Observations from a Hill

  Another twelve-month passes and the customary hopes for a better New Year, this time round at least, are truly heartfelt and deep, mediated by the knowledge of just how precarious life really is. We have experienced, globally a sense of restriction and powerlessness; trammelled as we have been by the invisible forces of Covid. We have experienced globally, an awareness and greatly overdue recognition of the rights of people of all races and creeds; highlighting the institutionalised prejudices and injustice at the heart of our telling of history; a partial, wholly biassed male, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant confection born of money, privilege and exploitation. We have experienced globally, during this pandemic, the very best of human endeavour, empathy and kindness alongside the very worst of our species' cant, hypocrisy and self-interest in politics and business worldwide. The very bastions of entitlement that formed our twisted histories and our current reactions to them have be...

  As the slab-leaden sky of late afternoon morphs into evening and the first flurries of snow have passed and given way to well, more snow, it seems; the day draws to a close. In the light of yesterday's post, I've cut more of the thick veneer strips for the last trim pieces of The Kitchen Thing and glued them up in a custom-built jig: we'll see how stable the piece as a whole is tomorrow morning and take a decision on whether glueing them up as a piece is the right modus operandi, or whether glueing them individually to the Thing and finishing them in situ is the better thing to do. We'll see... At least on the weather front, things are quiet, if cold & wintry: the Atlantic storms seem to have taken a break for now: it hasn't always been this quiet here in the festive season, though. Around a quarter of a century ago, when James was a small boy, we were preparing for Christmas at Brynbella Cottage, our then home. We'd got a duck for Christmas Day and a half...

I decided that the sink end of The Kitchen Thing was becoming an awful kludge: in jazz terms I'd lost the harmony somewhere in the improv and drifted into dissonance. That's the thing with improvisation - it doesn't always work: in music you can adjust and move on; in Jazz Woodworking, your mistakes can become concrete. I managed to extract the offending piece and set about making some more thick veneer strips out of more of the old chapel wood. This should look better in place and should balance out the similarly banded plinth at the other end of The Thing. I'll get there in the end. Hope to get it installed in the cottage this week and get the plumbing done by the weekend. Keep you posted!  

  As is customary at this time of year, terrestrial TV rolls out the usual suspects in seasonal film. This afternoon's offering is Jurassic Park; as Jane says, this one has long replaced The African Queen as the holiday film du jour. I still think it's a good yarn even now, but it might be time to ring the changes and find a new staple for the season. Thinking about dinosaurs, which after all on the whole existed over a very much longer period than mankind has thus far - and let's face it, if we carry on the way we are, the dinos will beat us hands-down in the longevity stakes - makes one wonder about the definition of a 'successful' species: there are after all species extant today that have been around since before the dinosaurs. One in particular is the scorpion, alive in the Silurian era, some four hundred million years ago and still going strong today. Makes you think, don't it? I'd bet on them being around four hundred million years hence, but I think ...

  Tonight's dinner in the making: a duck curry from the leftovers of Christmas lunch. We eschewed the usual Boxing Day ritual of a cold collation of festive remnants in favour of cheese-board leftovers instead. To accompany the curry will be leftover roast potatoes from the said meal, fried with whole spices. Maybe a naan or two, too...

  St. Stephen's Day dawned quietly enough, if a touch gloomy. As the day has drawn out into evening, the temperature has risen, as has the wind. We must have had some fairly strong northerly gusts last night as some of the felt on that side of the studio roof had lifted and ripped back. I managed to get up there and tack it all back, put a patch on and re-nail some loose patches on the southern side of the roof before darkness fell this afternoon. Here's hoping that the approaching storm Bella loses some of its sting, and we don't lose more of the roof covering:  I really must use spring and summer well next year to effect improvements to the building generally - if the thing actually survives yet another winter of storm battering. With more lockdowns, force ten storms and new Sars-cov2 variants on the march, it's not exactly a cheery run up to the New Year, so it's back to the bunker mentality for the duration.

This is turning out to be a very curious Christmas Day, indeed. Rituals broken, we seem slightly adrift; distanced from festivities and sentiments normally set in lockstep to the hours of the Day over years of practice and tradition.  It may well be that the last year has drifted so far from the usual and that the leaders we normally look to for certainty and guidance have been so lost in a sea of fantasy and lies of their own making that the cosy dreamworld that is a normal Christmas now seems bland by comparison: almost as if we have a collective need to wake from the confected, infected nightmare that has been the last twelve months. I hope everyone out there is able to make something of the day and maybe, just maybe; next year we will be able to immerse ourselves in the warm bath that is a 'normal' Christmas Day: the one day of the year when the world outside should be put on hold, if only at least for a few hours: sadly, this year it has been impossible to mute the clamour...

    Christmas Day 2020 - a strangely odd one unless you consider the context in which it sits: however, it falls into the grand tradition of Christmas's failing to reach expectations; the difference this year, though is that it is less a failure of a plan's execution, than the implosion of the world we all took for granted to be constant. I, for one will try and take a positive from the attenuated celebrations, this year - the year of strangeness, plague and constraint. A poem:      Now - A Toast Drink a toast and set against life's raw edge The softness of wine; the warmth of kind and Remember like times: when time spent in idle chat Was more vital; more now than now seems to be. We are still now: despite the now seemed past; The deftness of time an illusion of mind and Like times remembered past, opining: that Now is more vital, more now than ever was then.   ©Kel Harvey, Christmas Day 2020   Image - ©2020 James Harvey - Model: Amy

  Christmas Eve is upon us once again - the first one for some years that I haven't had to work on the day, barring weekends and rota days. In some ways this makes it feel slightly odd to me as if something is a little out of kilter and adding a final twist to the already really quite odd year we've all had. In fact, that there has been no escaping from Covid - it being in the nature of pandemics to be inescapable, I suppose - has lent this last 10 months or so the nightmarish quality of a non-stop anxiety dream. But let's at least try and put that sinking feeling to one side for the next couple of days and just be as safe and secure in our own selves as is possible, whatever our circumstances. For many, this won't be at all easy or even possible and my thoughts, not much I know, are with them. As always, I'm hoping that post-covid/brexit/etc. will see an upturn in humanitarianism and compassion in the world and the downgrading of greed from a desirable or even esse...

Been busily trying to get the cottage habitable for Xmas, so that the boys and dog have somewhere to sleep. I've assembled two tubular steel beds in situ upstairs and they're ready to fit the mattresses and to be made up ready for Xmas Eve. As you can see from the pic, the Kitchen Thing is also practically finished and the last construction bugs ironed out (cf. Jazz Woodwork). I won't be fitting it until after Xmas, as there is no real rush with the country still in lockdown for the foreseeable future. There's two bits of pitch pine trim to add to this section: a 1"x1/4" piece to the end edge of the surface to the left of the sink bowl and a piece 3"x3/4" to run along under the front edge of the sink. The niche to the rear on the left is deliberate and will contain something interesting, possibly of an arcane and spiritual nature . Keep you posted when this thing goes into the cottage kitchen. 

Nostalgia. It's the time of year for it, let's face it. From its ancient Greek linguistic roots to Charles Dickens weaponising of it in 'A Christmas Carol', it's Christmas! Except this year it will be perhaps a more profound emotion than is usual. Nostalgia - the ache for times past, probably more fondly remembered than experienced, is this year made real by Covid. Like a World War, there is no escape from it, until it is over. A world in suspension from itself. We will be remembering those past times, absent friends and childhood memories more acutely and earnestly than many of us can have ever experienced. The reality of our current, globally-shared lot, is one of collective loss; collective bereavement and ultimately, of collective hope for the future, post-pandemic. Let's not squander this lesson: possibly the biggest and most profound lesson we have ever had to learn: a lesson that has to be heeded, internalised and kept close; as we face the still-mounting...

The seasons' turn is with us yet again as the year pivots towards Spring and the slow slipping back of Winter gives way to hope for the New Year. Given the events that have taken the world by the scruff of the neck over the past twelve-month, hope is a touchstone to cleave to and exercise whatever faith you've got if you hold to one. Personally I'm content in the knowledge that the Earth's cycle will continue, despite us and out-with our philosophies: '...turn[ing] with disinterested hard energy, like the stars...'* *to paraphrase Thom Gunn: 'My Sad Captains' Image: Lulworth Cove © Chris Kotsiopoulos

Photo: Carrog Station, pre-Covid -  Well, here we are again in lockdown. No great surprise, all things considered; but there you go. Something woke me early this morning at around a quarter to five. In the weeks since my retirement, my internal alarm clock had stopped waking me at six AM every day and I had adjusted to a later, more gentle start to my mornings: so such an early one was a bit of a shock and has left me feeling a tad weary. So a day of rest and relaxation it is to be then; starting with writing this and listening to The Moonlight Sonata from the warmth of my bed. A much-attenuated Christmas awaits us all, but it was always going to be a quiet one this year: any expectations otherwise being wholly unrealistic anyway. We're just hunkering down for the duration till our place in the queue for vaccination comes around. I read with interest in The New York Times this morning about how the city of New York coped with an outbreak of Smallpox in 1947, inoculating six million...

  Just a quick update on Kitchen Thing progress: I've done all I'm going to on these veneers - they're not perfect, but what is? I think they'll look OK in situ under the top - I've just finished sanding that, too and cut the hole for the mixer tap behind the sink bowl. There's some finishing to do on the other plinth and I'll need to adjust the positioning of the locating blocks for it, as I've changed the thickness of the pitch-pine trim at that end: rather than cutting more veneer strips, I've opted for a solid, 15mm thick edging of the stuff, so I'll have to move the plinth back 20-30mm to accommodate it. The idea is to use the solid trim to provide extra support for the end of the top by the sink bowl, which is a bit of a weak spot at the moment. This is what you get when your approach to building things is more John Coltrane than J.S. Bach. I started out with a drawing, ignored it and winged it. Bit like my life, really.

For all the climate-change deniers out there, it's the eighteenth of December and it's been thirteen/fourteen Celsius today and I'm in North Wales: that geographical fact alone should say something. Currently, we're winding down from (yet another) Atlantic-squally-day which saw the top of our thirty-foot Italian Cypress nearly touching the ground yet again for the umpteenth time this year and the wheelie bins taking off across the area in front of our house that passes for a patio/top garden, like felled Daleks in a low-rent recreation of Dr. Who. This seems to be the new normal, weather-wise. Annoying and worrying in equal measure though all this is, I bend to the sanguinity of old age and the zen that has sustained me since my youth. Whatever it is will either happen, or then again it won't: but some legislation and at least a modicum of common sense wouldn't go amiss in helping to mitigate some of this shit.

I've put together a Mark One Moxon/Leg-vise thing to replace the wobbly jury-rigged device that's served me reasonably well over the last few weeks. The jaws are pieces of the 4"x2" (2"x4" to our North American cousins) baulk that I made the 'leg' out of originally. This time I've dowel-jointed the rear jaw to the top of the 'leg', forming a tee-piece. The front jaw I chamfered on the table saw and (for this version anyway,) I'm using 12mm hex bolts as the tightening system, held in the back jaw in counter-bored recesses and running through (sort of ) oval holes in the moving jaw as in a Moxon vise, so that asymmetrical pieces can be held with the jaws out of parallel. Again, this is very much a Mark One (well Mark One-and-a-Half, counting the lash-up) and I like the combination of the Moxon-style top and the floor mounted leg that can hold longer verticals using holdfasts, as you can see in the picture. If I can get hold of a couple ...

It looks like Wales is taking a rather more cautious approach to this, the first Covid Christmas: our movements will be more constrained than across Offa's Dyke over the festivities, so it will be just the four of us at table on the 25th. Two households, one 'bubble'. Our friends with whom we would normally share food here will be spending their time alone, and there will be no traditional two pints and a malt at the 'Duggie' before Christmas lunch for all of us. It's hopefully only just for this one year though, as the vaccine rollout begins in earnest here in North Wales at the start of the New Year; although the kicker is that we will be in full lockdown from the 28th. of this month for an as yet unspecified time. I for one have no problems with this. At sixty-six, I've still got plenty of life to live and do not relish an early demise just for the sake of a party or two; not that I do that much partying these days, anyway; but you know what I mean. Here...

The Christmas un-lockdown is almost upon us. There are very vocal critics of what really is going to be a fairly obviously ludicrous hiatus in the Covid-19 safety regime. All medical opinion seems to be firmly set against it, along with the Opposition and a significant tranche of the Tory party itself.  Epidemiologically, even from a lay-person's standpoint, it would seem to be counter-intuitive, especially given the now apparently adaptive nature of the virus, mutating rapidly as we speak. Add in the fact that we are just weeks away from vaccinating significant numbers of the population which would much reduce the impact of the virus in the near future and it looks on the face of it to be a short-sighted attempt to play to the gallery and gain brownie points. You would think by now that populist box-ticking would have taken a back seat to plain common sense, given the scale of the challenges we still face. But no, it would seem that being voter-friendly is still uppermost in the G...

  Had a pretty productive sort of day in the studio, today. I started coating up the visible surfaces of the end unit of The Kitchen Thing with beeswax: coat, dry, sand, buff and repeat: for cheap, crappy pine it's starting to come up OK, so I think we'll keep on with that modus operandi for the other end when I'm done with this one. I also started to apply the thick pitch pine veneers to its top: just visible on the right in the bench vise. They're going on pretty well and will look pretty nice, I think. I also made a kitchen chopping board out of an off-cut of the beech block top, and used the same top oil on it as The Kitchen Thing's top was coated up in. It polishes up like a beauty, so I'm pretty sure the Thing's top will be OK too. In the drying times between all these things, I decided to bite the bullet and drag the sorry carcass of my dad's old bench top bandsaw out of storage and get it working: I mentioned the other day it was a future project...

I guess in some ways BT did a good job on this often reluctant and frankly usually unclubbable son of the Midlands. I have found myself watching voluntarily, this evening, workshop safety videos on YouTube. This might seem sad or even risible at first hearing, but I think on balance that it's better to stay alive and as physically intact for as long as is humanly possible; given my continued usage of frankly quite scary and intimidating machinery. I also wear steel-toe-caps when doing any work at home; even in the garden and never, ever wear jewellery using power tools: I've seen some pretty 'orrid HSE videos at work, pre-retirement... Most of my workshop lessons and experience started at home, watching my old man in the workshop; later tinkering in there on my own. But my first day at Lordswood School introduced me to a lot of common sense workshop safety stuff through the estimable personage of one Mr. 'Dicky' Betts, my metalwork teacher, in the first actual class...

A thought's just struck me, having just finished the latest addition to The Kitchen Thing: the second removable panel to hide the excrescence that is the pre-existing plumbing; the (again) hidden mechanism to lock it in place is kind of baroque in execution, resembling as it does a door bolt from some crumbling Transylvanian pile clinging to a mountain fastness deep in some gothic fantasy. A bit Gormenghast, on a very domestic scale (calm down, now). The memory that struck me however, was that of a TV programme from the 1990's: Operavox. It was a stop-motion-animated series of operas that were beautifully executed; with stunning model-making and wonderful production values. When we were deeply involved with the museum in Llanberis back in the early and mid '90's, they put on an exhibition of some of the sets from the show, accompanied by recordings from the soundtrack. The sets were a triumph of just that baroque, gothic sensibility that I so love - wonderful stuff. The...

It is - image ©Kel Harvey 2020 - Why are philosophers so tortured? Vexed by existence and travailed by meaning, Uncertain of certainty: What ails the analysts of perception? Pursuing precision of definition; Of explication and explanation: Falling short and failing; the decision Has to be, to be. It's not a question.  

Time: Vigil - 2020, Kel Harvey - Without wishing to sound like a Government information film: it ain't over yet. SARS-COV-2 and the disease it causes are still out there and still killing people. The time to relax is definitely not now, despite the extraordinary progress on the treatment and vaccine development front. The reason I'm putting this out is that I heard today that the brother of my oldest friend John, had died last night in hospital, from the disease. Although I'd not seen him since we left the Midlands all those years ago, it still seems personal; and although I've lost many friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues over the last few years, Brian is the only one lost to Covid-19. None of us should take anything for granted in this situation; not until mass vaccination really gets underway and even then, it will be many months before we can even think of getting back to any semblance of normal. The price is just too great to take unnecessary chances. To...

Image © NTT Data -  If you're not currently listening to this season's weekly Reith Lectures on the BBC, I would suggest catching up with them on BBC Sounds. Former Bank of England Governor Mark Carney offers us not only the inside view of the mechanics and machinations of world banking, but also a dispassionate sideways view of the ethics and morality that should underpin their actions and business methods, but have so often failed to heed in their times of plenty. Greed, hubris and complacency are the bedfellows, ultimately, of failure. He talks about the primary lesson that needs to be learned from both the aftermath of the 2008 crash and the current global pandemic: the need for humility and long-term planning by the banking fraternity for the future security of the world economy and the people who both it and the banks themselves serve. Humility, a quality of attitude: vocation opposing the arc of careerism; planning of fundamental importance in the breaking of the ten-yea...

I grew up drinking in the stories of the Space Race and the heroics of test pilots throughout the fifties and sixties. Chuck Yeager was an almost mythical figure to me as a child. Scroll forward to the eighties and 'The Right Stuff'; Tom Wolfe's brilliant novelisation of the period and the subsequent film of that book; I found myself revisiting the territory in the mainstream that was afforded to me in my youth only by imported American magazines. This guy was the real deal. To quote the man himself; "The secret to my success was that somehow I always managed to live to fly another day."

  Workshop update - sorry! - One of the issues I've got left to sort out with The Kitchen Thing is the pitch pine finishings for the plinths that form the base. I was originally going to use 1/2" thick pieces to finish the tops of the plinths, but given the amount of stock that would take away from other projects, I decided to use 1/8" thick veneers cut from some of the pieces I've got. As I don't have a working bandsaw at the moment [as I said before, my old man's bench top job is one of my next projects], I've decided to use the table saw to rip the veneers. This is not a trivial undertaking, as the pieces I need to cut are from 2 & 3/4" wide boards which are only  just over 1/2" thick. I've looked at loads of YouTube stuff from some really knowledgeable people and as usual, have decided to plough my own furrow on this one. This was an easy decision to make as I've practically run out of stock wood and am trying to save money at the...

The slowest-moving disaster movie ever made continues. Brexit is still not a done deal. Or no deal. The game show from hell that debuted in 2016 is finally, hopefully reaching the end of its long-overdue last season. It would be so good if the principal players in this over-hyped fiasco would now just piss off back to their fortunes and stop playing at government: to echo the words of the man who precipitated this whole shitshow; "...for God's sake man, just go!": Cameron's words to Corbyn during PMQ's sometime in antiquity. One of the ironies of the whole wrangle currently taxing our bear-of-little-brain and the understandably-terminally-frustrated EU negotiating team is fishing. In economic terms, fishing is a very small, well, fish in the sea of European economic activity, so far as both the UK and the EU are concerned. But the historical resonances abound: a once great, seafaring island nation; the Cod Wars, und-so-weiter. One thing's for certain, we need...

Image © Kel Harvey 2020 -  Another nail in the coffin of High Street retail. Debenhams, Bangor starts its everything must go sale. This store was the cornerstone and erstwhile flagship of the Menai Shopping Centre, which itself has only been going for just over a decade and to this date still has empty units from day one. Yet another vanity project going the same way as The Wellfield Centre that it replaced. Meanwhile, there is probably only a tiny handful of locally-owned retail spaces anywhere in the city and only one of those, as far as I can recollect, has been there since we first moved to North Wales and its days look set to be numbered. The pandemic has thrown the weaknesses of corporate retail into sharp relief. It has also revealed the ugly face of poor business practice, profiteering and asset-stripping that characterises so many of the large-scale retail groups. In common with the do-it-all contracting firms like Serco, they've leeched the life-blood out of what were thr...

    The other day I mentioned EMS synthesisers in my short note on The Radiophonic Workshop at the BBC. The man behind EMS was Peter Zinovieff, electronic and audio engineer, the son of emigré Russian parents who met in London after fleeing the Russian Revolution. Zinovieff was a collaborator with Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson from The Workshop in a short-lived outfit called Unit Delta Plus, whose stated aim was to promote electronic music; Derbyshire and Hodgson later forming the group 'White Noise" with David Vorhaus. Zinovieff initially developed a hybrid digital/analogue synthesiser named MUSYS. This beast was controlled by two DEC PDP-8 minicomputers and a piano keyboard. At the time he built it, there were no computers in private hands and each of the DEC's cost the thick end of £120,000 a pop in today's money. All privately funded(!). Zinovieff and EMS went on to produce synthesisers in Britain at a time when they were one of only four commercial producers ...

The plumbing access hatch in place (above) - the open frame will be covered by the washing machine. Taking the locking pin out allows the key-board to lift out, freeing the hatch to be swung out of its frame, as you can see in the pics below; allowing access to the plumbing behind for maintenance, should it be needed. I took the inspiration for the locking device from a present the old man made for James when he was little, which was a wooden 'book' which was a secret hiding place for knick-knacks with a devious hidden lock. The one on the kitchen thing is slightly less hidden - I didn't need to go the full Mission Impossible for this, but I could have made the thing completely invisible, which would have been quite nice: maybe another project. The bottom picture shows the hidden catch from the inside of the cabinet. More later.   

Anyone of a certain age will have fallen under the sonic spell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at one time or another. As eccentrically 'British' as it was radically avantgarde, the Workshop explored initially the borderlands between musique concrète and nascent synthetic sound generation techniques; usually employing all manner of electronic test equipment that would have been normally employed in a purely technical role: oscillators, filters and so on; techniques that have seen a recent rebirth with the likes of Hainbach in Germany. Latterly, the Workshop embraced the emerging technologies of electronic sound synthesis coming out of the US in the late sixties and seventies; they themselves playing a central role in developing some significant technical strands of the genre itself; the EMS VCS3 and Synthi 100 the most well-known examples of a rather different approach to electronic synthesis. The VCS3 was made particularly prominent by Brian Eno's use of it in the early Ro...

Late post today; I'd been working down the studio workshop all day and then we went over to see the boys for an early Fish and Chip supper at their place this afternoon so I've only just sat down. The fish and chips were from Enoch's in Valley and mighty fine they were, too; I can recommend them highly. I took delivery of some new blades for the table saw today from Rutlands' tool supplies. The OEM blade that came with saw was a rather poor general purpose blade that frankly was none-too-sharp from the off and was too coarse for fine cross-cut stuff, anyway. The set of three came as in the picture: a 24 tooth rip blade, a 48 tooth GP and an 80 tooth for finer cross-cut work. I decided to try out the 80 tooth before we set out this afternoon: what a joy. It sliced it's way through some of that 100 plus year old pitch pine like it was butter, leaving a nice clean cut with no chipping or tear-out; and the design of the blade makes it much quieter than the original, too...

  Almost done with next door's kitchen-thing. Offered the top up to the two plinths just to check the locating blocks underneath were in the right place. You can see just under the sink where there will be the removable panel for access to the plumbing etc. There's also a couple of stretchers to put in there to reinforce the front legs, as the removable panels front and side won't offer a great deal of structural support in themselves. Apart from that, there's only four bits of pitch-pine trim to add; a coat more top-oil to the upper surface of the top and a coat of matt varnish to seal the white pine bits. Then we'll be ready to go  and it will be time to swap my woodworking hat for my plumbers'.

As the news at the moment is basically so woeful and we've been shouting vainly at our devices and media-boxes most of the day over the crass stupidity of just about everything and everyone, I'll leave the outside world, well; outside. Progress on the Nordic-scale saga that is my kitchen build: looking good and on the last knockings, methinks. Got the sink side offered up to the top today to secure the locating blocks and make sure the rear legs will be located securely. Not too shabby so far - just don't look too closely at the kludged bracing I had to do to take the twist out of some of the timber; crude but effective: the legs are at least true to within a 1/16". If I had the energy I'd write more, but I don't, so I won't. More later.