Observations from a Hill

Wasa Wasa - Edgar Broughton Band Fifty years ago in our youth,  we voiced our worries that the world was being despoiled by capitalists and our ecosystem destroyed in pursuit of profit. Greed. Short-termism. Self-interest. We were concerned then and made it plain but not many people believed there was even a problem and fewer listened. Money, oil, transporting goods across vast distances to suit the 'needs' of the developed world's populations; cheaper and cheaper food and commodities: simply moving the problems of the first world across into the developing world or to the ex-colonies, former empires and already ruined countries and environments. Think about the asbestos mountains dumped in India. The contaminated hulks of decommissioned ships towed out there to be hacked apart almost by hand in dry docks. The oil spillages from broken-backed supertankers. And so on. Half a century on, the world's population is generally now far more aware of the problems we f...

Hummingbird Hawk Moth - Image © Elsewhere I almost forgot... I was talking to my neighbour this afternoon when suddenly a Hummingbird Hawk Moth hove into view and started feeding at the Honeysuckle on the fence. I haven't seen one of these beautiful creatures for around five years - we had a summer/autumn when there were dozens of them feeding in the garden: again the first time they had been spotted here. A truly wonderful thing to behold and a welcome distraction from the follies of our own species, at present.

Sunset with Contrail - © Kel Harvey I took this after the storms of earlier this week - a rare thing at the moment: a contrail. Heading out across the Irish Sea and I would guess by the altitude, making for the USA. We should be about half an hour from Corfu airport by now, had we not decided weeks ago to knock foreign travel on the head this year. Still hurts a bit though; I'm going to miss stepping off the plane into the warm bath of Greek evening air - it's barely in double-figures here at the moment, despite the fact that it's been a decent day overall. Still, I've at least got the grass cut and we've already done a lot of cutting-back ready for autumn proper. And you never get sunsets as good as the one in my photo in the Med.

Images  - © Financial Times A couple of things from today's FT: the reassessment of work practice in a Covid-world; and passive cooling in an overheating climate. The former is a an essay by anthropologist James Suzman, which to summarise madly, proposes in a very circumspect way that we might, indeed should be taking our work/life balance cues from our hunter-gatherer forebears. It traces a path from a time when fifteen hours work a week would garner enough food and supplies to spend the rest of the time doing whatever it is you wanted. Enter the agricultural revolution and all of a sudden we are tied to the vicissitudes of the seasons and weather. No time to stop and stare here - dawn to dusk, seven days a week, well six if you observed The Lord's Day. Many have prophesied a future where drudge work would be carried out by machines and leisure time would increase for all - no lesser figures than John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell for example - unfortunately, no; a...

Untitled - Image © Kel Harvey Just a short word tonight that I'll amplify later. Because I've been mulling over the disturbing similarities between our current political zeitgeist and that of pre-war Europe, with the obvious caveat that we have not yet witnessed paramilitary activity on the streets; and because the email round from the Lads has now gotten round to actually voicing these comparisons - I didn't want to be the first and seem overly hysterical - it's probably time to try and unpick the bones of it all. The sad fact is that Trump, Johnson et al, are all employing a methodology that first saw the light of day in the inter-war years in Germany. They say that truth is the first casualty of war, but the lies and slander employed by the NSDAP, a tactic Adolf Hitler abstracted from the Social Democrats, whom he loathed, were to be employed throughout the thankfully brief life of the Third Reich to great and tragic effect. Truth is sidelined long before con...

No Comment - Image © New Statesman Just when did we cross the rubicon? At what point in modern history did the protection of commercial interests become the overarching priority, ahead of public safety and the national good? The news today that the data on deaths in care homes from Covid-19 are being kept secret to protect the interests of commercial enterprises [Guardian Online] should come as a profound shock to any decent, right-minded person; but I suspect that outside of our well-meaning bubble of left-leaning intellectualism and its support media it will go little-remarked and if at all it will be a with a fatalistic '...it is what it is...' As a boomer, I was born into the Welfare State; that wholly non-commercial construct that sought rightly to give everyone equal access to care from birth to death, allowing no-one to fall by the wayside. It cost a lot of money, granted; but it was paid for by contribution, by all adults of working age and their employers. If a...

Afon Ogwen from Brynbella Après le Déluge, a calm and sunny day today. Four inches of rain in one storm is a fair amount of water. Apparently we can lay claim to have been the wettest place in Wales yesterday. The dark patches in the water in the photograph are the enormous boulders that are normally the prominent features of the gorge below the bridge at Brynbella. We lived for some years on the crossroads just above here, while James was little; so we used to go down to this spot often. In summers then, we could sit and picnic on the rocks: I've got pictures of my late mom doing just that. A far, far cry from the boiling waters this morning. Things are definitely changing rapidly; the climate is becoming unstable to a degree I've never seen before. This is the second 'named' storm in the last month: not normal, but becoming so. We had two months of high summer in April and May, with temperatures close to thirty-two Celsius, hotter than the Med. Now this. Again. ...

Untitled - © Kel Harvey As yet another storm with a name tries to obliterate our house, gardens and outbuildings by force, I'm retreating from the conservatory as it's found a brand new place to leak; right over the table where I write. This only serves to emphasise the sense of claustrophobia that started with the pandemic and lockdown. On days like today, going out for fresh air would truly be doing a Captain Oates, although I still intend to open The Fridd Arms at 16:00 [our Garden Studio, AKA The Enormous Shed] for my customary couple of pints with Joe. I dread to think how many leaks have sprung in there today, with the wind pushing the rain up the valley towards us at a near horizontal angle and with [gale] force. The application of corrugated iron to the back wall earlier this year was timely and at least mitigates the worst of it as the wall faces directly into the teeth of most of the storms we get. So, fingers crossed, this will hopefully have abated a littl...

The Great Man himself - Eric Jones, his Tremadoc cafe below Jane & I went for a drive this afternoon as the weather was good and looked like it might last today, unlike the storm-remnant unreliability of the last week or so. We fully intended to go and revisit the old quarries at Nantlle and set out accordingly. We made our way toward Waunfawr, taking in the small town of Llanrug en route and using the back-roads for preference. Beyond the centre of town and going away from the Caernarfon end, you pass the Railway Station and the brew-pub that sits beside it, at the head of Nant Y Betws. Up into the valley you reach the beautiful Llyn Cwellyn on your right; a reservoir which serves parts of Gwynedd and Ynys Môn, where on some days and with the right conditions; especially in early morning, the waters form a perfect mirror; reflecting like for opposite like, the crag of Castell Cidwm on the other side of the lake, in it's stillness. The far end of the valley brings you...

Karl Marx Two commentators this week have highlighted to me a single issue which throws into sharp focus a fundamental problem with our democracy. Jeff Smith in an email to the Lads earlier pointed out that there apparently is still a majority in favour of this idiot government, despite all the evidence shrieking out to say categorically that they are totally and utterly unfit to govern. Andy Beckett in the Guardian yesterday: 'The Tories' incompetence is obvious - but do voters care?' It would seem they don't. The simple fact that the universal franchise was won relatively recently and at great expense to those that fought for it and that those very people who have benefited from that struggle and the seemingly simple right - to vote - have then themselves re-enfranchised the very class of people who for centuries have oppressed them and have given them carte blanche to reset the class structure to suit themselves, beggars belief. The problem is comfort and a sen...

Taken from "The Boy Mechanic" Popular Mechanics, 1920's I was just musing on how life has changed in the past century - my sister and cousin have been posting numerous old family photos on Facebook lately, including one of my great-grandmother Malpas with my mother and two brothers, Edgar and Godfrey as children. My grandmother and grandfather Southall were married around the time the kind of strip above used to run regularly in the American magazine 'Popular Mechanics'. Some of the projects featured in these articles would be well beyond the capabilities of most adults these days, let alone today's children. Not least of which the HSE considerations - some of the 'builds' look positively lethal to modern eyes and would probably lead to arrest or at least a strong caution. I used to have a 'Boys' Annual' - itself anachronistic [hopefully] in today's world, I can't remember which one, but it was a treasure trove of activities...

© Guardian  Hubris - Kel Harvey A dissonance: gapped, separate and parted from reason, The core of it trapped, insensate and without perception, Drained of meaning - morals arid of purpose, greed itself Motivation enough to feed the maw of ambition.

© Elsewhere Well in two years, Apple's stock has risen as much as it had in the previous thirty-eight, doubling in valuation to two trillion dollars. What on earth does two trillion mean? 2,000,000,000,000. On the short scale used conventionally in the US and in the UK since 1974, the trillion is a number that trips off the tongue easily enough, but is far, far bigger than you might imagine from such a compact little word. As we're talking about dollars, let's use the greenback as our standard: the One Dollar Bill. This is a thin thing: .0043 inches thick. I'll stick with inches as we're talking American standards here and it's easier to visualise the final scale of our little calculation. A one hundred dollar wrap of bills would stand less than half-an-inch high. By extension then, a thousand dollar stack is just shy of four-and-half-inches tall. A million dollar pile would stretch to over three hundred and fifty-eight feet - eighty feet taller than t...

The Fairview Cards & Cribbage Board A pretty gloomy afternoon here, awaiting the forecast storm, although it's pretty calm at the moment. Having posted the Deck of the Week earlier made me think of another pack of cards in my collection that I've had for well over fifty years. This was a deck that we used to use at Fairview in Fromes Hill when I was a child and the one I learnt to play Patience with. I still have the crib board that we used there, too. My nan was a mad keen Whist player and taught us to play and it's still one of my favourite card games to this day. The crib board dates back to the 'Twenties, the cards I'm not sure about: you can still see the cigarette burns on the box - just about everyone smoked in those days. A curious and forgotten fact came out yesterday when Jane was on Facebook. My Great Aunt Clara, who was a nun in a nursing order and a very fine and kind woman, used to love a game of Patience and always carried a battered old pack ...

Warley Odeon, soon to be Bowl... Here's a thing. I sat down last night to write about Arthur Brown and the context in which I remember the single 'Fire'. I got diverted by the exam-grades farrago, so used that as the base from which to write. What I had intended was to relate my one and only experience of the roller rink at Spring Hill: 'Whispering Wheels'. I had thought it might have been earlier, but it must have been 1968. The only reason I can be certain of this is that I remember 'Fire' being played on the PA as we skated (gamely in my case, as I realised very early on that I'd never learned to turn corners on skates) and as the single didn't arrive in the charts 'til '68, I guess that was the year, as by the following summer I was doing entirely different stuff. Asking Jane about the name of the place, which was an ice-rink before that, got us into remembering the Warley Bowl - the former Warley Cinema: The Odeon. My experience o...

Afon Ogwen © Elsewhere River Kel Harvey I can feel the edges of my darkening, palpable and not distant. it was moot, or at least abstract in the shooting years; its source fast fixed, the river arcs and traces the traverse from first cry to silence, pebbles murmuring in its deep.

Roger Taylor of Ofqual The Crazy World of Arthur Brown I had just sat down to write that I had found a nice morsel in todays Guardian G2 about Arthur Brown; he of the Crazy World, when I suddenly heard that the powers that be had climbed down over the exam-grade debacle under the weight of widespread protest, pressure from the Tory back benches [and some dissent from within the Government itself] and the moral high ground occupied by the Celtic nations surrounding them. In a fashion by now typical of this benighted administration [we really should not be expressing any surprise at this late juncture] the person tasked with the grovelling retraction, too-late lukewarm apology and enduring the public humiliation was not the Education Secretary, still less either the Home Secretary or the PM; [but then the PM is excused games as he has a letter from someone] but Roger Taylor from Ofqual, the quango given charge of educational matters by the government itself. The very government a...

Door & Ivy  © Kel Harvey There are as many versions of 'proper practice' in photography as there are photographers and photographs. The notion of proper practice, as I've mentioned before, is rooted in the notion that photography is mere 'craft'. When I taught my night-class, this is what my pupils expected of me - that I would teach them the 'proper' way to take photographs. This is as much anathema to me now as it was then. These days, there are still magazines touting formulas for pictorial success, although they at least acknowledge a much broader spectrum of subject matter and technique, reflecting the true nature of what is in reality an endlessly varied artform. I just went back to a piece in the excellent BLACK+WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY - a monthly journal devoted to, well, black & white photography, natch. In the Comment section, Tim Clinch addresses the vexed old question of image cropping. This one is as old as photography itself and ...

Photo © Kel Harvey - News Content © Financial Times Tim Harford's byline in todays FT carries an interesting piece regarding memory and the mind's structuring of experience - 'We won't remember much of what we did in lockdown'. He likens the vividness of memories stored from new and novel experiences to the algorithms that compress video. When a scene changes little, the compression is simple - a keyframe's data is stored and followed by smaller chunks of data marking only the differences between subsequent frames, rather than storing all of the data needed to render each frame in its entirety. Where you have a rapidly changing scene, the process has to produce many more keyframes and fewer 'difference-only' frames. His analogy is that we hold onto experiences more firmly if they are one-off or rare events in our lives: a holiday in a place previously unvisited, an event of historical mark, getting married, our children's births, etc. All see...

Financial Times, Friday 14 August 2020 The commotion, nay fury, surrounding the farrago that is this year's exam results for our currently maturing school student cohort is understandable in and of itself. So many results have been devalued, sometimes greatly, in stature by Ofqual and its statisticians, that the career direction and future lives of many of our young people will be altered irrevocably, mostly to their detriment and through no fault of their own. The pretext for this 'rounding down' is that the results that stood originally fell outside the scope of the 'normal' performance curve measured historically. The outcomes on average were seen to be evidence of grade inflation. This in itself has been a criticism of results even in normal times; rising standards seen as not evidence of improvement in teaching and overall student performance, but rather as an indicator of softening of standards generally and  assessment in particular. That it is deemed...

Image - Wikipedia Dooz-ie of a storm here last night - beat the one from the night before, which was pretty spectacular. It hailed for about half an hour, with some good electrical activity thrown in for good measure. Some of the hailstones were 3/4" in diameter and hurt like buggery. I tried to get a recording of the thunder and in my haste not to miss anything and having remembered this time to turn on the limiter and reduce the input volume to avoid clipping - I forgot the windshield. As a consequence, a large part of the recording has that unplayable and certainly not-at-all-pleasant wind-woofle all over it. However, I managed to get one good thunder-crack and a bit of an after-rumble out of the thing. Not a total waste of time. Well, some might think recording stuff like that a complete waste of time, but there you are.  Gives my canoe buoyancy. The only loser in all of this was the poor old cat: she was sleeping in the wild garden in the heat of the afternoon when ...

Half Moon I took this a short while ago - the beauty, fragility and mystery of our existence is encapsulated in that small fragment of rock: long-divorced from our own world, scarred but perfect and with a profound influence on that very existence we believe, with our customary hubris, to be immutable.

A Handful of the Collection I've added a new section to the blog: Deck of the Week,  which as the title implies *ahem* will feature one deck out of my slightly large collection of playing cards per week; just follow the link on the home page or in the sidebar to view the featured deck(s). This weeks offering is the Bicycle deck in the picture above. I started collecting playing cards sometime in the mid nineteen-seventies, although not deliberately and my purchases were sporadic until I started travelling. I always try to buy something local to the country or area I'm in, and have asked friends to bring cards back from their travels. The first I bought abroad was a small deck for playing the game of Scopa I picked up in Sicily. I also buy new decks occasionally from various online sources, including the excellent JP Games - one of the small businesses I like to support. I hope this will be of interest to someone - I find the old pasteboards fascinating and love the ...

Watchers - Image © Kel Harvey I agree wholeheartedly with A.E Housman that simply staring out at your surroundings is both a right and an absolute necessity; not solely for timely contemplation but also for good mental health,  and back-processing whatever your brain refuses point-blank to process when directly asked. I've spoken and written  before about my particular favourite spot and time for that simple, self-contained activity, in Corfu at Boukaris at sunset; a pleasure I won't have this year unfortunately. Still, I now have the time and I live in a beautiful place where similar qualities are not in short supply; the opportunities are there within walking distance. On that note, we were out for a short stroll at Llanfairfechan this morning and I chanced upon these two chaps both engaged in their own idle contemplations of the landscape, the one in the distance staring down the length of the strand itself and the one on the sea-wall staring out to sea past the firs...

Image ©New York Times, et al As if we didn't already know or suspect - the Idiot-in-Chief is selling our world to the highest bidder: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/climate/trump-methane-climate-change.html?campaign_id=60&emc=edit_na_20200810&instance_id=0&nl=breaking-news&ref=headline&regi_id=124195448&segment_id=35715&user_id=a35a52e8f14e33f89f3a600576e569eb The US is leading the way. To Armageddon. Climate change is ignored. The pandemic is an irritation; a fly in the ointment of commerce. Any and all dissent is met with sackings and forced resignations. Five million Covid-19 infections and 165,000 deaths - the highest in the world according to Johns Hopkins University.  In the UK,  Boris 'The Absent' Johnson maintains his usual disinterested stance, with his deranged advisors tinkering blindly with their mad socio-epidemiological experiments on the populous-at-large, not a very long step from that heinous period in European histo...

Nikon F4 Courtesy of a colleague of mine from work, I acquired this old Nikon F4 [film] camera, now surplus to his requirements, alongside a bunch of other assorted stuff; on the day I started my gardening leave. A cheap Ebay purchase of an old Nikkor 50mm f2 standard lens completes the package - a battleship of a camera in every way. The weight of a housebrick, this thing should be stable down to an 1/8th of a second handheld. The lens I picked up is an old FD from a long time ago, but as I only intend to use this as a fully manual camera anyway, it more than fits the bill. To boot, out of the box of assorted stuff came a lovely little Rollei compact digital, a pair of Nikon binoculars that really suit my eyesight and a Nikon DSLR. I've decided I'm going to make good use of all this kit, plus a couple more things from the box. One item however, was an underwater film camera which I've passed on to Joe, as he's the diver in our midst and I would never have made g...

Monkshood, bottom garden, this afternoon Image © Kel Harvey If you consider gardening to be a safe, indeed sedate and some might think, boring occupation, hobby or pastime; think again. It's a jungle out there and I'm not referring to the tangle of weeds that colonise at least some corners of large and unruly gardens - to the general benefit of the wildlife that inhabits them - there are myriad things that literally bite and many that metaphorically do, also. This train of thought was not sparked by the obvious thorn-related scars on my calves, but rather the first realisation that the Monkshood in our garden is just in flower. We were doing some tidying up post-rains and taking advantage of the current spell of rather fine weather when Jane pointed out the familiar and quite distinct violet blooms in the borders. Like so many plants in the average garden, beauty disguises a lethal character in this plant. It goes by various common names aside from the descriptive ...

Your Government, encapsulated. Face It        -        Kel Harvey face it face   it face     it face the fact that your government is selling your future, your present, your past, your existence - your children's future, past, present, and            existence for their own, personal gain: face it, before it's too late.

The road's a little wider these days!   We went over to Chester this afternoon to pick up a relative for a visit. Knowing the A55 would be crammed with holiday traffic, we took the scenic route over the Denbigh Moors, both there and back. On the way, we noted that The Sportsman's Arms was open for business, although we were passing before opening time and were in a hurry to get to Chester. The pub is officially the highest in Wales at nearly fifteen hundred feet above sea level. It has been closed down on a number of occasions over the past few years, but happily is now open for business. Covid precautions in place and a large marquee in case of the inevitable inclemency that the moor is apt to bring to the table, they're fully booked tonight and all looks good. We called there for a quick drink on the way back from Chester and sat in the Marquee as the earlier blue skies had turned to cloud - not cold, but with a cooler breeze than in the sunshine. I would recommen...

Image   ©Financial Times, et al What is it with this bloody dilettante PM? Mr. PR and big-gestures Boris was photographed in Cheshire yesterday 'laying a brick' on a building site. You can guarantee the poor lamb had to retire to a portable chaise longue (provided kindly by local subscription) to recover from the effort. Politicians and celebrities generally, when seen taking photo-ops in full hi-vis and PPE (the industrial kind) and pretending to actually commit an act of work, irritate the bejeezus out of me. The man's never done a hand's turn in his entire privileged, silver-spoon-in-the-gob existence. A disgrace on every front, he is allowed, no; encouraged and supported in this artifice, all the while failing to actually govern the country; surely his job-description, after all. And now the Bank of England appears to broadly support the government's and presumably the PM's complete-non-strategy to chop the furlough scheme off at the knees long bef...

Room 101 Image ©Kel Harvey Yesterday's leader in the Guardian Journal criticised the just-rolled-out Eat Out To Help Out scheme introduced this week by the  chancellor, Rishi Sunak. It points out the obvious weaknesses in the reasoning behind the scheme, principally the flawed notion that people are being put off re-engaging with the hospitality sector on grounds of cost as opposed to simply being anxious about so doing. Ed Miliband in the same paper on Tuesday raises the issue of the fundamental structure of the economy, that rolling back to a pre-Covid model will serve only the wealthy in the short term and damage society irrevocably in the medium and long terms. That the government is seeking to end the furlough scheme so soon into this pandemic is a good indicator, as Miliband says, that they simply see this as a short-term irritation blocking their over-arching plans to wrest control of the economy; pulling it away from the scrutiny of democratic process and passing it...

Dixons were our competitors, but there don't seem to be any photos extant of Photomarkets, so bugger it - it's a camera shop. Back in 1978, I'd left college and worked over the summer for a contract hire firm. I managed to get a proper job as a salesman at Photomarkets in the Bull Ring in Birmingham. I was only there for six months, but in that time I managed to become the third highest seller throughout the whole UK chain. I was earning a basic salary of just over a grand a year. Saturdays were always busy, with a mix of our frequent-flyers: the geeks who in those days liked to hang out and talk technical stuff with the staff; and very often tourists looking for their holiday purchases. A couple of occasions stand out for me. Once we had a Japanese visitor and his wife roll into the shop, enquiring about gear. All of us, however were transfixed by the camera the guy had around his neck. It was a Canon rangefinder camera, common enough then; but the lens on it wa...

Blaen Y Nant, with Tryfan in the Background, this afternoon. ©Kel Harvey Had a quiet drive up Nant Ffrancon this afternoon, and took this from the old road. Telford's early nineteenth century road can be seen rear left, still carrying traffic along his original A5, London to Holyhead route over two hundred years on. Although remedial work has been carried out in recent decades, it's still substantially Telford's original, albeit metalled with a slightly more modern surface. Plenty of tourists around, a few struggling to drive the old westerly-sided road that this was taken from, in cars woefully unsuited to its rougher character - low-profile tyres and sports suspended BMWs don't mix well with cattle grids and potholes. And with extra traffic comes the vexed question of reversing. Some city-dwellers seem barely aware of the function of reverse gear and wing mirrors. This is one reason I drive a so-called city car with bouncy suspension, it's ideal for the r...

Well, there it is then. Done. Had some nice texts from a lot of the lads and a long and very pleasant conversation with Gareth Davies and Llifon Hughes has just rung me with his best wishes. We've just had a visit from a couple of friends and neighbours of ours, Carolyn and Brian - a few drinks and a jangle! Steak and chips and some good wine - all good. Next chapter, moving on...

My retirement is now only hours away. At some time tomorrow, sooner rather than later, I hope; I finish my current career. I've worked in telecoms for over fifteen and a half years now and although it was not my choice, it was expedient at the time that the job effectively chose me. I was at the time in the unlucky position of having lost a lucrative freelance job which had given me a lot of travel opportunities and paid pretty well. But it went wrong and I was going bankrupt, so what the hell; go get a 'real' job. I was fortunate that at, to be realistic, the quite advanced age of fifty, to get anything halfway decent. As it turned out, after a ridiculously short telephone interview of three basic and apparently banal questions, and a wait of a week or so, I got the  job. It has been challenging in many ways. Physically, it can be a tough job to do, what with climbing, lifting heavy stuff, a lot of driving and working in all weathers. In fact, after the first winter, I...

Pliny The Younger Rarum id quidem nihil enim aeque gratum est adeptis quam concupiscentibus. As Boris Johnson is so terribly fond of exhibiting his Classical education and apparent erudition, he would do well to note the above from one of his undoubted literary heroes, Pliny the Younger: ' An object in possession seldom retains the same charm that it had in pursuit.' This ably encapsulates his attitude to just about every public post he has ever held. A triumph of aspiration and vaulting ambition over both native ability and any willingness to put in the hard miles. c.f. his attitude to relationships and family. Roy K. Gibson's 'Man of High Empire, The Life of Pliny the Younger' was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement of July 24th. by Rebecca Langlands. I quote:      'Pliny had long been revered as an exceptionally stylish writer whose surviving letters remain a record of a man and his world.      The life they reveal, howe...