Observations from a Hill

  Exhibition Case of Birmingham-made Pens - image ©The Pen Museum   A further recent addition to my continuing descent down the rabbit hole of retro-analogue-ishness is a brand-new fountain pen. Nothing exotic or expensive, just a basic Parker cartridge pen. I've tried replacing my long-lost fountain pens in the past, but none of the newly purchased pens would ever write decently. Enter my latest attempt; the Parker Jotter, only £7.75 online and it writes perfectly: no skipping, scratching or splatter. I have started using it for note taking and making up the cards in the Zettelkasten. It has been a re-introduction to actual handwriting, a personal skill that had all but atrophied over the years of keyboard use and scrappy note taking in biro. I can't say my handwriting was ever very pretty; I think our generation was the first where the skill wasn't really valued at school. If you can, look at a sample of the writing from anyone born and schooled between the wars; my Dad f...

    At last the Atlantic squall that's hammered us over the last couple of days has passed over, some respite from the battering, at least till the next one, which arrives tomorrow. I took the opportunity to get up on the studio roof and patch up the apex with the few remaining bits of roofing-felt I had lying around. Whether this will temporarily stem the leaks I don't know, but I think that at least it will mitigate the worst: anyway, I'll certainly know by tomorrow night. It's a big roof and catches a lot of water. I need to get the place fairly dry and secure so that I can get on with using it for its intended purpose as a studio workshop/store/recreation space; rather than simply an enormous dumping ground for stuff being moved, in endless rotation, from either the house, the cottage or the garden shed. This place is a logistical nightmare. Add in the autumn storms we seem to be inheriting from across the water pretty much every year now and it can be a right royal...

Nobby Stiles  

  Cartoon - ©Mankoff   Why is it that the only common sense written about the pandemic in this country seems to come from one general circulation newspaper (Private Eye notwithstanding, Joe!): The Guardian? Surely the time for partisan politics is over, at least for the duration of the current crisis. We need to start addressing this thing rationally through reasoned, scientific analysis and not through the arse-end of a balance sheet (cf spreadsheets, this blog, passim). Two posts in today's Grauniad (sic, in case you don't know the reference) are obvious stand-outs for anger at the current political response to our present, sorry situation. The first piece is by Julian Tang, who points out that all the evidence thus far proves this virus to be airborne and that there have been no proven infections via surface contact as yet, although as he says this is not proof that this is not a vector. However, the government's response thus far has centred primarily around this mo...

Initial Drawing - actually to scale, shock horror...     15:30, 29th October 2020 . It's almost dark, the wind's howling and it's tipping down. It would seem that the latest spent hurricane is making its way across the north-west: the garden's taking a right hammering again, and the leaks in the studio roof are a pain - first fine day, I'll be back up there with felt, nails and black goo to try and staunch the blighters before we get another cast off storm from across the Atlantic. On the bright side, though I've been planning the kitchen layout for the cottage next door. I've stripped out the existing work surface and am ready to pull out the old sink unit, as soon as its replacement arrives. I'm going for a solid beech; well, what passes for solid,  work surface: it's actually a glued block construction, but at least it's all real timber and not particle board, so it should look good. The sink will be a drop-in bowl type with a freestanding mix...

  Your Humble Author, somewhat younger... I can't remember exactly the year these were taken, but at a guess around 1970, in Clive's front room in Laxey Road. In the picture below is Mr. Hill himself, a-tuning his instrument, the Hofner bass that came from a secondhand shop at not a great deal of money and was first heard amplified through our old mono radiogram by my disconnecting the leads from the tone-arm and taping wires to connect to the lead on the bass - happy bloody days and so much to look forward to... CBH - the bass player...

  Under Glass - Kel Harvey   Contact Photography used to exist as an entity about thirty-five years ago around here and for whom I designed their stationery and business cards, but I've not heard anything of them for many years. Back to that in a minute. I've decided to try and float the idea of a community photography project - something we did in Bangor decades ago, even getting to the point of building a darkroom and holding classes in photography. To this end, I've started a Patreon. I've no idea  how any of this really works, so it's a bit of a shot in the dark. If something comes out of it, all the better. As I'm tied up with the cottage renovations at the minute, I aim to get moving with the project in the New Year, probably early spring. I've decided that it's working title will be Contact Photography as the phrase kind of encapsulates the community aspect of it's aims. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I love the crossover between the an...

  The Finished Article Another domestically-orientated post today (if I start on politics, it's going to get very sweary, so I'm playing it cool again). Finally finished assembling the table saw I got from Leo last week. Construction was a fiddly affair, not helped by the instruction leaflet having exceedingly tiny print. I would have had no problems twenty years ago, but even with reading glasses, it was a squint. Everything plodded along reasonably well with the assembly of the main part of the machine; myriad nuts and bolts, washers plain and spring, etc., etc. Having got the bulk of it together, it was time to assemble the stand - easy looking job; a few steel pressings, captive nuts and bolts - except complacency had set in and assumptions made about the symmetry of the device. At this point, in my mind, the ditching of the intructions seemed reasonable, faced with a straightforward finish to the job - after all, the hard work was done. Until I came to locate the apparentl...

Ceiling and Gable Cladding Our end cottage: Bank's Cottage, is getting closer to being finished, so not quite 'Unspoilt by Progress', the old Bank's Brewery slogan being a long-standing joke in our family; a paper sign used to hang on the old almost-outside-loo at one of Jane's parent's houses in Brum with the epithet on. I've finally finished off the woodwork on the ceiling that I put in earlier this year and panelled the upper part of the gable end above the bookshelf. It's made a hell of a difference in temperature, both summer and winter, and keeps the wind noise down during bad weather. It looks so much better, too. The last bits above the purlin in the picture below, were a complete sod to do; with much measurement, cutting and cursing in the process. Still, I think it's worth the effort. Hoping to get the place up and running by December. Ceiling, showing the Centre Hatch  

Pen Lleyn - Kel Harvey   The straight path is no path. Time, fixed by the living, All memory, evanescent; Ceases at the ceasing.  

  Virus Replication by YK Times, Wikimedia Well, the flu jab I had yesterday has suddenly conspired to give me the aches and a fuzzy head this afternoon. Up till about an hour ago I hadn't noticed much at all outside the usual sore arm at the site of the injection. Add to this the fact I've been awake since God-knows-what-o'clock this morning with the change back to GMT, I'm feeling pretty wiped just at the minute. Still, it's better than getting the flu itself, although having said that, I've only ever had the real thing once in my life; and once was most definitely enough. It's difficult to describe how nasty the disease really can be to someone who's never had it; and it really annoys when someone with a bit of a cold says they're feeling flu-ey. The only correct answer to that is '...if you're fit enough to think and to say that, you ain't got it!'. It's the same with post-viral fatigue, not so many years ago dismissed as yupp...

Marie Antoinette     Once again, the Tories show their true colours by voting down Labour's proposal to help children and their families through the difficulties of a Covid-lockdown winter by 322 votes to 261 - a damningly large margin. Meanwhile, the world's billionaires have had a corking time during the pandemic so far, swelling their combined wealth with the largest percentage increase since the last global crisis of 2008/9. In the US tech sector alone, their year on year increase from 2019 was over $250 billion. Whilst millions of people are being forced closer to and beyond the breadline - in the developed world - the fat cats meanwhile keep on soaking up the money that the rest of the us so badly need and our government insists is in such short supply. That  they can be so crass and insensitive to the needs of the most vulnerable in the society they supposedly have a duty of care towards is hardly surprising; but utterly indefensible, nevertheless. Is there a plan...

  Passivhaus - image ©Passivhaus Institut Sonia Sodha, writing in yesterday's Guardian, makes a good case for properly affordable and social housing to turn the tide of property-value inflation and the gradual eroding-to-nothing of the social housing sector. I'm not personally averse to home ownership - we, or at least the bank - own ours; but I am averse to a housing market where value inflation has pushed a very large number of people who would otherwise choose to buy out of the market altogether. And if the kind of widely available decent social housing stock that we in this country used to build was currently available, people would not be forced to rent in a similarly inflated private sector. Post-Thatcher, the pipe dream of home ownership for all in a free and pretty loosely regulated market has all but evaporated; killed by the rise in inequality, hoarding of wealth and a reluctance on the part of successive governments to interfere in the markets. The mantra of build, b...

The Carneddau & The Glyders from Pentir - Kel Harvey     Autumn's here and we've had a pretty raw end to the summer as yesterday's posts testify; and to cap it all, from 18:00 tomorrow, we're back in lockdown. A sensible move I approve of and I'm glad I live on this side of the Dyke, as things are markedly less confused about the pandemic in Wales than they are in England. Mark Drakeford is doing a solid, steady job as our First Minister whilst not politicking at a time of national crisis: a certain sign of someone whose political career is secondary to his political role; a distinction lost on so many so-called leaders, whose ambition far outstrips their ability or indeed will to govern with integrity. We shan't mind the two weeks of lockdown as we're fortunate enough to have the space for it not to be an issue. But we've seen the boys for the last time for the duration; shared birthday plans have been put on hold and our friends in Gerlan are still...

The Tail End, Another Year Passes - Kel Harvey  

  Nant Ffrancon - Kel Harvey A Valley Town For Al Bonc A valley town cleaves to it's own In memory of it's lost, The echoes of our voices on the wind. A valley town grieves for it's own In memory of it's past; The rain and the wind disinterested,   And unmoved by our reflections; Memory itself untouched, Meditations unmediated; Humbled, we go our ways alone In memory of our loss, The hard path our present: memory itself. Kel Harvey

    Alun Owen's funeral today at Eglwys Glanogwen. As expected it was very well attended. Family, close friends, workmates and just about anyone in the village and beyond who knew him. Due to the Covid restrictions the church itself had just the family and close friends within, but the area outside was full, right down the drive and out onto Ogwen Terrace. After the service, the cortege processed down the High St., flanked by pupils from Ysgol Dyffryn Ogwen on both sides of the street at the Bangor end of the village. A sad day: a much-loved bloke taken far too young.

The book with a copy of Chamberlain's 'A Rope of Vines'     A week or so ago, whilst digging around and looking for information on my village about which to write, I chanced upon someone of whom I have to admit I was shamefully hitherto unaware. Either that or equally shamefully, some previous knowledge had somehow escaped through the cracks of memory only to evaporate for good. For my part, though, some mitigation lies in the knowledge that I was only sixteen when this person died, and living in Birmingham, not Rachub. The person in question is Brenda Chamberlain, artist and writer, born in Bangor, trained in London; who lived in the cottage at the top of the field behind our house, just by the mountain gate, between 1936 and 1947; before leaving to live on Ynys Enlli, her marriage to artist-craftsman John Petts have recently broken up. In the years they lived in Rachub, the two formed The Caseg Press and published a series of six broadsheets, encouraged and helped by Alun...

Image - ©Elsewhere     This year marks the one-hundredth birthday of the Theremin, that stalwart of 50's science fiction B-movie soundtracks with its ethereal keening usually prefacing some sort of jump-cut to the monster, alien or other such scary thing's entrance; they themselves were usually McCarthy-era cinematic ciphers for the Russians. Which, as it turns out, was sort of apposite to the story of the device's invention, in a roundabout way. The Theremin is a musical instrument that requires no physical touch from the musician playing it, instead relying on gestures varying the relative proximity of the players' hands to two antennae on the device. The players' dominant hand controls pitch and the other volume or swell. It works in much the same way as a proximity detector does; sensors in use across industry to give feedback to control systems on production lines, for instance. It was invented in Russia by Lev Sergeyevich Termen, known in the West as Leon Ther...

What, Me Worry...? I said yesterday that I wasn't going to post anything Boris-themed for a while, but an exclusive  published by the Daily Mirror online last night and updated first thing this morning let the brakes off that one. Looks like he's had enough of trying and failing to be a statesman and aims to resign in six months time. But not before he's 'sorted' Brexit. I tend to read this as code for 'I don't want my carefully crafted plan to get shafted by my successor, before I get my hands on the cash.' I wrote on July 26th. how the vultures were circling over an impending no-deal Brexit and yesterday that those same vultures had even started to pick at the carcass of our economy in advance. It seems that Boris is simply unable to live on his £150,402 salary, as I wrote in September (Get a Grip, man). If he wants his latest offspring to follow in his footsteps and attend Eton College, he will have to stump up £212,500 over the five years his son wil...

Image - ©Reuters     I promise this will be the last post on this theme for a little while; but honestly, we do live in peculiar and none-too-pleasant times. However, our current circumstances are at least serving to emphasise pre-existing inequalities and to highlight what is fundamentally amiss with politics, governments and economies. The two key things facing us, Covid and Brexit, have thrown a bloody great spotlight on the divisions between the haves and the have-nots. Those at the bottom of the heap financially are being disproportionately affected by further lockdowns, employees by redundancy and small businesses by loss of trade and much reduced business support packages. The inequalities are further being exacerbated by the bizarrely partisan interpretation and enforcement of the lockdown policy, hitting northern cities the hardest. To add insult to injury there have been different levels  of imposition of the rules between one city and the next despite both bein...

In God We Trust, but banks?     All countries - that's all countries - are in debt. Fact. As of 2015, that debt was $59.7 trillion. So if countries, governments; don't owe each other, just who holds the paper on these debts? Simple answer: banks. For instance, and I think some might find this weird - I know I do - Japan's had the largest part of its national debt held by its own central bank. Am I alone in finding that a bit circular? Similarly, China; its debt the charge of both some domestic banks and tellingly, mostly by the state-owned banks. This obtains world-wide. We are being told that the debt that we could rack up due to the Covid pandemic, if we continue to support businesses and individuals whose livelihoods are being ruined through no fault of their own, is simply unsupportable. How on earth can we countenance a system's continuance where debt is simultaneously owed and owned by effectively the same entities? It is simply nonsense. When the world is on a wa...

Nurses working in a South African COVID-19 clinic, based on a train, which travels to reach different communities. image - EPA-EFE taken from The Conversation article     There are many criticisms that one could level at Boris Johnson; his self-importance, inability to see a project through from start to finish, or in the case of Covid, simply exhibit a consistent approach from week to week. That he is a hypocrite with a slender grasp of reality and a willingness to say whatever is momentarily expedient to his current predicament, is evidenced for all, that are willing, to see. His underlying prejudices are a matter of public record, for him an unfortunate side-effect of his being a 'journalist'; his words and opinions are enshrined in the man's own columns for anyone to read. That some of those opinions are deeply racist has been much reported and his Telegraph columns quoted at length by many commentators. I won't bother re-airing the phrases he used, offensive a...

Image pinched appropriately, from the Adam Smith Institute - ©FreeForAll     So test track and trace's 'success' rate has nosedived again. The 'app': the one that appears to be a wraparound 'front-end' to the system-native ones offered by Apple and Google and obviously cobbled together by someone having failed to get to grips with the APIs of either, initially sent out apparent warnings of Covid contacts that were totally spurious, panicking members of the public into thinking they might be infected, when it was just an un-trapped message from the system. Programming 101 dictates that it should really have had a modicum of stress-testing before release, obviating the worry it gave vulnerable people already tested to the limit by the pandemic and its collateral effects; yet another frame in the increasingly exasperating disaster movie that is the Government's performance this year; on Covid, Brexit and well, everything they actually try to do, really. As ...

Image - ©Swatch Sometimes good ideas and the products that follow from them simply arrive at the wrong moment in time, others quite the opposite. Two such ideas in quite different spheres, both emerged out of crises in their parent markets in an attempt to rescue their respective businesses. The first of these critical responses was that of Swatch, the Swiss watch company founded in 1983 by Nicolas Hayek. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s the watch market was moving away from the traditional mechanical watch toward the complete adoption, or so it seemed at the time, of the cheaper and more accurate quartz watches issuing from Japan. By the early '80's, the Swiss watch industry was in a state of panic as its market share plummeted. Hayek founded Swatch to address this imbalance; the name is a contraction of 'Second Watch', as the company envisaged that their customer base would adopt these cheaper, electronic watches as daily wearers, alongside their more expensiv...

  © Elsewhere   The World-Wide-Web, that ubiquitous subset of the internet, truly is a vast, albeit virtual space, comprising around 1.8 billion resolvable hostnames [read: web sites]. It all started with just the one web site in 1991, hosted by Tim Berners-Lee, the web's inventor; on a Next cube computer at CERN in Switzerland. By the time we had our first dial-up in our office in 1993, there were only 130 websites out there in the entire of cyberspace, with as I've said before, no method or tool with which to search and find stuff, but with only 130 sites, knowing where each of them was located was easy enough. Within twelve months, Yahoo had arrived and the number of web sites had reached nearly three thousand. By the time Google appeared in 1998, the numbers were up to about two and half million. The next ten years saw the numbers grow rapidly, to over one hundred and seventy-two million. The amount of data sloshing around the planet today is estimated to be around forty t...

  Just a little addition to the two spreadsheet articles [October 9th & 10th ] I posted. The Dilbert cartoon above very succinctly encapsulates the issue of spreadsheet error; but as an article in The Register points out, the problem is as much to do with the capabilities of the person or persons involved in the setting up of systems as it is the type of system itself; and neither is it exclusive to spreadsheets. The Reg article references a fairly typical commercial scenario, echoed in the Dilbert cartoon below. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Couple it with stubborn egotism and you're in for a rough ride. A self-diagnosing system at least lets the operator know they're writing garbage before it's too late and the cover-ups start.  

  Image - © Owlcation   Something I read in yesterday's Guardian - as so often, in the Journal;  Andy Beckett, writing on the ongoing Tory assault on UK culture and the arts says that the government exhibits a somewhat confused state in simultaneously promoting racial inclusivity whilst engaging in "the war on woke." To quote Beckett direct: 'Johnson has spent his political career sounding both liberal and reactionary, often in the same sentence, and generally getting away with it.' The truth in this observation is self-evident and obviously also holds for President Trump, another leader who doesn't let truth or logic get in the way of a good bluster or self-promotion. In both cases, for their target audiences they can do or say little wrong, despite their lying, dissembling and self-contradiction being out there in neon lights for anyone awake and of a mind to see. Has this always been the case with politicians? Didn't the truth actually used to feature i...

Migrant Mother - Dorothea Lange, 1936     Something made me think of writing a bit about American photography. Many fine books and thousands of articles have been written about the subject, often by the practitioners themselves. I started thinking, what constitutes the archetypal American photograph? The f.64 Group? Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift and Willard Van Dyke trying to establish a purer form of photography, eschewing for instance pictorialist attempts to 'emulate' the 'finer arts'. Ansel Adams' Yosemite images alone; photographs as magnificent in scale, tone and detail as their so American subject - surely a candidate? How about the Farm Securities Administration photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee? Lange's Migrant Mother stands practically alone as the image that represents the plight of the dustbowl migrants; surely a nomination? O. Winston Link's astonishing photo...

 I wrote about the tragic death of a workmate - Alun Owen. Another lad from work started a fundraiser for the family a day or so ago. The link's here.

Image - Shutterstock     Yesterday I outlined the basic problems with spreadsheets and the very real impact they have had over the last forty years, good and bad. The issue of the Covid tests is a real-world example of over-reliance on tools that have long been suborned for tasks they were never designed for, nor capable of doing, reliably. There was at one time however, a spreadsheet-like application that not only overcame these limitations of the standard spreadsheet, but gave it powerful and most importantly reliable predictive modelling facilities customisable to companies and institutions from the small to the very large. Its key feature was that it dynamically scanned the model as it was constructed, any errors by the operator being flagged in real-time. It also had the singular ability to have a complete sheet embedded in a single cell of another sheet; the possibilities for use practically infinite. It was produced here in North Wales by the company run by the former c...