Observations from a Hill

Well, here we are again at the turn of yet another Autumn Equinox, with its attendant mild jet-lag and confuzzlement in tow. I like the equinoxes more than I like the solstices as they seem more sudden in the change they bring [and I'm not referring to the artifice of British or anybody else's Summertime constructs], with a sharper dip into Winter and the subsequent shout of Spring. The equinoxes feel physical, with the solstices being broader signposts to the changing seasons. Again this modus mentis of mine harks back to a post I made some time ago about one's internal visualisation of time and its passage as a virtual physical space; I've forgotten when I posted it and I've just failed to come up with the link to that post in these pages, despite using all the obvious search terms, but it's the one about my internal time-spiral visualisation, which I hasten to add is a known psychological phenomenon - cf the post I can't find - although everyone that vis...

Seventy-two and counting: my birthday today. Yay! Whoopdeedoo! Who gives one? I left school in nineteen-seventy-two, which is kind of synchronicity, but only tenuously, in a numerological kind of way, and I would struggle to come up with any other combinations of the digits seven and two that would suggest any manner of cosmic significance, so I won't bother even trying. What it is, though, is another year thinking 'why do I still feel thirty-five in my head?' To be frank, thirty-five was the age at which I was physically fittest and strongest; and it is my son's current age, and as I said to him on their visit this afternoon, looking extremely dapper having been to a rather grand wedding in the Conwy Valley; I would have it that I was that age physically but knowing what I know now, thirty-seven years hence. I hope that I have learned from the past, from history, and from those around me, and that I truly exercise the precept voiced by Edmund Burke in a letter to Fanny...

Tonight's rather meagre offering is, as the above image would suggest, a quite gratuitous food post of the most egregious kind. Apologies. Jane's back from her week's sojourn down Pen Lleyn and she returned bearing some rather fine chicken thighs purchased on a slight return detour to Hooton's Farm Foods on Ynys Môn. I roasted them with lemon, thyme, bay, garlic, and anchovy fillets in chilli oil [avec olive oil, salt & pepper, obviously]; and served them up with minted, boiled baby potatoes and tenderstem broccoli. Simple and very tasty. Adding anchovy really does up the ante flavour-wise: I've only really ever used anchovy with lamb previously, but I can attest to its efficacy with a bit of chicken, too. Tomorrow I'll use the two pieces left to knock up some more of those wonderful tacos I mentioned the other day . I might even pass on the the recipe in full...

Following on from last night's exasperated economic sigh, I was reading - again in last week's New Statesman - an interview with author Dan Wang's take on America's changing role in world politics under Trump: the courting of Russia and China and the focus on AI as the future of the American economy. The interview was long and detailed and his conclusions too wide-ranging to summarise in the few words of tonight's post, but some key points are worth picking out of it. The underlying faith in AI as the next US gold rush is largely based on the performance of Silicon Valley over the past several decades: a tech bubble on the west coast that functions almost as a separate national entity, unlikely to continue indefinitely as the physical and economic constraints of the semiconductor industry, software bloat and the voracious hardware demands of AI really start to bite. The truth is that the industry will hit a physical capability and manufacturing capacity brick wall, ...

For the most part, I've often felt like a lone voice in some sort of Biblical wilderness, quacking on about the reasons why the world - well at least the human race - appears to be in constant self-destruct mode, economically. Economics, as I've always maintained, is not a science. At best, it equates to some manner of astrology or quack medicine, and like both is rooted in centuries past: attempts by ill-equipped minds to explain the unexplainable. I was reading a cover piece in this week's New Statesman by Ed Conway, which rang so true with my long-held belief that economic dogmas - which come and go in long periodic cycles - are nowt more than fictions concocted by the uninformed and blindly optimistic to attempt to explain the vicissitudes of the market economy. We know only too well the vagaries of trying to predict the behaviour of the world's climate. And predicting the fluctuations of economies is, like predicting the weather, at best an educated guess. The clos...

Here we are again in messing-around-in-the-workshop-land. Yesterday I decided to make a replacement for the most trivial of kitchen-things: the kitchen-roll holder; which in our kitchen had hitherto been an inverted toilet roll holder that I jury-rigged a couple of decades ago as a quick and dirty job and which has remained, irritatingly [mea culpa] since then. Anyway, I thought I'd just knock together a couple of bits of flatwood and some dowel to cobble together a freebie solution to this rather banal problem. Finding out that I had no drill-bit size to allow the only dowels in my possession to work in my imagined scenario, I decided on what might be considered to be the nuclear option instead, opting to shave the offendingly-large stick down to a more manageable dimension in order to fit the only hole size I could drill. Then I thought on, as you do, and decided to turn the spigots on the dowel on my old man's old Myford ML4 [blog posts passim] metal-turning lathe. I might a...