Observations from a Hill

  Well, there we are - fully jabbed, stamped and processed: our second Covid-19 vaccinations (Pfizer) completed this afternoon with remarkable alacrity at our local centre. With the sun out, blue skies and April waiting in the wings, we can look forward with some hope and optimism to Spring and Summer and something of a greater degree of personal freedom: please let the pubs open soon, I need a cheese & bacon toastie and a pint of Bass! More progress on the cottage front with the second and third coats of paint applied to the front door by Jane (she of the paintbrush), the woodwork for the bathroom washbasin splashback/support thing approaching some sort of dénouement and the prospect of inward-bound tourism by the twelfth of April: things are starting to look up, indeed! That's all for today as it's a bit late and supper's ready: chicken and mushroom curry and naan breads.

      The mason's law Though the slate where his hand slipped could not stand        worthy of a name, at least it could lie in his living room, set in the floor.   Er Cof unfinished, under our feet, recalls the mason and his law:         Honour the dead with your craft; waste nothing; leave no botched memorial. Jeremy Hooker

  Today we went shopping for isolating people and latterly carried on with the cottage renovations: we're into the fiddly, snagging and finishing-off stuff now, although the bathroom washbasin has yet to go back in: I'm just glueing up the new rear support/splashback at the moment, as can be seen in the spectacularly uninformative pic above. We also had the front door off its hinges today to give it a first coat of paint. While the weather's holding we'll do the same tomorrow and give it a final coat. I should have the washbasin thing finished over the next day or so, glue permitting, and we should get the bulk of the work finished by the end of the week. Tomorrow and Thursday see us both second-jabbed, which is a relief: let's just hope the current trend vis-à-vis Covid-19 infection and mortality rates continues here in Wales, and things can start to ease off a little. So, in the absence of any other real news here today, I've put up a poem by Jeremy Hooker on ...

  In the UK we tend to take for granted that we live in a democracy that holds freedom of speech and association as sacred. We also have a tendency to point the finger at other countries whose like freedoms are curtailed and trammelled by oppressive regimes and where the repression of that freedom of speech and association is more overtly applied, either at home or from abroad. Smug judgementalism is usually the de facto stance on such things - '...how can you possibly compare...?' Indeed. This approach is invariably successful as 90% of the press/media in this country are complicit in what is after all, a mass delusion. Here a subtler  and altogether more sly approach to such matters is taken. Again, I would say that the coercion used here is more Brave New World than 1984, with the establishment depending largely on the bread & circuses of the capitalist/consumerist equilibrium to ensure the status quo. Yesterday's Observer carried a short op-ed piece, buried deep eno...

  Since I assembled the table saw I wrote about some time ago, I've wanted to make some modifications to it. The list included a slightly larger table, better mitre slots and fence; and a zero-clearance blade slot with a moveable splitter instead of the original riving knife, so I could cut dado slots. The table extension I made of 3/4" ply, bolted to the original steel top: it would be easily removable, and so the original table could be used for angle cuts and to facilitate blade changes. I installed a couple of narrow t-tracks for the mitre slots, so that they could accommodate accessories, such as the home-made featherboard-type-thing you can see in the picture, as well as the crosscut sled and mitre (yet to be built for these slots). For a long time I couldn't work out a way of making a solid and accurate rip fence for the thing, but this afternoon I came up with a plan. I had been thinking along the lines of an adjustable, triangulated affair, since seeing one in an ...

  It's one year exactly since I decided to start this blog. To be honest, I didn't think I'd last the first week writing it: but here we are, twelve months and four hundred and sixty-two posts later. Knowing how intrinsically lazy I am, this surprises me greatly, and I'm grateful for whatever it has been that's motivated me thus far to keep this up, as I'm pretty certain I'd have gone completely stir-crazy, at least in the months since I finished work. The spread of content herein doesn't however surprise me, as I tend only to have focus when a goal is placed in front of me of whatever kind. One such goal is afoot with our local Covid-19 restrictions being eased a little, allowing some freedom of movement within Wales, although cross-border travel is still verboten: which will at least facilitate holidaying internal to the Principality. Getting the cottage finished is now more urgent than it was, and so to work! Until this pandemic mutates into sporadic ...

Our second vaccination dose appointments are with us - mine humorously or ominously, depending your viewpoint; on April Fools' Day, but what the heck: I'll take anything at the moment. My letter shown above, surmounted by a postcard of The Liston, Corfu Town: one of my favourite summer evening places. It seems to have been an eternity since we last strolled around there, and had drinks in the evening heat under the colonnades - although in truth it's only eighteen months: long enough, though. Here's hoping... at least next year, anyway: 2021 is definitely staycation territory for us.

Apologies for yet another pot of food you can neither smell nor taste: but as Harry Worth profoundly put it, '...there it is.' A classic two-day curry along the lines of the mythical Madras; although yesterday packed little in the way of chilli heat, the sweet gravy of plenty of onions, ginger, garlic, coconut and the 'warming' spices: Cinnamon and Indian Bay amongst them, giving that underlying body familiar to anyone who likes a good curry. Tonight I've extended it with more chicken, which I've fried off in its own spice mix and added to the pot from last night. The two frozen green chillis you see by the pot are destined for my plate as Jane prefers her food slightly less spicy than I. Last night we had Basmati rice - tonight it's shop-bought naans as I can't be bothered to make chapattis. By the way, freezing fresh chillis is one of the best things I've discovered only just recently: they work brilliantly - tasting as fresh as when they went into...

  Oh dear, Bozza's at it again: opening his mouth and letting his tongue flap in the breeze to ill effect. This PM's stream of consciousness rambles mostly make little or no grammatical or semantic sense, usually comprising random snatches of sentences, odd noises and grunts. But occasionally we get Freudian slippage, revealing exactly what is on the Bear of Little Brain's mind at the time and revealing his true, inner motivations. His latest gaffe - as usual recanted in haste, but not before it was laid bare to a public, ever-wearying of the man - was to do the full Gordon Gecko in a 'private' Zoom meeting with, I would imagine pretty astonished, backbenchers: one of whom must have dobbed him in - and to claim that the UK's Covid-19 vaccine rollout success has been afforded by 'greed' and capitalism. Not the scientists, NHS staff, the volunteers or the Armed Forces. No, no, no: it's been entirely due to the cupidity of people like himself. The only ...

When I was seventeen, maybe just turned eighteen, I was kicking my heels, having dropped out of sixth form and not having told my parents I was no longer in school, I used to do a lot of random walks: many of them along the towpaths of the myriad lengths of canal that run through and around Birmingham and beyond - sometimes eight or ten miles taken at a leisurely and contemplative pace, going nowhere in particular, returning whenever. Most of these rambles started from the City Centre, where I also spent a considerable part of my time. It's strange to think now that what I eventually sought and succeeded to escape - the City - was once my territory: my favoured stamping ground. I have to admit that I loved city life then, the bustle and the crowding: it's giving of personal anonymity, allowing one to blend into the background and observe, without being observed [fat chance anywhere, these days]. I used to frequent the museums, libraries and art galleries of the City regularly, ...

  A small shout out to Hackers' Tyres in Bangor, North Wales. This Beach Road-based family firm are my car-tyre suppliers of choice. I went there today because of a small sidewall nick on the passenger front wheel of the car. The tyre's not losing pressure and the nick looks superficial, but I don't trust sidewall damage at all: it can go very pear-shaped very quickly at speed. I'd looked in there the other day and the youngest lad asked all the right questions and came to the same conclusion as me that around town it should be OK. But this being North Wales, local means something a bit different to say Birmingham. Twenty-five miles is considered pretty local around here, and some of that will inevitably be travelled on the A55 for sure; which is effectively motorway and means sixty to seventy most of the way: a sidewall blowout on a front tyre on a small skate like my motor at that speed gives me the willies, so I opted to swap out my spare, which has a brand-new tyre ...

  How far adrift from reality is it possible for society to be before outside manipulation becomes systemic necrosis? We've come pretty close in recent months and years to just that tipping-point, where the finest of lines is crossed and there is no way for the manipulators to any longer control those they manipulate: the point at which the inmates take over the institution and anarchy fuelled by the misinformation propagated by the manipulators becomes the new 'real' in the minds of the manipulated. Think 'The Truman Show' writ global with no TV network involvement. QAnon, anti-vaxxers, preppers, flat-earthers, etc: that panoply of the paranoid and ill-informed, amplified and regenerated into false coherence in the echo-chamber of the internet, social media and lest we forget, the less-scrupulous but by no means minority organs of the mainstream media: all giving legitimacy to notions that in any normal, sane society would lie within the realms of witchcraft and lu...

I like my rugby. As a youth I really didn't want to play the game, though; I was structurally and mentally not suitable for such a physical and complex sport; lacking in power, speed or coordination. Doesn't stop me enjoying watching people who are endowed with those very properties play the game though. Tonight's game between France and Wales to decide the Six Nations leaves me, as is usual with this fixture, conflicted between my first and second teams, and the memory of our friend Jean-Charles, whose 2007 French shirt graces the vacant seat on my sofa for the game tonight. I've alluded to our mutual love of the game and our friendly rivalry over the years up until his untimely death. A hell of a game - both sides played their socks off, but in the end La Belle France suddenly got up on their hind legs and took it to us big time. All power to the finish they put to the game. JC will be grinning from ear to ear from wherever he now is. Your shirt, hat and scarf are sti...

  Sometimes the simplest things in life just turn out to be the best: the exemplars of their particular ethos. Jane & I were talking about the rather sad 'evolution' of pub food here in the UK over the past few decades. To be honest, the purists among us would rather see kitchens banned from public houses and the focus placed back where it belongs - on good beer and salty snacks. I think it's fair to say most of us have got over the smoking ban by now, although even as a reformed smoker of fifteen years or more, I still harbour nostalgic thoughts of the smoky bars and tap-rooms of my youth. Realistically, we're pretty obviously better off not inhabiting rooms full of airborne carcinogens, so I'll let that aspect of the past, shall we say, pass. The thing about pub food these days is that it has pretty much subverted the actual point of a pub: a place in which to drink and banter with like-minded people: a community centre with the added bonus of a decent drink. ...

It's a curious thing, being slightly OCD and disorganized at one and the same time, but in my case it's a fact and there it is. Being simultaneously both habitual and chaotic carries with it benefits: chaos being self-feeding - entropic - the weft of the fabric of our Universe; sans warp, meaningless, directionless: empty, parallel energy: trending to infinity. The warp holds the cloth, shapes the fabric and renders the meaning in it; checking its dissolution, at least for time enough as it is of use. Personally, the habitual reins in the chaotic to a point of balance: the harmonic offsetting the fundamental and setting the key - a root with which to cleave, and a centre still enough to calm the fray. Without the checks, without the balances, without the harmonics: there remains only chaos, and a completely chaotic existence is no life at all. One aspect informs the other, and vice versa; but truth and importance - value itself - always lie in the tension between the two poles ...

  'And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it.' Exodus 12:8 Bread: the staple; the staff of life. In lean times, bread can sustain us in the absence of much else. Grain, salt and water: the simplest of breads: unleavened, plain, unadorned and beguilingly beautiful. This barest distillate of starch and bran holds much of the history of humankind in its so basic form: the essentials of survival itself, the foundation of cuisines; the building blocks of ritual. Passover begins in ten days time, and whether you subscribe to an Abrahamic faith or not, celebrate Passover or no; this year it's worth reflecting on Exodus, given the travails we've all been subject to this last twelve-month: just maybe we can see a glimmer of light that might - might, suggest a gradual release from the tyranny of Covid-19.

  Well, we're now a twelve-month into our new, circumscribed lifestyle: a year since lockdown was first declared in the UK and a little under that since I started writing this blog. What have we learned in that time? The detail of that will depend of course on your perspective and the context in which you find yourself. As I've said before, we count ourselves lucky to live in an underpopulated and largely rural area, as well as having plenty of personal space to ourselves: this has gone a long way to temper the sting of restrictions to a large degree. For those in the more urban areas in the northeast of Wales that I worked in during the first three months of lockdown, the story has been very different for the most part. It's relatively easy to cope if you are not confined to a small house with little if any garden, as were so many I visited in my old day-job: single mothers with young children, old people stuck at home alone, the vulnerable now more so. I think in those e...

Following on from yesterday's post about the curious idea of individual autonomy, one obvious concomitant of the concept is particularly apposite during this plague year. Some feel that vaccination against pandemic disease to be an infringement of their personal human right to that autonomy; and whilst I might just [just] entertain the idea of objection to it on religious,  and certainly on particular medical grounds; the notion of objecting to it because of some notion of individual freedom of expression is just plain barmy, given the pickle the world is in at the moment. People of my age have grown up in an era when the myriad of childhood diseases that cut short the lives of many, many of our forebears prior to mass vaccination programs no longer hold sway, at least in the developed world. But the success of these programs relies on the participation of as many, if not all, of the current cohort to work. If you were born in the mid-fifties as I was, you were literally on the cus...

  Here's a thing. At some point this morning on Radio Four - can't remember either programme or context, been too busy with other stuff like shopping and cooking for the family to recall exactly - mention was made of 'Individual Autonomy', a concept apparently held dear as practically sacred to some people, the violation of which is in turn a violation of their human right to said autonomy. But what pray, does that mean exactly? Even the most libertarian-minded person has family, friends, workplace, etc: wherefore autonomy? The principle argument against socialized thinking is that it subsumes the individual into some kind of abstract, outwardly-controlled entity, usually referred to as 'The State'; as if this somehow constitutes human rights abuse. The very people who would argue this to be the case still cleave to like-minded groupings of 'autonomous individuals' all espousing their 'individuality' whilst exhibiting 'hive-mind' - someth...

  One step closer, indeed: with a bonus point win over Italy and our only rivals France just edged out by England in the closing minutes of what frankly was an amazing game of Rugby Football; we are the sole candidates for the 'Slam this year. Anyone who looks at the apparently one-sided scoreline of our game today and decides Italy were crap just don't know the game. Italy played a great match, particularly in the second half, but were let down by indiscipline: also the Welsh defence was peerless, but I would say that. The France-England game was a pure end-to-end contest and the margin at the close shows just what a good match-up this was. On the whole France were actually stronger but their scrummaging started to falter later in the game and some loose work at the breakdown told its tale, but I think they will only grow from here on in: next year's 'Nations is going to be even more interesting than this one, methinks; and I don't think the World Cup will be too s...

  If you were growing up in Birmingham in the fifties and sixties and spent any time at all in the City centre and environs, you would have been aware of the Bailey bridge that apparently had zero traffic function in Digbeth - taking vehicles up and over apparently nothing at all. This structure lasted for quite a few years before being dismantled and returning the thoroughfare to its original state, as if nothing had happened. The official story behind the bridge and the large number of heavy trucks that used to trundle in and out from under the thing, was that Birmingham was to have an underground railway system to relieve the congestion of the City above. This story was dropped early on to the tune of various rumours as to why the project had been shelved - a popular one being that the Birmingham soil would not support the tunnelling. The truth of the matter is that it was all a blind to hide the construction of an enormous, nuclear-hardened telephone exchange that would form th...

  I've just been doing some more family-tree digging around this afternoon; just picked up the cudgels again after a week's lay off. I've started on my father's father's family, which was always a bit of a mystery, with little detail floating about the family. So far, not a great deal of depth, but I know who his parents were and where they came from, so I've got grandad's siblings and parents in the tree, and confirmed from census and birth records. My grandad's unusual middle name of Hurmann (sic) doesn't appear on the census as such as he's listed as Samuel E. Harvey: but I know from the family context and dates that the household in question is undoubtedly correct. My great-aunt Leah and my great-great grandmother Roseannah [various spellings!] being the deciding factor in this. At the same time, the 1881 census confirms my great-great-grandfather Godfrey Rudge as correct and proper to my lineage - I now know where he was living in Birmingham...

  Tables -- The traces of countless meals Shared around this table - echoes Of conversation, debate, seldom argument: Are etched into its oilcloth. At this table, and so many others That we’ve shared in so many houses: Food and wine the lingua franca Of our kin and friendships. Kel Harvey

Beard -- I wore a Beard when young, to age a face I thought too smooth, lacking Gravitas Or Experience, the Lines and Grooves Of time absent, telling of a Life yet to be lived. Beard now is wire-wool and full, not hip: My Great-Grandfather channelled, the Experience, Lines and Grooves now Present, not wished-for: a Work in progress. Kel Harvey

  Well, that's it. Every damned news media outlet across the entire panoply of formats has gone Royal-nuts. The one paper that in its original incarnation back in the eighties - and what a paper it was - that deliberately shunned, as a matter of editorial policy, any mention of the Royal Family was The Independent. Now in its digital-only format it's editorial team deem it OK to just go along with all the other sheep and cover this embarrassingly trite and frankly irrelevant family feud, that at its heart is just publicity-seeking bullshit. Money for them and deflection from the issues at hand for the Government. How. Bloody. Convenient. For the government, that is. This, as has happened so many times in the past; when a government is struggling to keep the hearts and minds of the hoi polloi on message, they employ that tried and tested tactic: bread & circuses; convenient non-stories to deflect the media - hence the populace - from the real issues of the day, and if you do...

  It really is astonishing how we just seem to let double standards ride in this country. Frontline NHS staff are woefully underpaid for the vital work they do on our behalf and over the course of the pandemic so far have saved countless lives at the expense of those of many of their own cohort. One of those lives saved is that of a Prime Minister who still has the brass neck to suggest they [the Government] '...[are trying] to give them [the NHS] as much as we can at the present time...' Arrant tosh from a man who only recently was quoted by a colleague as being unable to live on his Prime Ministerial salary [blogs passim] and whose Government has shelled out billions to private companies to do absolutely bugger-all of any real use during the Covid-19 crisis [ditto]. And now there's news that an NHS worker who had the gall to actually organize a protest against the insult of a 1% pay-rise has been fined £10,000 under Covid-19 regulations for so-doing - when the pandemic ap...

  Another day draws to a close - beautiful sunset tonight: the extreme-zoomed iPhone pic doesn't really do it any justice, but it gives a flavour. We've got a lot of stuff done in both the garden and the car park today: mountains of brambles and sundry other overgrowth cut and taken to the pile for burning. The bonfire burned brightly but briefly this morning, before bogging down in the rather damp atmosphere of the early day; but progress has been good and things should be reasonably tidy for Spring; so - a good day, methinks.

  I was thoroughly dismayed - to the point of despair - though not surprised, to read - that would be naïve of me - that the world's wealthy not only have not suffered financially from the pandemic - unlike many millions of us; but that the wealth of the ten - yes, ten - richest men has grown over the last twelve-month by a frankly staggering half-a-trillion dollars. Ten men. Five-hundred-thousand-million dollars. That's fourteen dollars for every man, woman and child on this planet; and that's just the increase in their wealth. Ten people have earned enough throughout the course of this pandemic to inoculate everyone on Earth. And our Chancellor of the Exchequer stands by his decision on the NHS pay rise(?) on the grounds that the economy won't stand any more. Dear God, by any moral yardstick the whole thing's just sick & perverted, and it needs sorting. The money's out there - I rest my case.

  Well, the sun has set on yet another glorious day of blue skies and sunshine, albeit tempered by a bite in the air. We've been continuing with the clear-up of our car park, which has succumbed over the last few years to the space-voracious bramble. We topped out the tree-growth at the side of the space earlier in the week, generating significant quantities of material which will end up on the bonfire over the course of the next few days/weeks, depending on how the weather pans out. The tree-cutting looked at first like the major job, but the brambles, I suppose predictably, have proven somewhat more intransigent to deal with. Also, our car park is along our lane and just down the hill from the house and the side garden where we have the bonfire is a good thirty metres from the front gate, so all the green waste we're generating has to be manhandled some distance in relatively small amounts at a time. Still, it's good exercise and as I say, the weather has smiled on us thi...

  Three observations today of pure joy in being: seeing James & Leo for the first time in ages and Lady charging at a gallop repeatedly through puddles, just because - it’s fun! Later, the smiles of an infant on a YouTube video that I was watching about a guitar build. Reasons to keep breathing and smiling.

  All but two of the main daily newspapers available at our local shop (I can't speak for The Times as it was sold out when I went) led with the Harry/Meghan/Oprah [non] Royal Celeb axis: The Mirror, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Star, Express and Daily Mail. The soap opera begins right on cue for Sunak's budget, the NHS component of which has rightly aroused a furore amongst those affected and any right-minded folk not-so-directly-affected by it. No prizes for guessing which two papers led on this actual - somewhat rather important - news: The i and The Guardian. The rest of the media are content to provide bread & circuses for the masses in the service of the Government, providing smoke for the Chancellor's pitiful offering to the NHS staff who have been and continue to be the backbone of our well-being, particularly throughout the current health crisis. One percent . Pathetic and insulting only scratches the epidermis of an apt description of that figure. And to cit...

  We've been mulling - as you do at our age; actually mulling is practically a full-time activity at the moment - on our collective hearing loss for whatever reason; mostly age, viral infections and too much loud music in our prime, etc. Two things afflict our hearing at the moment: a severe suppression of the narrow speech band, between approximately 300Hz and 3,000Hz, and anomalies in perception of audio directionality - some sounds can't be located spatially as before. As one would expect, we have a tailing-off of frequencies above 10 kHz, quite normal in and of itself with ageing, but the drop in sensitivity to the speech band is weird - in my case particularly because my perception of frequencies between 3 kHz and my current ceiling of around 9.5-10 kHz-ish is OK, somewhat annoying as vocal sibilance is within that gamut; so whilst a lot of speech sounds muted, some voices have a pronounced edge which grates rather. This has reminded me of times past in the audio-visual bu...

  Tonight's nosh is Almond Chicken Curry - as seen on the Beeb last weekend - a stack of Madras poppadums in the foreground and a freshly-opened jar of Ahmed's Mixed Pickle to the rear. We'll be having it with Tandoori Roti when the chicken's cooked through. I've got a good feeling about this one: I'll let you know how it pans out later; if it's a goodie, it could become a staple as it's really easy to cook, despite the number of ingredients. Post Script: It was an absolute belter!

  Gratuitous Captain Beefheart pic © Elsewhere -- Whilst watching The Bill Evans Trio on a YouTube of an episode of 'Jazz 625' [anyone remember that?], I was idly scrolling through the comments, and at the bottom was the delightfully inscrutable: "...The unsightly chocolate worryingly excite because fine energetically bounce from a available dogsled. certain, jumpy punishment..." If that's not Don Van Vliet to a tee, I don't know what is: warped, surreal and as far as it's possible to be from a point as it could be. It's a pity the Captain's not here to wrap some music around it...and I'm most certainly not up to the task. The Bill Evans clip [full programme, presented by Humphrey Lyttelton, 1965] here.

  After I'd written Friday's post about my stupidly abandoned Watkins guitar amplifier, I re-read a Sound On Sound magazine article from some time ago about Charlie Watkins - the founder of Watkins Electric Music Ltd, later WEM. This is the guy who pretty much invented the modern PA system and whose company powered the sound of so many musicians in the late sixties and early seventies. Through trial, error and happenstance he produced the first genuine, modular vocal reinforcement and onstage monitoring and mixing kit, used by the likes of The Who and Pink Floyd. July 18th, 1970; Hyde Park, London - Floyd in the park. A bunch of us from school went down from Birmingham on the train to join another 100,000 or so individuals for a day's music in the summer sunshine. The gig was headlined by Pink Floyd who debuted their then latest album 'Atom Heart Mother', but also performed their long-time live staples of 'Astronomy Domine' and 'Careful With That Axe, Eu...