Observations from a Hill

      The World of Retro meets Mac   This is the first post I've tried writing on the AlphaSmart 3000, which is a hell of a name for anything. The keyboard is full-size and quite clicky, so the typing experience is probably better than on the MacBook, which has the usual chiclet keys, which don't offer a great deal of feedback. The style of this thing is straight out of the Apple playbook from the era of the very first iMacs - it's even in one of the translucent colourways of the second generation of those machines; I would guess, although I don't actually remember, that the AlphaSmart was aimed principally at a Mac-based audience. So far so good: the MacBook is off having a cool down, so my notifications are limited to my phone, which I tend to ignore anyway until I've finished what I'm currently doing. We'll see how this works out as a methodology, but it definitely has the appeal of simplicity and focus about it - this particular machine does have a calcu...

  Tigerlily, the cat from Berriew I buried our cat today, 'nuff said.

The Thinker - Rodin There was an interview with Claerwen James, daughter of the late and oh, so great Clive James in yesterday's Observer Review. I haven't finished it yet, but what I did read reminded me of what I so admire about her father. That her voice, even in print is so like his, gives me hope for the future. Erudition is much more than simply having ready access to a grab-bag of classical quotations. Quotation is not synonymous with understanding. It's unfortunate that those who seek to re-establish the old pecking order in this country don't grasp this simple truth. Blather is blather, either in Latin or Ancient Greek. Clive James was an erudite man; he had what could somewhat understatedly be called an enquiring mind. He simply was genuinely interested in the world and what it had to offer, not for material gain alone, but for how it fed his mind. In return, he gave us some of the very best writing and some of the most scurrilously entertaining TV imaginable....

  Moleskine Notebook, Psion II & Psion Series 5MX   The Psion Organiser was a British-designed and made device that was the vanguard in the relatively brief history of that singular device, the PDA [Personal Digital Assistant] and was in it's earliest incarnation the electronic upstart that threatened to knock the Filofax™ off it's perch as the yuppie weapon of choice in the late eighties. To anyone under fifty, this last paragraph will contain many alien words and concepts. Whatever. This is about a British company that came up with some truly innovative kit over a period of years, starting up in 1980 and producing it's first Organiser in 1984, the year that saw Apple Computer produce the first Macintosh computers. The version of the Organiser that really took off was version two, issued in 1986 at the height of the yuppie era (ask your grandad) and was the go to device for techies wanting to get ahead of the Filofax™ game (again ask the old man). The photo above shows...

  Your Humble Narrator, Snowdon, 1980 - image © John Latham   Exactly forty years ago today, on the twenty-seventh of September 1980, we moved here to live in Bethesda, a town we've lived in and around for all but nine months of that forty years. Four decades on and the world looks a very different place in so many ways. The obvious and perhaps trite examples would be the internet and social media, the rise of populism or Covid-19. The price of everything: a pint now ten times the 1980 price; pre-Covid licensing hours practically unlimited; no-smoking almost anywhere: so few smokers these days. When we came here most adults smoked; it was a fact of life then: pubs, cafés and public transport were thick with the blue haze of cigarette, pipe and cigar smoke. Pubs and pub-culture have changed more in the last forty years than in the previous hundred. In 1980, opening hours were still the same as in the 1950's: 11:00 or 12:00 till 2:30 in the afternoon and 5:00 till 10:30 at night...

            Image - Shutterstock        Lost Time - Kel Harvey   Are we all lost, old man? Was the time come and Did we not see or Understand? Are we all lost, old man? Is this where all ends And where we cease to Know or be? How do we end, old man? Is time not enough of itself an end and a trial? Can we commend, old man, The time we spend Not caring for time, Or it's end?  

The Raft of The Medusa - Théodore Géricault 1818-1819      Further to yesterdays post on the urban village - 'Don't Brick It' - Norman Foster pitched in on the topic in yesterdays Guardian Journal, referring to the 15-minute-city concept and extending the discussion to the greening of the reduced-vehicle urban space created. Green spaces have been created and used in cities for a long time, the need for them never more relevant or pressing than now. He cites the idea of effectively recycling the spaces left by the missing vehicles: car parks being used for growing food to supply the local 'village'; closing down traffic lanes and turning them over to pedestrians and cyclists etc. I for one am a great fan of these ideas and as I said in the previous post, it's something that I took to heart a very long time ago, back in the days when climate change was being ignored and anyone making the case for it seen as merely cranky and out of touch with reality. Fifty years...

Well...a brick, you know - image © Elsewhere     George Monbiot in The Guardian - 23rd September - puts a slant on reducing vehicular pollution that perhaps many people might not immediately think of, including reducing the numbers of what to many are the exemplars of environmentally friendly motoring, electric vehicles. Of course he's absolutely correct, the problem is not so much the type of vehicle used on our roads, but the sheer numbers. The most insidious pollution coming from tyres: both during use and when discarded, un-recyclable in any meaningful way, except maybe by those who follow the Bob Flowerdew method of cultivating potatoes. Monbiot cites the notion of the fifteen-minute city; a view of the urban on a village scale, a project started in Paris by its mayor, Anne Hidalgo. The idea is to return to a time when all one's needs could be met within a fifteen minute walk from home. Cities like Paris and London are already constructed in such a way that supports this;...

  Poor Sod? Not sodding poor, that's for sure - image ©Times Newspapers I was going to vent spleen over the Saturday Times article 'Overburdened, underpaid and a look of misery on his face,' referring to the abject penury in which our poor Prime Minister lives. But Marina Hyde got a piece in first in yesterdays Guardian Journal, and as always she was right on the button and funny as hell with it. But I might as well add my four penn'orth anyway. The 'substance' of the Times piece is that a Prime Minister's lot is not a happy one, particularly when referenced against the working conditions and stipends of other World Leaders. Probably correct, but it does rather ignore the tiny factoid that most people go into politics as a vocation; usually with laudable, if too often unrealised, ambitions to right wrongs, do some good, etc. That Boris Johnson is manifestly unsuited intellectually, psychologically and culturally for this role is to simply state the bleedin...

Image © Vistorian     I started tentatively using the Zettelkasten I mentioned in Monday's post; what exact methodology I'll eventually adopt to make it work for me I can't say, but I think the process of adapting the idea to suit my needs will be a hugely productive process in itself. The whole point of the Zettelkasten is that there is no single approved or prescribed way of building one; the underlying principle of linking thoughts and ideas in a non-linear way is the whole point: how that's achieved is almost irrelevant. What I've discovered though, in a brief foray this afternoon, is that it does help unearth those thoughts and references that are lurking beneath the surface of conscious memory. It strikes me as being rather like human conversation, as opposed to formal dialogue or debate, which are structured according to scripts or rules and follow a narrative arc from one end to the other, linearly (usually). With natural human conversation, one idea becomes...

Mountain Haze - Image © Kel Harvey     Having initially frightened the bejeezus out of everyone and only getting a grip on the basic facts of the virus' infectivity, potential lethality and mode of transmission all too late in the course of things to prevent what turned out to be one of the worst outbreak s in Europe; only then turning to lockdown and emergency economic measures to save millions from potential penury '...for as long as it takes...' the NonGovernment® then performs a U-Turn worthy of Ken Block, shooing everyone back out into wider society, all the while urging care to avoid infection. What has followed was entirely predictable by anyone with half a brain, and totally without the need for the multi-screen pandemic-bunkered team of super forecaster, The Mekon - Classic Dom to his chums - and his Treen minions. With a potentially worse spike in infections and deaths staring us down, we now see the Tory NonGovernment®  moving back to its normal comfort zone....

  Zettelkasten and Macintosh     I'm guessing that a basic understanding of how the World Wide Web originated and its underlying organisational structure is only really held by people of a certain age and background - indeed just knowing the thing by its name - most people these days 'have the Internet' in much the same way that they have electricity or the telly. Aside from the myriad complexities of how the internet itself and its subset, the World Wide Web actually function, let alone the details of the twenty-odd layers of software protocols involved; there is a single, unifying motive underlying the original concept dreamt up by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989 to enable the sharing and linking of documents between academics using the then Internet, as I've posted previously, a direct offshoot of the original packet-switched wide area network, ARPANET. The feature that made the Web different was its use of the Hyperlink: Hypertext; something no-one using the net the...

Dominic Cummi...  - sorry, The Mekon Thanks to Smith, J. for pointing out an article in The Guardian I had missed: 'Why Boris Johnson is constantly surprised when his government fails' by Andrew Rawnsley. The central point in the piece is the influence at cabinet level of so-called 'Super-Forecasting' - much vaunted; indeed touted by Dominic Cummings, who obviously has cast himself in the role of said forecaster. That the NonGovernment® have serially failed to forecast anything even vaguely accurately in the current crisis speaks volumes. Worzel Gummidge could have predicted the path of this pandemic better than this shower. I suspect that the Prime Minister, who is now widely regarded by his own back-benchers on all sides of his party to be inept and incapable of carrying out his duties as head of state, has been in thrall to this madman Cummings for some considerable time. The really telling thing is that Cummings has half-inched his theories from a third part...

Holding Time Project - image by unknown photographer Some time ago I discovered that there was a ready source of glass plate negative stock in the UK. The plates are produced in the States by J. Lane and imported into the UK by Analogue Wonderland , who supply a wide range of, well - analogue - photography gear and materials. I've bought quite a few rolls of film from them since I discovered them and find them the kind of small business I like to support. Please check out their YouTube live streams - well worth the time. So, in preparation for the day when I stump up the cash for a box or two of plates, I found a parcel of old 5"x4" plate holders on eBay at a bargain price. These little beauts are the thick end of a hundred years old and I discovered that one of them had cut-film adaptors in either side (these being double dark slides), shimmed out with two glass plates to make them fit. One was an unexposed plate, but the other was an actual photograph. Unfortuna...

Home - image © NASA's Earth Observatory In Loco Parentis - Kel Harvey a grain adrift in an ocean vast beyond limit of imagination, our blue dot home waits; biding and crossing time, whilst all which call this place home are trapped; ensnared in this gilded cage with no let or out save that choice, afforded to us alone in loco parentis. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Not Us Back in the mid-eighties we had quite a thriving bohemian community around Bethesda. Aside from the old Baptist chapel we converted into an art gallery and workshops under the aegis of the Association of Artists & Designers in Wales [AADW], there were independent artists, musicians, poets, writers, photgraphers and film-makers all working from the precincts of this small town and its satellite villages; a scene repeated in other communities throughout the region: activity and activism paired in a concentrated locus. There was the annual rock festival, Pesda Roc; attracting thousands each year to a maes somewhere in the town, featuring bands supported and promoted by the late John Peel on the BBC, some of whom are still playing to audiences today. We held annual exhibitions of art at the chapel, as well as hosting performance pieces and interactive events - our local film society held regular screenings there, including an extraordinary 3D movie and immersive sculpt...

Just a short update on the pew project. I've managed to get the dowel-holes drilled and the dowels cut to size, [the ones above are over-sized to allow me to manipulate the end-piece], the remaining slat from the lower back board cut to size and fitted and a modus operandi for getting it installed worked out. I reckon there's a couple more days work on it before I drag it from the studio up to the house and finish the damned thing. I'll post pix when I'm done.

Adam Smith Karl Marx I was going to post the fourth instalment of the pew saga, and might do later; but a short reflection on the status quo seems in order. Aditya Chakrabortty writes in todays Guardian on the Covid testing crisis; our 'world-beating' test & trace system, which the NonGovernment® and Boris Johnson trumpeted months ago and which has all but stalled, the blame as usual deflected onto the people themselves and the by now well beleaguered Civil Service; the state of the art app that never appeared; the PPE which miraculously turned out to be a pup; the contracts handed out without question or tender to private companies hand-in-glove with the NonGovernment® and its principle actors; Serco, Deloitte, Accenture, McKinsey, etc., etc., etc. The question very few are voicing overtly is that of the overarching motivation behind all of this. That the UK has resources in depth, of world renowned quality and already within the public sector ...

The pew-end nearly sorted Detail showing the angled end So far, so good. Getting the pew-end slowly sorted - it has turned out to be as difficult as I imagined, as the pew-end came from a different pew and the rebates don't quite match. Also, the damage originally done via chainsaw(!) by the previous chapel owner, has meant further fettling to get the thing anywhere near actually fitting. Anyway, the pics show the end strapped up and ready for drilling for the dowels: I'm going to glue and peg this old style. There are numerous places where the mis-fitting and damage have left gaps, but I've got plenty of offcuts of the timber to fill most, if not all. As I said the open end will fit flush against the conservatory wall, supported by a wooden bracket screwed to the masonry, so what with the weight of the thing and a nice secure right hand end it should be good and stable. I'll post further updates as it progresses.

Untitled - Kel Harvey Dateline: September 15th 2020: 07:00 Location: Rachub, North Wales, UK: 53°11'27" North -4°3'29" East Altitude: 705 feet Air Temperature: 17°Celsius The figures jar. This time of year, the temperature here at this time in the morning should be around 7° or even less. This is by no means a unique event; we have had extended Indian Summers in the past, but following the past few years turbulent, inverted weather patterns it is difficult not to notice a rather more persistent change in our weathers instability. Worrying, as are: The west coast of America is on fire and the leader of the Free World™ insists it's all down to poor forest management. Also, our own NonGovernment® has just got its Internal Market Bill through to the next stage by a considerable margin, despite dire warnings from all sides not only about the illegality of the instrument, but also of its potential for catastrophic knock-on effects for Wales, Scotland and N...

  Stage One - squaring off the left end Well, made a start on Project Pew today. Squared off the left end, which will eventually be supported by a bracket on the end wall of the conservatory. This was done with a handsaw to minimise any further butchery to the already beleagured old thing - the original owner of the chapel saw fit to try and 'remove' the pews by using a chainsaw - the results were largely not pretty. Doing this the old-fashioned way was 'hard collar' as my dad used to say. He would also not have been particularly approving of the quality of the excision. But then I'm not the woodworker the old man was; although I could have gone to B&Q to get a fresh saw, rather than make do with the tired one I actually used - you can't sharpen modern saws, just have to bin the bloody things when they lose their edge. Not an excuse, but there you go. The next step is to get the pew-end onto the right side of it. This will probably be less physical effort, b...

  The pew in its current state We have recently taken delivery of this old pew, which came out of James' & Leo's place, well at least the chapel adjoining their house; a pretty impressive space in the early stages of renovation and alteration.  Like all old chapel pews round here, it is constructed out of some amazing woods: mostly Yellow and Pitch Pine, which originally came back as ballast on the returning slate-carrying ships from America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These pews were all set at an angle to better face the pulpit, as the chapel has a squarer footprint than most. I'm going to square off the end at the left in the picture, but keep the angled end as is. The plan is to fit it into our conservatory opposite the kitchen door. At nearly two metres long it is nearly a third the length of the conservatory, but as it is only about nineteen inches deep front to back, it shouldn't look out of place or too large for the space. I've got it do...

  Welsh (natürlich) Lamb - tonight's fare A short break from ranting and railing at the world's utter ridiculousness, disparity and unfairness. If I did Instagram, I suppose this would constitute the usual, clichéd food-I-am-about-to-eat post. What the heck - it makes a change from politics. Can't be bad. By the way - it's a half-shoulder cooked on a trivet of rosemary and three bulbs of garlic split into cloves, barded with anchovy, doused in olive oil and herbs and, well, roasted! The spuds are Maris Piper, par-boiled and roughened before sticking them in the pan with the joint, then doused with more olive oil. Simple as pie and very tasty. Da iawn.

    I quote: '...maternity provision is sufficiently generous...' - yet another beauty of a phrase from our gloriously shameless NonGovernment®. We are currently experiencing a viral backlash that is entirely the NonGovernment®'s fault and all they can say is that new mothers' maternity leave is adequate. The implied largesse staggers in its pomposity and arrogance. Whose bloody money is it anyway? We are fast approaching economic and societal meltdown: if the furlough scheme ends as planned amid further lockdown and restriction of economic activity and, if the NonGovernment® manage to crash us out of the EU as they seem intent on so doing, the economy will tank - taking down everyone but the rich; make no mistake, their wealth is hedged; yours is precariously balanced against the economic performance of the country. The decision and the fate of most of us rests in the hands of this NonGovernment®. The wherewithal to weather this storm is there, the money and resources ...

    A slightly surreal day yesterday on the domestic front, featuring an accidental injury to the oldest member of the family, a semi-abortive visit from another family-member which was cut short due to the above and a virtual concert in the dining room. I won't dwell on the detail of the accident - the injuries were not life-threatening, merely painful and will be so for some time. The virtual concert was a streamed event: Andy Fairweather-Low and The Low Riders; which went down rather well with the assembled crowd of two in the aforesaid venue. Judged by the standards of the NonGovernment®'s shenanegins I would class it an ordinary sort of day. The news that the EU are considering legal action against the UK over Brexit or that the NonGovernment® ran out the new Covid laws without first even bothering to inform Parliament, causing the Speaker of the House to issue bollockings to the woeful Matt Hancock, who was placed yet again conveniently in the firing line, came as no sur...

The Great Leader of the NonGovernment® - Guardian front page, today The rhetorical rule of three takes yet another hammering from the NonGovernment® in the form of their latest Covid-slogan: HANDS FACE SPACE. I feel we could ultimately be able to produce a very large compendium of these tri-phrasal utterances, as the NonGovernment®'s dismal efforts thus far to deal with the pandemic in the UK lead one to believe we're very much in it for the long haul. With the depressing news of drug trials being stalled on safety grounds, yet another set of rules for the English to follow and rising numbers of infections throughout, I'm glad I live in Wales. However, we too can't afford complacency as we are flooded with tourists at this time of the year, mostly from across the border. Obviously all visitors are welcome; a very large slice of our economy depends on tourism; but there has been so much evidence of people simply ignoring the advice regarding social distancing, e...

Serifos - Image   ©The Guardian Way back in the mists of antiquity, well 1979 to be exact, a pair of young travellers from Birmingham decided to embark on their first foreign adventure. It was me & Jane actually. Having decided that Greece was to be our destination for a variety of reasons and being in possession of a brand-new credit card, I went and blew the entire credit limit on two return flights to Athens; BA scheduled flights no less. From bloody Heathrow. Which meant the biggest and most painful part of the journey was getting down to the capital and across to the airport by train and tube. Which took hours. The plane we flew on was a TriStar, which was very commodious, being of the wide-ish-bodied long-haul variety of tube with wings. So far so good. My sister Karen and her husband George, who were old hands at travel, particularly to the Med and the Aegean, Ionian etc.; suggested that we just get a taxi from Athens airport to Omonia Square in the centre of th...

All gone - aftermath of a very fine lunch in Corfu, 2015 - © Kel Harvey Just sifting through the rest of this weekends Financial Times - there is an excellent article on the Wirecard affair by the man at the centre of the investigations, Dan McCrum, which I recommend; as it shows just how precarious investigative journalism can be for the journalists themselves and how, through  telling and doubling down repeatedly on a big enough lie, the protagonists led a large, fantasy business for twenty years, involving billions of Euros of debt and the unknowing complicity of governments and markets. A significant proportion of Wirecard's business simply didn't exist. From one fishy tale to another: Rowley Leigh's Recipe page in the same bit of the paper. Baked sea bass with plum and star anise compote, the list of ingredients of which contains such overpowering flavours it would better suit some very well hung game. I ask you; the king of fish plonked on top of what appears...

Image © Elsewhere Just been into Bangor to pick Jane up from work. I've acquired yet another rescued film camera in the form of a Canon EOS 650. Everything seemed to be working OK, so last night I loaded up a roll of Fomapan 400 to run through and test the thing. Mostly random shots around our garden and distant landscape stuff looking out to the mountains, I took the Canon into town. While I was waiting for Jane to lock up the shop, I took a few pictures from the car window - towards Debenhams' store and up towards the town clock in the square. The thing that struck me most about what I was framing, was the surveillance cameras. Bangor has loads of the things, both in the centre and on the roads in and out of town. Although Bangor is a city, having one of the principal Welsh cathedrals at its heart, anyone that knows the place is well aware of just how small the place is. It's population normally doubles when the University is in session; it's students forming 50...