Observations from a Hill

  Just a quick update on the kitchen project: the picture is testimony to the fact that you can never have enough clamps, no matter what. A shout out to Lidl for the ratchet clamps I'm using here; £4.99 for two medium sized and two tiny clamps: they're good quality, assembled in Germany and at that price unbeatable.  The piece I'm working on here is the support for the left-hand side of the unit, including the support for the sink bowl. There'll be two hidden access hatches under the sink so I can reach all the plumbing as necessary. Just starting to lay the first one at the bottom of the picture. I've also been trying to get my tools organised; putting another shelf up for the honing setup I made yesterday for sharpening chisels, plane irons, etc. I came across a completely different technique for honing blades than the one I knew: much simpler, no jig and better results: even my cheap Magnussen chisels come up razor sharp. I have to say I'm really enjoying the...

It strikes me that the government is rapidly losing its audience in the tragicomic drama that is Covid-19. Not only its audience but its stage crew; with a rebellion building from the back benches [various posts, this blog passim] via the 1922 Committee. The Cabinet's vacillations between doing the right thing, on the one hand epidemiologically and on the other to assuage the concerns of those in business and their employees, now simply looks from the outside like rabbit-stuck-in-a-headlight territory. Rather than sticking with a plan for either and seeing the thing through until the vaccines are out there in the wild, they're stuck forever in a feedback loop of indecision, losing the faith of all sections of the theatre's audience simultaneously. Trump has learned to his electoral cost the folly of theatre gone wrong; Johnson really needs to win over his own theatre before the catcalls start and the rotten tomatoes begin to rain down on his sorry cast from the stalls, circ...

  I've carried a pocket knife of some sort practically all my life.  I honestly don't know how people who don't, get by. By 'pocket knife' I'm referring solely to folding knives of one sort or another - jack knives, pen knives, etc. I just find them an essential tool for daily life. The picture shows some of the more traditional ones I own: left to right, an Opinel No. 8 I've had for over thirty years, showing considerable wear and tear. It was once lost in the garden at Brynbella Cottage in the mid-nineties, turning up rusty as hell and the blade seized in the handle. But a good clean and oil revealed that, although blemished, the steel was as good as ever and in common with all Opinels, when properly sharpened, you can shave with them. Second is an Opinel No.9, recently purchased which has seen no serious use yet. Next up, my oldest and most treasured knife: an army-issue knife/can-opener by Taylor of Sheffield from 1943, which bears the military Broadarro...

It's difficult to know where to look or how to pitch things at the moment. England's back in lockdown, at least until - for some areas, possibly not - the Xmas un-lockdown; which will no doubt see a New Year spike in Covid infections, blah, blah, etc. followed inevitably by yet further locking down, und so weiter, ac yn y blaen... Here in Wales, it looks as if we're back in some  kind of restrictive regime again from a week Friday. It wouldn't be so bad if the reported statistics we're getting daily were even vaguely consistent. One day we're told one thing, the next the opposite. Up, down, plateauing; ding, dong bell. We're just keeping our heads down until after Xmas and hope that someone, somewhere, hopefully with a modicum of authority and some degree of appropriate knowledge and expertise will just let us know what the bloody hell is actually going on. I'll be back in my workshop tomorrow; on my tod with Radio 4 and a load of sawdust. Let us know wh...

Birmingham: Britain's second city; despite more north-westerly claims to the title. But whereas one of those cities, Manchester, has been on the ascendant in recent times due to an increased media presence and a thriving University; poor old Birmingham, which was looking so promising recently: remodelling the much-maligned 1960s town centre, with its vehicle-centric, brutalist architectural vision of a 'modern' city centre; has seen a sudden, rapid decline in it's fortunes. This has been widely commented on in the media the last week or so and the closure of John Lewis' flagship store stands testimony to the very thing that was wrong with the City's recent regeneration: putting all of it's eggs in the corporate retail basket and mortgaging itself to the hilt with vanity projects. After the pandemic hit, there was no backstop to fill the gap; nothing. With hospitality in free fall and retail on its knees, there is nothing left to pay the bills. Sad though thi...

  Moving on from yesterday's post about Lo-Fi audio and music to Lo-Fi image making. Lomography is by now an established movement in photography, using usually cheap and nasty film cameras to produce images that have what would have been previously considered faults such as image and colour distortions; akin to the noise and distortion of Lo-Fi audio gear: the beauty being in the unpredictable nature of the resulting images just as it is with sounds produced on old gear. It all started back in 1992 in Vienna, with a bunch of students and the Lomo LC-A camera; a Russian device of dubious quality that was essentially a cheap knock-off of a Cosina CX-1. The nature of its poor optics meant that images were oddly coloured and often soft-focussed [read: blurred], but rather than considering these images flawed, the group took their visual eccentricities and ran with them to produce their own brand of photography. As with the Japanese Provoke group of the '60's, which I've men...

Lo-Fi really is a thing: I love it. During the 1980's, the constant push in music was for more and more fidelity, with technical developments mostly happening within the digital domain: crystal-clear audio, high headroom and frequency response ranging from nausea-inducing sub-bass to a top-end to frighten the bejeezus out of bats. This was the future. That was then, this is now. The sterility of the pure, digital approach under its own terms of reference sowed the seeds for it's own stagnation and the return to the noisy, warmly distorted retro world of the Lo-Fi. In truth, the love of the edgy un-pristine never really left the house; all through the rise of the digital era, artists and producers were using sampled sound; either digital, using nascent technologies like the Fairlight, or artists like Holger Czukay drawing on the traditions of Musique Concrete and Stockhausen, using tape, short-wave radio, etc. to create those dredged-up Lo-Fi textures that hark bark and connect ...

  Checked out how the main bits of the kitchen thing went together by laying it all up in the conservatory, this afternoon. All the heights are right and everything's square and true at last, after a couple of lapses of concentration had led me to have to execute frantic remedial work. Always happens when you don't measure and square for one last time before committing to glue and screws. The underside of the sink will be boxed in with a similar plinth, but probably less complex as it won't be taking the load that the other end will: I'll be hiding the plumbing behind it anyway. There'll be some kind of maintenance access for the inevitable watery nonsense: few bits of plumbing hold out for ever and I don't see me changing out this unit in the future; it's meant to be a permanent fixture of the kitchen. This is what I should have done when we first renovated the place. On the right-hand cupboard/plinth I've just got to add a front piece (just under top) ...

This morning felt like the first proper Winter day so far, sharp and sunny as we headed into Bangor first thing. At the end of the lane we disturbed the pair of collared doves that roost somewhere close by and are often to be seen in the scrubby little oak that sits by the side of the High St. opposite our lane. The garden birds are in full tilt mode at the feeder, the area outside our veranda more like like Heathrow in full swing than a garden, with squadrons of small feathery things taking turn - and sometimes not - to peck at the seeds; all wastage being hoovered up by the rat that lives in the hedges opposite, nothing going to waste.  The hedgehogs are still around, although I guess this drop in temperature will see them in hibernation soon enough. While being most definitely a summer person, I do appreciate this particular time of transition, especially as these days, the Autumn seems to consist mainly of endless rain and gale-force winds: the season of mellow fruitfulness is...

It looks like we're back to Big Bozza's Big Gestures™ again. With the PM self-isolating, he can now participate in PMQ's and other parliamentary activities via Zoom, safe in the knowledge that he's always got a teleprompter and advisors in his ears to give him a realtime heads-up on stuff he really can't be arsed to read up on himself; ensuring the kind of flawless, statesmanlike performance he so wishes he could produce in the actual, real world. Has no other bugger noticed this? In the house in recent months, he has waffled, fuffled and harrumphed his way through any such proceedings, without a shred of coherency: his lack of direct support in debate glaringly obvious. Now! Here's Bozza! Sharp as a tack and up to the task of actually answering questions. Do they think we came down with the last shower of rain? Anyway; the newest crop of Big Bozza's Big Gestures™: Defence spending up; figures are moot but very large and projects include a centre dedicated t...

The side cupboard base Have done a little more to the kitchen project today - we were going to go out to the Vic for lunch, but it was closed when we got there: I guess they didn't think it worth re-opening until the English lockdown has ended and the tourists return. A mixed blessing I know, what with the risk of the further spread of Covid-19, but we really do need the trade around here. I got the floor of the cupboard put in and edged the front of it with a bull-nosed strip of the old pitch pine from James and Leo's chapel, glued and pegged with beechwood for strength; I'm putting in a few such strips to contrast with the white of the pine and the beech top. it also makes for  tougher exposed edges and should wear pretty well: it is well over a hundred years old after all and hasn't done so bad thus far. Detail below right.   This is all taking me rather longer than it would have my old man, but as I've said before, I'm resurrecting skills I never had in the ...

Getting There... Just a short update on the woodworking front. The cupboard/right support for the kitchen top is nearly done. You can see the interlocking bits that will allow the top to drop onto the base and be held firmly with the minimum of extra fixings. Shelves to go in next, then onto the left-hand side of the thing. A bit of a beast to make but it will be well solid.

George Monbiot has been banging on about the apparent misappropriation of public money by the government since the start of the Covid crisis. He tweeted yesterday morning about the publication of the National Audit Office's Report into their investigation of just that. So I downloaded the documents to cast an eye over them. Admittedly, the document available is a tad thin, but one quoted example stands out for me: Case Study 3 [Part Three, page 35 of the study]; Ayanda Capital Ltd. They were awarded without competitive tender, a contract for £252.5 million on the 29th of April this year. The Daily Telegraph voiced disquiet over this in their issue of the 6th of July. Ayanda Capital Ltd., which they [the Telegraph] describe as '...Investor Tim [Timothy Piers Horlick] Horlick's...small family investment firm with no known history in the industry...', actually has only two company officers: Horlick and one Nathan Philip Engelbrecht, whose directorial portfolio is catholic,...

  The Right Hand End Offered Up... I finished the main assembly of the right hand end of the kitchen unit this afternoon and offered it up to the under-top frame - the right way up to gauge how it will sit - and the corner tenons dropped in nicely. When I've finished with this side, it will take the form of a freestanding, open-fronted box with shelf space for a few pans. The top's under-frame will be coach-bolted to the floor supports at either end, with the rear edge fixed to 2"x2" support rails on two walls. The aim is to make it as heavy and movement-free as possible - a kitchen worktop needs to be as solid as a workbench - but also make the whole thing demountable; unlike the previous, rather more crude affair I built and have now binned [it did a decent few years service, though].  For once, I'm trying to get everything prefabricated in the workshop, now I've got a decent amount of workspace, thanks to the recently-liberated garden studio; also having th...

'Empire' - Andy Warhol Public Art: always controversial if it strays beyond the conventional and usually sculptural personal encomiums of the great and the good. Even when applied prosaically, pleasing all of the people all of the time is just never going to happen. Sometimes, attempts at conventional representation of the subject of a commemorative piece just go horribly astray: think Ronaldo; or rather, don't. Sometimes, likeness is ephemeral: if the subject, say Winston Churchill, is held to be a national icon, typecast cliché is inevitable: hat, cigar, V for victory, etc. Better then to take a more abstracted view; what did the person commemorated do, achieve? A likeness of an historical figure, even of relatively recent times, is a likeness out of time, remembered by no-one living. Better to express what they represented and their legacy to the currently living. Much has been said this week about Maggi Hambling's sculpture to commemorate Mary Wollstonecraft. That i...

Cutting The Open Corner Tenons I started work on the right-hand base/cupboard frame for the cottage kitchen worktop today. As you can see from the pic above, I've had to knock up a jury-rigged top extension so that the WorkMate can accommodate the top's framework. I've got a load of spare old melamine kitchen unit stuff knocking round, so I used a couple of the doors held together with battens screwed to the underside. I just clamped the thing to the WorkMate to stop it sliding about. Like the temporary wood vice I spoke about, I just improvise around whatever bit of kit I don't yet possess. I was quite pleased with today's progress and my previous comments about the wonder of a decent tenon saw still stand: I managed to cut the corner tenons pretty much straight off the bat; one needed a bit of chisel work, the other one went straight in. I've got bigger problems with the appalling state of the kiln-dryed timber: trying to find a straight piece [even 2x2!] is a...

Awful weather here this afternoon; yet another named-storm remnant from across the Atlantic: further sign still of the damage we have done to the climate of our planet over the generations. Simon Kuper was reflecting in his column in this weekend's Financial Times that after all the immediate stuff that the current generation of youth are having to face: Covid, Brexit, etc., are sorted one way or the other; they will still eventually be facing up to the ultimate challenge that is the unfortunate legacy of industrial revolutions, corporate capitalism and unregulated growth: climate change. Our rapidly changing weather patterns seem to bear out that gloomy prospect. Kuper's piece focusses on those 'named' generations post Second World War; boomers, X-ers, etc.; framing his discourse within the disparate experiences, opportunities and problems afforded to each. His take is that we shifted from a politics of dealing with existential threat to a 'cult of personality'...

  FT Strapline - got there first, guys! cf. Yesterday's post - I think I got in ahead of the press with this one! ;0)

  The Temporary De-vice Just a short post for now as I’m typing it on my iPhone: my Macbook is currently updating to MacOS Big Sur. The usual trepidation’s apply with a major update, but fingers crossed... Above is a picture of an experiment I tried this afternoon: a jury-rigged temporary wood vice made of a couple of pieces of scrap 2”x2” pine, two short lengths of 12mm dowel and two J-clamps. Just to test it out I cut the saddle of a through-mortise joint in it - cutting down the grain being a good test for slippage. It worked a treat, so I’m going to cut a neater piece for the front jaw and reinforce it with angle iron to prevent its bowing under pressure. I’ve got a couple of forged holdfasts on the way, so I’ll probably incorporate them to replace the more cumbersome to use J-clamps. Made good progress on the cottage kitchen unit to boot. So all-in-all not a bad day’s effort.

    Exit Stage Right - image ©Elsewhere Well, if the carefully for-the-media-staged exit stage right from Number Ten by Classic Dom is to be believed, he's upped sticks ahead of his self-allotted time. Everything in the world of Westminster politics at the moment seems to be reeling from the fallout from the US Presidential election and Joe Biden's victory in same. It only remains to be seen if this halo effect can further help to reverse some of the damage that this government and its out of control Prime Minister has wreaked thus far on the UK. Cummings reminds me of someone of personal acquaintance, who I won't name as he's now old and out of the run of things; but who displayed the same level of arrogance and disdain for anyone displaying, as he saw it, an inferior intellect to his own. Classic Dom and his ilk are, like Johnson and Trump, products of this ethos of privilege and assumed superiority; of inherited money and never being told 'No!'. If I could s...

The Old Man's Carpentry Manual - As old as me...     Spent today working on the frame for the cottage kitchen surface. This has seen me dragging skills out of the deepest recesses of memory; skills that I had hitherto abandoned as just too bloody difficult to get even vaguely, let alone master practically. But the ghost of the old man is always on hand to advise and I'm now listening rather more intently than I did as a youth.  I decided that I would try and do justice to the beech top by at least attempting to build its subframe and cupboard properly, by which I mean using actual jointing techniques. Cutting housing and dado joints is not my normal fare, but since this Covid bollocks kicked in and with my recent retirement in the bag, I decided last March that I would start making an effort, albeit a little late in life; viz this blog and the desire to start making stuff to a reasonable standard: maybe good enough to start a small online business in wood and...

  Image - ©Elsewhere   Fall - Kel Harvey   It was Autumn and the Fall: Leaves, drying slow Under pale November sun; So many fallen and lost, So many: lost. One; unknowing, unsung but Chosen, returning To the void left on his leaving; The many his legacy, Too much, the cost.

  Honeybee No.18   For the time being, Deck of the Week will be posted as a regular, well; post, as Blogger seems to have broken the widget that normally powers the feature. Cést La Vie... The Honeybee No.18 Elite Edition from Penguin Magic manufactured by The United States Playing Card Co.

The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Westminster Abbey - image ©National Army Museum Armistice Day passes once again, this year marking the centenary of the interment of an unknown combatant in a tomb in Westminster Abbey, in memory of those who lie, also unknown in name, in the war graves of France and Belgium. This year's Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day commemorations were understandably severely abbreviated due to Covid, but nevertheless undiminished. Looking back at my reflection on our war graves visit to Ypres in 1983, it's so often the small, unremarked detail that illuminates and allows us some attenuated comprehension of, the unimaginably awful. Today's muted remembrance somehow enhances our focus on the humanity underlying war, in the same way that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or The Railway Dugouts Burial Ground at Ypres affords us the clarity of the particular: the Universe in a grain of sand, reminding us that death is always personal, even in war. 

An Augury of Better Times to Come?     Well, we emerge from our fire/circuit/leg-break here in Wales, just as England goes into a four week lockdown. All in the same week that Trump is rejected from serving a second term by the US public, to the great relief of anyone sane enough to see through the haze of the reality-distortion field™ surrounding by far the worst President of the United States, not just of a generation, but of all time; a view echoed even in the Republican Party itself. The elephant in the room [sorry - GOP pun] has been kicked sideways and can now actually be talked about by those hitherto too polite or diplomatic to mention it. To top all of this, there appears to be good hope that there is not just one, but multiple Covid vaccines ready to be rolled out in the coming weeks and months. All we need now is for Brexit to be smoothed with a deal that works for all, or better still [never gonna happen] cancelled for the crap idea it was in the first place: a cra...

The Thirty Quid Beech Thing     Having decided finally where the sink bowl is going to be located on the kitchen worktop, I routed out the rectangular hole for it and in doing so created enormous quantities of dust, as you do. Judicious use of the old vacuum cleaner mitigates the carnage somewhat, as does the wearing of appropriate PPE; respirator-type mask, ear defenders, etc. The latter item most definitely required: my tinnitus doesn't need encouragement. [Says he that played his guitar far too loudly last evening - if you can get a Les Paul to feed back, you're loud...] The supporting carcass and under-top shelves/cupboards, etc. are still moot: in my head but not yet (if ever) on paper. Like everything else I do, the execution and ensuing results of all of this will depend largely on whim. The main problem I have at the moment with my increasing use of scary power tools such as the router - an inheritance from my Dad, who admitted that it was the only tool that actuall...

  Biden Won - By a Lot - ©Not Fake News™ - image ©The Observer   It just gets stranger. Not only have the UK government U-turned on furlough and now school-kid's food (again), they appear, according to the FT, to be looking at knocking outsourcing on the head by forming a 'Crown Consultancy' to cut their dependance on hideously expensive, and truth be told largely useless, consultancies. Which, if true and is a genuine attempt to stem the outflow of public money into the private sector, is only to be lauded. If I trusted this lot one iota, I might be convinced, but I don't; so holding my breath I'm not. As I wrote the other day though, the US Elections seem to have had a clear and immediate knock-on effect on the government here; as if all previous bets were off and some serious back-pedalling is being done in the corridors of power. I note the very low profile our lot have adopted since Tuesday, with only a recent Johnson waffle congratulating Biden on his success ...

The 'L' Piece glued in place   I bought a small dowelling jig from the local Screwfix and jointed the 'L' piece onto the main board last afternoon. The dowels went in pretty accurately, to a tolerance between 1/64" and 1/32" top and bottom, but it served only to show how poor the beechblock panel really is. The machined end really isn't that accurate and the stability of the panel itself is a bit iffy, bowing ever so slightly with the atmospheric moisture. Still I've decided on a change of plan as to the location of the sink bowl which will probably get me out of jail and save a good bit of plumbing into the bargain. Back to it - more later...

  Joe Biden, President-Elect 2020   Well, all things being equal, Trump is down the road and the world can breathe a sigh of relief. Maybe we can look forward to the US entertaining the Paris Agreement, re-enacting Obamacare and reversing a shed-load of other stuff that four years of Trump has threatened to destroy utterly. From our perspective in the UK, we can expect a retreat from the cancer that is neo-liberalism as the Trumpistas in our government start worrying over their loss of global affirmation with the election of Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States. The 'Special Relationship' will take on a whole new hue as untrammelled business interests are brought to heel and the likes of Rees-Mogg et al have to find new allies in their self-serving quest for money and power. Expect a retreat from a no-deal Brexit and some fundamental changes to the Cabinet and possibly the premiership itself. As aware as I am that Obama's tenure achieved probably less than i...

London, England, yesterday - image ©Daily Mirror   Just an early(ish) morning reflection on where the hell we find ourselves this morning. The US election count grinds on, ever closer to a Biden victory for the Democrats, while Trump is bounced off the airwaves by embarrased networks to explain that the President is just lying through his teeth live on national TV from the White House. Over here, since Biden started to show a clear lead, the Johnson government has suddenly come over all philanthropic, buoyed up by a £150 billion cash injection to the economy by the Bank of England, extending the furlough scheme previously abandoned in favour of a Pound Shop alternative not so very long ago. We see protesters on the streets of London avowing conspiracy theories surrounding Covid-19 and the lockdown while the official death-toll projections have been revised downwards because of incorrect data. At the same time, the woeful Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Business & Ind...

Me & Mr. Bass - image ©Al Moores   The picture above is of your humble narrator, circa mid 1980's. I can't be more certain about the year, but it's probably around 1986; which makes me thirty-one or thirty-two at the time so just over half a lifetime ago. The photograph was taken in the old and sadly long-gone chapel that our branch of the Association of Artists and Designers in Wales [AADW] had converted into a gallery, performance space and artists' studios over a period of years from the late 1970s. Sadly, the place burned down in the early 1990s, taking with it a valuable local resource that has never been replaced. In the photograph, I'm pointing at what is obviously a fairly large loudspeaker, which was something I acquired when the old City Cinema in Bangor closed down and was in the process of being turned into a snooker hall. I was working in an office opposite the site at the time [1984], and wandered over one lunchtime to see what was happening there....

  Image  © Sliwa Insights   What are we to make of this damned world? A world where the power of the corporate lobby holds sway over governments, democratic process and human lives. A world where, despite a common threat to the entirety of humanity - for once not of its own making - those self-serving parasites can still freely help themselves to whatever spoils they can lay their hands on whilst relying on their politically connected allies to assist in their plunder and simultaneously deny basic human rights to the rest of us. A world where a lie, repeated large and often enough supplants truth itself. A world where we imagine we have the freedom to hold and exercise democratic rights, and all the while those supposed rights are being subverted by the informatic machinations of the data-munching gurus of the corporate right. A world where the vast majority of it's free press sits at the right hand of the corporate establishment, its existence merely to serve and foster ...

Ducts, Waunfawr Telephone Exchange - image ©Kel Harvey   Well, here I am at another little milestone; actually two for the price of one, in fact. This is post number three hundred since I started this blog in March and this week is officially the first of retirement, my gardening leave having finished at the end of the month. The final ritual of handing back keys, pass cards, laptop and phone complete, my former manager Rob and I had a good jangle about all and sundry over coffee; all in all a very enjoyable hour or two. On balance it has been a pretty good fifteen plus years with the company and I will definitely miss the craic, if not the winter working. I knew last winter that it would be my final one with the firm as just summoning up the motivation to get out of the van in the teeth of a gale and driving rain/sleet/hail just got too hard. The tipping point was during one such maelstrom last year, on a darkening Saturday afternoon in Capel Uchaf, Clynnogfawr. Damage Report Over...

Dia De Los Muertos - A Family Altar - image ©Eneas de Troya     I could make comment on the Prime Minister's statement in Parliament this afternoon regarding the upcoming English Covid lockdown and how the waffle and self-denial continue, over eight months into this pandemic; or how he appears to have not noticed that we are now in November, stating that the Test & Trace figures will hit 500,000 by the end of October; All Hallows Eve, ie Saturday last. But I won't, as today is The Day of the Dead: Dia De Los Muertos. My Deck of the Week last Wednesday reflected this with cards designed by the Edgy Brothers. The festival is a public holiday in Mexico and throughout the Latin world. It is the day when the souls of the dead are welcomed back by their living relatives with food, drink and celebrations. In 2008, it was included on the UNESCO List of The Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. In Spain and most of Latin America the festival is celebrated on All Saints Day, th...