Observations from a Hill

Our first visit of the week to The White Horse in Clun [blog posts passim] this lunchtime. Eschewing a full Sunday roast, having already had coffee and cake at the newly-reopened Poppy House Café in Bishop's Castle - very good espresso and a slice of cherry Bakewell - we opted instead for our continuing favourites from the pub's Light Bites menu: in my case the above sausage and chips; good honest pub grub, well cooked from great produce and in a portion small enough not to render one speechless with bloat. As always, their locally-sourced sausages were great and the chips homemade, not frozen. I washed mine down with a pint of the inestimable Clun Pale, brewed on the premises: a beer without equal by my measure, and one of the cheapest pints you'll find anywhere. The pub is open at all proper pub hours, has a great landlord in Jack, and most importantly has that particular comradely atmosphere found only in a pukka British public house. And as I've mentioned once or tw...

  Just a brief throwaway diary post tonight, as is my usual custom when relocating to Shropshire for a short break. The blue remembered hills are still here, and for the time-being at least, so is our little bolt-hole off the beaten track down here. How much longer the place will be available to rent, we can't be sure, as the owner is ten years older than us, and we ain't young ourselves, folks. Still, here we are again for a few days, so I'll keep you posted as we do and see stuff at the epicentre of my family's origins and their travels to and from the greater part of the Midlands over the last centuries: the Marches straddle the border between England and Wales, with Welsh speaking Oswestry in England and English speaking Welshpool in Wales. From Gloucestershire to Denbighshire via Shropshire; my lot certainly got around a bit in the old days...

I'm a kind of glass-half-full sort of bloke: an eternal optimist, and a believer in the basic humanity of our species. I'm also a realist with a keen sense of historical context: as a species, aside from great art, music and literature - the good stuff - we've also inflicted great harms on ourselves as humans, and on the home planet we all share, rent-free, from the Universe itself. The ultimate social housing project. Except that socialism has never been good enough for the more selfish and venal amongst us. So we continue to tread a path that will ultimately destroy us all. This is the currently-trending parallel narrative of the 'threat' of A.I to the our species and death by the 'others'. By the the way, it's interesting to note that this dystopian narrative arc includes only us and our creation; Artificial Intelligence. It ignores the vast majority of creation that exponentially outnumbers us here on Earth, and which almost certainly would be better...

  Just a quick one tonight, literally - at least that is in terms of food: what else could I possibly be referring to at my age? - I've been assembling a raft of inspirational recipe ideas to try recently in my on-going grail quest to recreate a good, old-school, British-Indian, West Midlands curry-house Madras at home, and I've parsed out a number of techniques that I think I can assemble into a decent simulacrum of said dish from. I think a few days in the kitchen might suffice to secure my ultimate goal, now so armed. However, in the meantime I would like to offer a word of praise to a homegrown [Welsh] brand of readymade south-asian-food-alikes. Pictured is the wrapper from a particularly decent butter chicken that has formed the last two evening's repast for me. I have to say that I would have passed it by on the shelves of the local Tesco Express were it not for the price reduction. I have to give it its due and say that for the money and convenience it was pretty dam...

To anyone who has studied Fine Art - properly, and at a practical level - there are two species of art-related persons that provoke a righteous animus amongst our number. Critics and dealers. I am struggling to [re?]watch the programme about a lost Leonardo that could [have been?] be worth gazillions of dollars on the market if proven 'genuine'. Two things spring to mind about this: one, was Leonardo da Vinci, as he is widely credited, 'the greatest painter of all time'? Two, does this painting have anything to offer to the history of art, apart from its putative connection to Leonardo? Firstly, Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath - admittedly of genius - and his principal focus was on the natural sciences. His painting, although highly accomplished, was effectively a sideline, and he was as experimental in its physical execution as he was in other areas of his endeavours. One of the reasons his paintings have survived in such small numbers is that he experimented wildly w...

There's design and then there's design: some design is timeless in its purity, some is just of its time and will go through the cycle of good v.s bad, fashionable v.s unfashionable, liked v.s vilified as bad taste. Some things last, others simply are in the moment until their revival at a later date. I'm motivated in this thought by a repeat of a Grand Designs episode tonight of a Thames-side build that caused a lot of ruffled feathers amongst the neighbours of the designers/builders of their new home there. I've no particular beef against the final outcome of the build, but will it endure as design? Probably not, but then again, the 'traditional buildings' surrounding their home are to be fair a motley lot themselves, some even exhibiting between-the-wars mock-Tudor half-timbering, not exactly authentic in itself, and which I can imagine Pevsner or Betjeman in their day coruscating the very existence of in both prose and poetry. What I would criticise about the...