Observations from a Hill

  Two things conjoined randomly today: a piece in the Guardian online - I assume it was in today's Observer, but we haven't ventured forth for a print paper today - and a link that Joe sent me to a piece in The Conversation : an estimable online journal I've referred to before. The first refers to US author Sarah Jaffe's book 'Work Won’t Love You Back', in which she outlines the precarious and fragmentary state of the contemporary world of work and essentially how the world seems to hold the least socially valuable occupations in the highest esteem whilst treating the most essential as somehow inferior and unworthy of appropriate remuneration or security: viz the 'gig' economy etc. The second is about revenge: that of an online crowdsourced kick-back at Wall St. and that sub-class of traders known as 'short-sellers'. In the financial world, brokers and traders earn big bucks and are looked upon as shining exemplars of the beauty of the capitalis...

  The soundtrack to my adolescence was brought back to me this afternoon: watching a documentary about Jethro Tull. The picture shows the cover to their first album, on top of which is the stub of the ticket from the one time I saw them in concert. September 1970: I was fifteen and growing up rapidly. It's no exaggeration that this lot were very important to me at the time - still are, as far as their earlier stuff's concerned - and that this one particular gig was very special indeed. They were scheduled to play back-to-back shows at Birmingham Town Hall, which hosted some of the biggest artists in the late sixties and early seventies; the first at the usual start time around seven in the evening, and the second kicking off at midnight. We'd elected to go to and bought tickets for the latter. A clutch of us - all mates from school - gathered at my house for the evening before catching the bus into town for the gig. The last record we played before setting off was the B-sid...

Being having a tidy-up today, in the absence of any other inspiration or weather decent enough to venture forth in. It's interesting what you find in boxes: in this case under the bed. Three documents, two personal and one, well, nicked from school. My first bank account was a childrens' savings account with as you can see, the Birmingham Municipal Bank (Rotton Park Branch). This later became part of TSB and is now again, after disappearing for a while, part of Lloyds TSB. Intriguingly, my first adult bank account was with Lloyds Bournville branch. The pass book shown informs me that my account held, as of March 21st 1963, the princely sum of two pounds, fifteen shillings, or £2.75p in decimal currency (for those too young to remember; yes, we used to have a monetary system that was duodecimal: that's base twelve, folks!) With compound interest, that could be worth about oh, eight quid, now? I'll hang on to the book as a keepsake, anyway. The other personal document is ...

  Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I'm not the most clubbable bloke on the planet, and that I do not naturally cleave to the law and order brigade; whose natural habitat is the letter columns of the more, shall we say, conservative style of newspaper or journal. Disgusted of Surbiton I ain't. But given our current, collective epidemiological pickle, I do find myself taking exception to the actions of some who, to be perfectly honest, act like complete prats and flout perfectly reasonable, sensible recommendations vis à vis appropriate public behaviour with respect to Covid-19. Talking to my friend Dawn this afternoon - who was a nurse in this field and knows a thing or two on the subject - we related common experiences encountering the frankly disturbing behaviour of some individuals: ignoring all guidelines - and some local laws - by entering retail buildings without masks, talking freely so un-attired, and in close proximity to innocent members of the public. I...

  Today is UK Holocaust Memorial Day. On the day of January Twentieth, 1942, the death warrant for six million people was signed in Berlin on the shores of Großer Wannsee: just fifteen pages of typescript; outlining in cold, businesslike terms the intended fate of the Jewish race in Europe: the Besprechungsprotokoll (Minutes) of a meeting held between senior Nazis, chaired by Reinhard Heydrich, the principle actor and chief architect of the horror that followed in the wake of that meeting: The Holocaust, culminating in the six million deaths warranted that day. Long before this formalising document was stamped Geheime Reichssache (Secret Reich Business) and filed away, the intent was there and known throughout Germany and the rest of Europe: '...only a voluntarily deaf and blind man could have any doubts about the fate reserved for the Jews in a German Europe: we had read Feuchtwanger's Oppermanns , smuggled secretly in from France, and a British White Book, which ...

  We’ve just passed the grim milestone of 100,000 deaths from Covid-19. New Zealand has had just five twenty-five. We are now putting in place quarantine hotels for incomers, but it will take two weeks to implement. The first returnees from Wuhan last year were quarantined - in hotels - on arrival immediately. The first cases of incoming virus from Europe were reported almost straight after this, but what was the Government’s response? Nothing, nada, zilch. The airports remained open and people were flooding in from all over Europe, where the pandemic was starting to take hold. What was the New Zealand Government’s response? Shutdown: no-one in and no-one out and total isolation for the infected and their contacts. Result, virtually zero problem. This Government reacts to everything. Just very slowly. Then reacts against the next development. Just very slowly . We are now the worst Covid-affected nation on Earth, per capita; yet still the vacillation continues just as the vaccin...

Just a short reflection on the historical significance of workers' self-education. In the slate quarries of North Wales, there was a tradition whereby workers on their short meal breaks from the customary twelve-hour shifts; gathering to eat and drink the usually meagre fare they carried with them*, would gather in a communal hut, usually constructed from waste materials on site, called Y Caban - the cabin. Rather than simply take a break and eat, discussions on politics and history would be the focus of the break, with singing and poetry in equal measure. For many of the younger apprentices - Jermon(s) in the dialect - for whom, aged between sixteen and twenty-one, this would represent the only continuing education they would ever get. It was from these self-created, self-taught beginnings that the University College of North Wales, later Univ. Wales, Bangor was formed; by subscription from the quarrymen themselves, in 1884; receiving its charter the following year. Institutions l...

Nant Ffrancon from Ogwen Cottage --   We drove up to the head of the valley - about ten minutes from Bethesda - this afternoon to see how the weather was looking in the mountains. From about halfway up the valley where you start to properly make altitude, the snow was falling in good quantity. In the lower reaches on the opposite side from the A5, the old road was pretty clear, but at the very top, above Buck's Farm, it looked pretty treacherous, and as it's a fairly steep descent past the farm - with a nasty drop should things not pan out too well - we decided discretion would be the better part of valour and made our way back the way we had come; down the A5 and back into Bethesda for some shopping: thence home to Rachub, where the sun is currently out and what little snow we had last night is receding fast.

$1.95 Billion and counting... No kidding around, this is no joke: even in the midst of a global health crisis, capitalism just can’t resist turning the screws. The New York Times yesterday reported on Pfizer’s clawing back of vaccine supplies, based on the fact that each vial of the vaccine was found by pharmacists to potentially contain six, rather than the stated five, doses. That this sixth dose was only attainable using a special syringe and needle combination not universally available was originally covered by the rider ‘…up to six doses…’ used by the FDA. Pfizer are paid by the dose, not the shipment; so, they argue they’re losing a sixth of their due on each batch: and have been lobbying the FDA to change the wording used and to count the ‘sixth’ dose toward their commitment of 200 million doses delivered by July 31st; in so doing, shipping fewer packages of the vaccine. They got their way, with the FDA, the WHO and the EU all agreeing to the ‘six doses per vial’. Is this part o...

  Well, it's now nearly three months into my official retirement and close to half a year since I actually stopped working for Openreach. My initial concerns over losing nearly a grand a month's worth of income as my salary gave way to my state pension have proved pretty much unfounded; even given the brakes that COVID-19 has put on our business plan for the cottage: we can't go much further with that until the vaccination programme is well under way and things start to ease back a bit. The truth is, we're not spending money like it's going out of fashion any more, and it hasn't taken a great effort of will to achieve that; which has come as rather a pleasant surprise to me. It also highlights just how easy it is to waste money when you have a decent income and don't really need to count the pennies. A sobering fact when reflecting on the lives of the very many people who don't have that facility. When I did the cashflow forecasts at the point of my deci...

Staying away from politics for today - Biden's in the house and cracking on with business - let's see what the first 100 days of his tenure has achieved when that time arrives. This side of the pond, we wait. Vaccination will come, at some point; but normality will have to wait a good bit longer; so tonight I bring you... Pork Belly with roast potatoes and parsnip, broccoli and a porky sauce to douse it all in! The first piece off that fine joint I posted about (really just the tailings from squaring up the main bit - but fine and plenty for the two of us). The rest of it's in the freezer and will probably form the centrepiece of a celebration dinner when our lockdown is scaled back a bit. When restrictions are finally lifted, and it's safe to socialize, there will be the mother of all neighbourhood parties up here in Yr Achub. Everyone is desperate to party, but most of us are old enough to be patient: anyway, we are for the most part in at-risk groups, so caution prev...

  I wish America and its people well and hope with all sincerity that the incoming Biden administration will be allowed to be a force for good in the coming years. Listening to his inaugural address, the poetic contribution of Amanda Gorman and the benediction delivered by the Rev. Sylvester Beaman, I was struck by the hope and frankly, relief expressed; as if  the country was waking from a nightmare that had threatened to become a Groundhog Day of abnormality, inexorably sucking sense and fairness out of the lives, not just of Americans but countless people throughout the world: administrations across the globe founded on blatant untruths and the self-interest of the powerful. I’m not so naive that I view this handover as an augury of the Promised Land; but I do feel that not all politicians are so abjectly corrupt that politics and democracy are de facto redundant concepts: that way lies the kind of open warfare that Trump, not always tacitly and more often than not explicit...

  I do love a bargain: we don't shop at Waitrose that often these days, at least since I retired - it was all too easy to drop a hundred quid in there when I was working - but I wanted some more loose teas and there isn't much local purchase choice in that department. So we went over there this afternoon in a brief break in the appalling weather we've got today. We were looking for some lamb mince to make some minty burgers, as we no longer have a meat grinder to do it ourselves - something I think I'll remedy via eBay - but they didn't have any. However, there was a large, sealed bag labelled free-range belly pork going for half price. As you can see from the label, there's about seven and three-quarter pounds of rather fine meat at the ridiculous price of £6.53: around 0.85p/lb and enough food there to feed eight people at one sitting or around three to four meals plus cold cuts for the two of us. Alongside the joint (which I've cut to provide tomorrow...

  Who's Fooling Whom? While President-Elect Joe Biden seems firm in effecting root and branch changes in the US from day one of his coming Presidency: echoing Roosevelt’s New Deal and hopefully ushering in a new era for American politics, our excuse for a government is setting out, behind the scenes and under cover of the pandemic, policies that threaten to push us back into the nineteenth century in terms of workers’ rights and public spending. It looks from this old grouch’s perspective as if the ‘New-Monied’ arrivistes of this country are intent on joining the landed gentry in reclaiming their collective ‘birthright’. It is pretty self-evident what this implies for the rest of us: lower wages, longer working hours, emasculated union representation and a pension age pushed well beyond the average person's lifespan. Never mind the inevitable privatization of our health and welfare services, already well underway. What is less obvious though, is the implication for the economy ...

  More fragments of frozen time unearthed today: a box of 35mm slides that have been buried in the spare bedroom for I don't know how long. Judging by the image content, either this was one film that had been in the camera from 1992-1997 or my slides need a good sorting out! This is kind of a three-part time-out-of-time post: the slide featured in the picture is of comet Hale Bopp seen over the roof of the house we used to live in at Brynbella, taken on time-lapse sometime just after it reached its last perihelion: the film was processed in June 1997, so it can't be far past its closest point, on April 1st that year. By August 7th 2012, it was 33.2 Astronomical Units from the Sun, a distance of over three billion miles. By now it will be indistinguishable against the cosmic background. The transparency is photographed in my Dad's old handheld slide viewer, a Paterson from the early 1960s, which still sports a crude repair Dad made in the late sixties, when the catch on the ...

  Following on from yesterday's post on tools and toolmaking, this popped into my notifications this morning. It's a natural extension of the basic point I made in 'Sticks & Stones': all measurement and following that, all technology stems from some very basic principles. I recommend watching the video: it's a half-hour well spent. Flatness, circular accuracy and following from them angular and dimensional accuracy;  are in turn derived from the very basics of grinding and turning materials, which are in turn derived from hitting and scraping things; both of which are the simplest and oldest hand processes we have. From these, simple machines can be derived to enhance the degree of accuracy that can be achieved by those fundamental processes, which leads to making devices with finer degrees of precision and so on. All those subjects now considered so old-fashioned and somehow out of touch with the modern world; paling beneath the umbra of the classics and PPE,...

  Hacking is not simply the province of software geeks, gamers and hardware tweakers. Hacking is the stuff of invention in all fields of human endeavour. The ability to hack is the ability to improvise, with whatever tools or materials you have to hand. Starting with just a rock or two, you can make a hammer and a knife; and cutting and hammering can shape your world. Add making fire through friction, and you’ve got the basics not just to build shelter and to eat decently, but to make more sophisticated tools, from which to make more sophisticated tools, still. At its heart, the history of technology boils down to these very mechanical radices and the ability of higher-order species to hack their environment in order to achieve what they themselves physically cannot. If you can cut wood, you can make a lever. If you make a lever, you can move stuff that you’re not strong enough to lift or move without the machinery you’ve yet to invent. If you can cut wood, you can fashion rollers ...

  Liver with garlic and parsley (and olive oil, flour and red wine vinegar): supposedly Provençal, but according to my late French friend and fellow bon viveur, definitely not from Provence. We've been cooking this for forty years, and it still surprises and delights us to this day: happy Friday!

  The Kitchen Thing is now fully installed and plumbed in at last. It's a good job my deadline's been pushed back and back by the pandemic: small mercies, I guess; every cloud and that sort of clichéd nonsense. Still it's done and there's only the tidying and cosmetic adjustments to make, so I'll get the bathroom plumbing fettled this weekend, then the rest of it is mostly snagging, tidying and exterior stuff. I haven't mentioned the paintwork and the quarry-tile clean-up! Jane has as usual, done all the painting throughout the cottage. I personally loathe painting, but then I can do the woodwork and plumbing stuff, so I don't really feel all that guilty about my shortcomings in that department. We should be done with it all, hopefully by the time the vaccination programme kicks in properly and maybe, just maybe, we might get some takers for holidays in the hills; subject to whatever rules are in place when the time comes. Keep ya posted...

  It seems that at last a line is being drawn in the sand of American politics and that the waking anxiety dream of the Trump presidency is over. I watched a good chunk of the debate in the House last night (UK time) and was struck by the contrast in the quality and tone of argument on either side of the aisle. Where the Democrats were sombre, dignified and considered, their opposers often came over as shrill, defensive, even belligerent at times in their defence of the indefensible. The impeachment at least prevents Trump making another attempt on entering the White House in four years time. While some diehard MAGA types will no doubt continue to propagate their views, I suspect that support for Trump himself will evaporate quickly once the President Elect is sworn in and that the attention of his ex-acolytes will turn elsewhere. The only niggling worry is the possibility of trouble on Inauguration Day: plans are apparently already being made to toughen up security surrounding the...

  This rather grubby looking piece of kit (I deliberately didn't clean it up to show the state I found it in) is a Mitsubishi Programmable Logic Controller and its handheld programmer. The PLC was part of the AV installation we did for The National Grid at the museum in Llanberis, North Wales: this particular one was woefully over-spec for the rather trivial task it had to perform; being a delay after power-up, a timed switch-closure and then to just sit and wait for the next power-up. I could have used a timer-relay or some such to do the job, but this was to hand and the budget afforded us the luxury of such extravagant over-specification. This pair of objects, along with the PLC that handled the rather more complex fail-safe routines for the show, have languished in the back of sheds, cupboards and in various damp, rodent-infested corners since I pulled them out of the rig when it was decommissioned. I decided today on a whim to power up one of the units to see if it and /or the...

Slowly getting there --  The Kitchen Thing in situ and nearing commission. The left-hand panel is off because I've still got to plumb the sink waste in and attach the washing machine outlet. I got to fettle the gap to the rear of the sink: the Thing's square, but the kitchen ain't! Should be up and running by lunch tomorrow - then it's the new taps on the bathroom basin to fit...keep ya'll posted...

Five days worth of school lunches? Eighty percent profit, anyway; so that's all right, then...   Where in God’s good name are we headed? As I said the other day, at least the US at least seems to be clawing its way back from the brink of paranoiac chaos; but here? I really am concerned that we will be taken so far, so fast into the maw of that beast’s seemingly civilised British cousin, our genteel take on Neo-liberalism, that we may never recover from the damage our government will inevitably wreak on the  economy and our society. The framework is there: a solid mandate for the next four years, with a practically unassailable majority; key discussions regarding our trade deals, post Brexit being held in camera in closed committee, courtesy of the leader of the House: the Right Honourable(!) Member for the Eighteenth Century,  Jacob Rees-Moog - personal and family wealth, north of £150,000,000 - the very person who accused UNICEF of playing politics in giving a paltry few...

“The future is still so much bigger than the past." - Sir Tim Berners-Lee -- As we all know, the World Wide Web (almost always erroneously refered to as 'The Internet' or ' My internet') was invented only in 1991 by Tim Berners-Lee (blog posts, passim), going online the following year. One thing that became groaningly obvious by the late '90's was that the whole thing would be subsumed by commercial interests very rapidly, and this as we all know, is what came to pass. Well, Berners-Lee, like an awful lot of other people, although he has more and better cause than most; is now seeking to claw back some of the original purpose and intention of his original creation, in the form of Solid, an information sharing system that appears to owe much to his original concept, from the early years at CERN. He has with others, formed a company called Inrupt. I'm just looking into what their methodologies are, and what they can afford me and people I know - but it lo...

  Sumac Chicken - This recipe is from the BBC programme 'Rick Stein: From Venice to Istanbul'. I first cooked it about four years ago, and it's been a go-to in our house since then. It makes a nice alternative to a Sunday roast and works well at any time of the year. We found some skinned chicken in the freezer yesterday, and all the other ingredients were in the store cupboard, so I decided to cook enough for the whole weekend. Last night we had it with a Tomato & Chilli Cous cous we get from Lidl; branded Newgate Express, it comes in two-serving packets and takes less than five minutes to knock up. Tonight we'll have the rest with Wholegrain Wild & Red Rice: this time from Aldi, branded Worldwide Foods. Bang it in the microwave for two minutes, and it's done.  Here's the recipe for the chicken: Ingredients: Chicken - the amount is up to you, but I always make the same quantity of marinade/sauce, which is enough for a whole, jointed chicken. It's b...

  For the first time in what seems like an eternity, we are above the snowline; for a couple of days at least: it being due to warm up again pretty soon. Classic winter-as-we-knew-it up here in the hills, but you can clearly see that Bangor and  Anglesey are free of it. We've given up on the idea of taking the car out today - the High St. currently resembles and feels like a Winter Olympics ski-jump ramp. There wasn't one bit of road around here gritted before the snow started yesterday and as there was a partial thaw during the afternoon followed by more snow and sub-zero temperatures overnight, the surface is absolutely lethal and the steepness of the road leading up to our place means we're sitting it out until tomorrow. Fair play to our postie, though: he still delivered the mail this lunchtime as usual. Top man!

  While the events surrounding the the Capitol in Washington have revealed finally that the Emperor is actually naked, at least to those with eyes to see the truth, and will hopefully draw the sorry tale to a close; on this side of the Atlantic the long run of our very own Whitehall (that's the theatre, folks) farce continues its run apace. Three things stood out for me this morning. I won't try and draw too much of a common thread between them and maybe each merits its own post, but whatever. The first was a comment on Amol Rajan's estimable Radio Four discussion programme 'Rethink'. The main thread of the programme looked at fairness, contrasting how young people today fare in comparison with previous generations; the general conclusion being that this will be the first generation in a very long time that will be worse off than its parents'. I wouldn't argue differently, the facts speaking for themselves: young people of working age today will almost certa...

  Anger is not the exclusive province of youth. I am now sixty-six, not an age I ever thought I would reach, but there you go; but I am angrier now than I have ever been before in my life; at the injustice, perfidy and downright stupidity that prevails in the running of the world today by the self-serving incompetents and their idiot acolytes who we seem to have allowed by some variant of the democratic process to actually be in charge of it all. Vaccination, as I remember it as a child of the NHS, growing up in the afterglow of the creation of that, the greatest innovation by mankind in history, nonpareil; was a thing we had as a matter of course; administered by our GP, locally. So far in the current Boris Big Gesture Jab Rollout, we seem to have a number of Boris Big Gesture Vax Centres where people are queuing, non-socially-distanced around the block for hours to *maybe* get a needle stuck in their arm. Whatever happened to the notion of distributed, local care and expertise? W...

  I wondered how long it would be before the bubble burst. Just like Trump's asinine and rather pathetic attempt to stage a coups d'état was over before it started, unfortunately incurring four deaths in the process: his fellow republicans bar a half-dozen or so in the House and even Twitter later rounding on him and turning their backs. Now, here we learn that the UK's vaccination rollout is already starting to stall, with our second-largest city about to run out of doses of one vaccine (and having received none of the promised supply of the other) by tomorrow. The spurious reasons given for extending the period between doses now seem to have a simpler and rather more familiar explanation: hubris and cock-up in equal measure. I refer back to my post about New York's Smallpox outbreak and the authorities' response to it. Six million people vaccinated in one month in the aftermath of a World War. 1947. Six million. Seventy-four years on, and we're struggling alre...

  I was originally of a mind to write something of chisels, having found four or five of my Dad's in not-so-optimum storage conditions in the small shed that is currently in a state of slow-motion collapse: a condition I have to halt come springtime, otherwise I'll have to demolish it and start again. I realised that the initially very sorry looking tools I unearthed, were actually not that far gone and decided that I would try and resurrect them; a process I started this afternoon, more progress having already been made on next door's kitchen. Instead, when I sat down at the laptop, I got sucked into the YouTube vortex and ended up on the Wogan show in 1989. Wogan himself was not even present; Joanna Lumley deputizing for the holidaying host. Already on set was Harry Secombe, to be joined by Spike Milligan for interview. The conversation that followed was typical Milligan/Secombe; the kind of surreal ad-libbing that only friends of very long standing and with a very partic...

  OK - just a quick throwaway: last night's roast dinner - the picture shows the leftovers being prepared for tonight's meal. It was off-the-cuff and simple, but bloody beautiful. As I've said before, I don't often use recipes and just wing it most days (the liver-thing and that glorious Biriani I wrote about last year notwithstanding!) We didn't really do much different from my normal slow/fast roast lamb method, but here's what transpired anyway. Ingredients and method as follows in various grammatical tenses: One half-shoulder of lamb (I don't know whether this made a difference, but we'd frozen it before Christmas and while it was defrosting, we covered it with a clean tea-towel which absorbed all the blood and moisture). Lamb placed in a roasting tin on a trivet of garlic cloves and rosemary; rubbed with olive oil and well seasoned with sea-salt, black pepper, thyme and oregano, a half-glass of white wine in the bottom of the pan. Covered with a sea...

  Well, there you have it. More vacillation, oscillation and sadly, inevitably; isolation. Tonight's announcement from the PM comes as no surprise to anyone with even a scintilla of critical acuity. That this latest development in the sorry saga that is the pandemic and the Government's serially laggardly responses to it was flagged up, in Covid-time, eons ago; repeating yet again the same mistakes, missteps and mishandling that have dogged us since they failed to control the borders in late February last year. Those very same borders they have been crowing about having taken back control of since Brexit reared its sorry head and thus leading to one epidemiological knock back after another throughout the whole tragic affair. My old analogy of under-damped feedback loops still holds - lurching from one state to another without sufficient damping can not generate stability under any circumstances: try driving a car with buggered shock absorbers to get a mild flavour of an out of ...

    Just a quick reflection on our status as citizens of the country in which we live and work. The first BBC Radio Four Womans' Hour of the year has rightly highlighted the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whose unwarranted sentence and detention in Iran is shortly to expire, leaving her facing more spurious charges and further detention by the Iranian authorities.  Our Government's official response in a recent letter regarding its obligations to British nationals abroad, is largely one of wiping its hands of any legal involvement. A quick look at my passport reminded me of the protections we all assume to be afforded us as carriers of that document when travelling abroad: 'Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as is necessary.' A reasonable assumption on the part ...

      That Donald Trump has sought, no; pleaded, begged and to quote AP ‘badgered’, Georgia’s secretary of state Raffensperger for support in defrauding the presidential election result for that state comes as no real surprise to anyone. But to my mind, the gratifying thing about this rather pathetic conclusion to the worst Presidential tenure in modern US political history, is that the Emperor’s new clothes have been recognised, at least by the authorities that matter, at last for what they are not. There is on the face of it, hope for some retrenchment of sanity in the near future. I wish it were so on this side of the Atlantic. We have to face the fact that constitutionally at least, Johnson can continue to cause chaos for another four years, pretty much unopposed. That his government of carefully selected, under-achieving and grateful just to be there yes-people continue to screw over the electorate that gave them such a commanding majority at the last election, is li...

The late Paul Davies: Welsh Not performance piece - Paul was the epicentre of AADW, Bethesda branch, getting us all involved and motivated from the late '70's until his untimely death in 1993... And so here's a thing: Jane pointed out to me this evening that an old friend of ours from the '80's is the Production Designer on the TV series Death in Paradise ( amongst quite a few other things): Eryl Ellis, who along with many of us from Bethesda, were members of the aforesaid Association of Artists and Designers in Wales (AADW - mentioned before in despatches, blogs passim) and based in the old Baptist Tabernacle Chapel on Pen Y Bryn. Looking on Facebook, some of the pictures thrown up are truly scary, insofar as just how bloody young we all look, despite being in our late twenties and early thirties at the time. Tempus Fugit, don't it? Looking at the pictures, we had a hell of a laugh - most of it, I fear, I can't remember!  Not being one to particularly dwell...

Just a very short observation. Twice since starting this blog last March at the outset of the Covid lockdowns, I've had two major and momentary spikes in page hits; once six months or so ago and again today. The latter markedly larger than the former by a factor of four and the first still outstripping my normal traffic by a very large margin. Both bursts have originated from Israel: both happened suddenly and tailed off just as suddenly. I have no idea what this means (if anything), but I suspect bot activity. No human can be that interested in my humble ramblings, surely ;0) Disclaimer: I have no political aspirations or connections outside of a long-time membership of The Labour Party in the UK.