groupings ...

Rust, and I don't mean the programming language du jour, is an unending fascination of mine, representing as it does a wonderfully complex interaction between ferrous materials and oxygen itself. On the face of it, rust would seem to indicate irreversible decay and despoliation of otherwise solid and reliable material. On the other, it is simply the natural combinatorial action of a reaction between a metal and a reactive element, resulting in the formation of an oxide of that metal. The beauty of it however, is that the resultant oxide can be reduced and reversed chemically, as anyone who has studied basic chemistry at school will know. The oxidation of iron of course can lead to violent reactions as well as the gradual oxidation of itself into rust, however, given sufficient heat and fuel. Iron Oxide III or red iron oxide [rust without the water-based component, if you like] for instance, provides a very good source of oxygen to fuel a thermite reaction in a number of reactive me...

Consider this when next you stand at the shore's edge gazing out to sea, marvelling in the constancy of its ebb and flow. It was never always thus and will always be changing as time inches forward and Earth's geological clock ticks on. When the Moon was much closer to the Earth after it broke away from its mother ship, its gravitational pull was much greater than now, and each incoming tide would seem to us now as violent as a tsunami. As the moon gradually moves further from our planet, it is likewise prompted on its journey by the ocean tides on our planet that it - principally - initiated in the first place; each swell of our oceans a gentle push outwards and onto our moon, gently, subtly, nudging it further out into space, its progress more remotely aided by the weaker gravitational pull of more distant solar, planetary and stellar bodies: its progress outward and away from its original home and us, imperceivibly but measurably slow and insistent. Over vast time, the tides...