Observations from a Hill

It's that time of year again - we got our flu jabs yesterday morning: the herald of winter to come. We were offered a once-and-for-all-time pneumonia jab at the same time, but declined as we are due for yet another spike in the arm in the not-too-distant future: the Covid booster. I'm glad I did knock it back, the way I feel today: like last year it feels like a decidedly unwarranted hangover, only this year it's worse: even my right shoulder has come out aching in sympathy with my jabbed left. Still, as I said last year, better this than influenza itself, which ranks pretty highly on my all-time list of least-favourite-infections-I-have-had, alongside the Covid-like episode I had two or three years before Covid was a thing: a bloody miserable three weeks, at least ten days of it bedridden with the worst case of ague I've ever suffered and which left me partially deaf to boot. Only a severe case of Strep-throat one Christmas that proved resistant to all but Vancomycin, ...

I've written recently about my old man banging on about the failure of the '48 Labour government regarding their non-nationalisation of land; the biggest and most far-reaching mistake the party has to date made. The above is from today's i , and exemplifies all that is totally and utterly wrong with British society, even today, at a point when we thought that we might just be getting somewhere in class reform. Ah... nope. The above-pictured over-privileged excuse for a human being, Lady Eliza Manners; has actually had a speeding fine reduced by the magistrate - from the £100 that every other bugger would get - to £50, due to 'financial hardship'. The effrontery of a woman who lives in a £700,000 apartment, whose family home is Belvoir Castle and who in the picture is carrying a Prada bag which is probably worth more than my car is absolutely staggering. As to the magistrate, well words really do fail me. Aspirational shit in a suit probably gets close. These people ...

Is Hinckley Point C the future of stable, carbon-neutral energy generation?  The proponents of nuclear energy and the lobbyists that support the industry and the adoption of its dubious technologies would say a resounding "yes", citing the variable and some would argue unreliable supply available from renewable energy sources. The reality is as usual, somewhat different to the puffery of the corporately interested. From the coal industry and lobby in the States and elsewhere, to the oil and gas industry, still with their politically and financially connected supporters in our and governments abroad; those vested personally in the profit-streams of climate despoilers will continue to argue black is white to continue to feather their squalid little nests at the expense of the rest of the world's population, and ultimately, ironically their own, such is their myopic self-interest. The simple facts are that nuclear at best will supply around 33% of electricity, whereas renewa...

I started repairing and re-covering our old dining room chairs today, the first one shown above. We bought these and an old 1930's draw-leaf dining table when we moved into our first flat together, back in 1977. The table we left back in Birmingham, but these four chairs have been with us pretty much ever since. They've been re-covered I don't know how many times, this time with a small bolt of cloth from a charity shop. I was tempted to sand back and oil the old oak frames of these chairs, but refrained when I realised just what that would mean. When we moved up here to North Wales in 1980, we rented three successive furnished cottages before buying our first house in Gerlan, so our stuff stayed in storage back in Brum. It followed us up on moving into Gerlan Terrace, along with our old gas cooker - a 1950's New World exactly the same as the one my mom and dad had at home when I was growing up, and that cost us the princely sum of £7.00 from the classifieds of The Birm...

Well, Budget Day came and were there any great surprises save an attempt by the Tory government to appear to be espousing socialist ideals and therefore trumping the Labour Party? Not really: the bones were adequately picked over by not only the Opposition parties, but by Tory backbench critics as well. The general consensus amongst the naysayers was that it appeared to give generously(?) with one hand whilst the other snatched it away with interest. Classic Tory budget, then. One of the more entertaining passages of the debate was when Ian Blackford, leader of the SNP - for those who aren't fans such as we, he's probably the best Parliamentarian we've had for a very long time - called out the Chancellor over reducing passenger duties on domestic flights between Inverness and the Highlands and Islands; as well he might have: there ain't any, anyway. Oops , as Jane put it. He also pointed out quite rightly that short-haul 'commuter' flying is far more destructive...

One of our pipe dreams - ain't that a lovely phrase? - has long been to own and run our own second-hand bookshop. We just love 'em, especially those run by and aimed at bibliophiles of all stripes. I suppose we have a couple of thousand books here, dotted about between shelves and boxes - it used to be more I think, but I can't be sure, and I haven't stopped buying books, so it could be more. My best personal library space was an upstairs room at number six Gerlan Terrace, the first house we bought. It had a 'corridor' formed by  a six-foot plus high double-sided bookshelf, which opened out into a small space with an open fire, two overstuffed armchairs with a full-size chessboard between them, and my easel and work table by the window. Magic on a winter's evening with a glass of wine and a roaring fire. A couple of instances spring to mind from when I was still working. I met a woman whose broadband I'd been sent to sort out - then in her late eighties ...

We do indeed live in ridiculous and frankly scary times. A time when Croydon police are investigating a 'potential crime' over Crystal Palace fans displaying an anti-Saudi flag at a recent match with Newcastle over the latter's takeover by a Saudi Arabian-led consortium. That it depicted what everyone actually knows to be a true picture of Saudi Arabia seems not to count for much with the authorities. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was branded a "... a psychopath..." by a former Saudi security official, Saad Jabri. Uncorroborated though the statement was, I think evidence enough is out there, not least Saudi funding of terrorist organisations: anyway, I personally know enough people who have worked out there who will attest to the unpleasant nature of the regime and its ruling family. A time when NHS employees are being actively 'gaslighted' by not just their managers, but by other employees who are in thrall to and primed by those managers: as I've ...

My birthday today - sixty-seven years on this planet, and still nothing makes any sense to a common-sense mind. We have a climate-change forum which the two largest global polluters have decided not to attend - China and Russia: coal & gas interests taking precedence over the planet's good in the pursuit of profit. The West keeps touting the need for strong market ties with China in particular, whilst China strengthens its global nuclear potential by testing stuff that can ultimately be deployed against the very nations to which they are already inextricably bound economically. Within spitting distance of the climate-change talks in Glasgow is one of the largest methane plumes in the UK - a leaky pipeline just offshore from the talk's venue; apparently these plumes are detectable every four kilometres or so along the pipelines - so basically all over the damn' show. Methane is the largest gaseous contributor to global warming, far and away above carbon dioxide. At the s...

The world as most of us know it now started here: in the unassuming form of a box with a torn label on it, proclaiming "This machine is a server - DO NOT POWER-DOWN!!" This was the computer upon which, [Sir] Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web and the HTML code with which we all still view its content. Millenials would most definitely not recognise 'The Internet' of the mid-nineties, as the whole thing took off at a gentle canter, becoming an exponential gallop by the end of the decade, and resulting in todays utter global social and economic dependence on was originally conceived of as a convenient means of sharing papers and documents among the worldwide community of academia. What was in the beginning a playground for geeks (myself, friends and colleagues included) became the hunting-ground of corporate business, eventually spawning its very own 'native' corporations in the New Age of Digital Capitalism; created by the very geeks themselves, who re...

Yesterday marked the 55th anniversary of the Aberfan disaster. I had recently started secondary school that year and we had a weekly charity collection in our form meeting in the morning before lessons began. The usual collection was a handful of copper - ha'pennies, pennies at best; but the day we collected for Aberfan, the amount of money in the pot was several orders of magnitude greater than the usual shrapnel in the pot. I used to have the figures in my head, but time and age have succeeded in denying such exactitude. I think the event resonated with us and our parents particularly because it was our generation of children particularly who were swept up in the appalling events of that day.

So, copper's on the way out as the basis of telephony in 2025: the dial tone will officially be dead. No surprises there: it's been on the cards since the decision was taken back in 2017 to terminate PSTN and ISDN services and replace them with fibre-based VOIP (voice over internet protocol). This makes sense, given the speeds and bandwidth available using fibre technology, which is improving all the time; gigabit access now readily available on FTTP (fibre to the premises) - by the way, my current pet hate is the use of the word premise as the singular form of premises: wrong! - call me old-fashioned and pedantic if you like, but it just grates. As to the Great Switch Off, the main issue that this throws up is the question of 999 calls to the emergency services. Currently available on mobile (coverage permitting) and PSTN (just about on tap everywhere), this service will be limited to mobile and VOIP after 2025. The problem is with this is that if you get a power outage which ...

A curious thing, but all my Indonesian traffic through here has dried up this week. The last time this happened Hong Kong came back from the doldrums briefly, to be replaced by Indonesia again when that glut disappeared for the second time. I can't figure the dynamics of all of this. I did try and sign up for Google Analytics to glean some more detailed metrics on the traffic through this site, but the hoops you have to jump through to get anywhere with it remind me of the early days of using the internet. The setup of even the most simple things used to be so painful that even a much younger, geekier self often struggled to configure stuff without assistance. It seems that some things are just resistant to change and the sort of streamlining into black boxes that is necessary to render processes accessible to a mass user-base. Just because I want to know more about my site's readership dynamics shouldn't mean I have to learn the instructional equivalent of War & Peace ...

Met up with someone today on going over to the Anglesey Arms with Joe for a pint, whom I've not spoken to for a good while, what with the COVID upheaval and all the changes that have happened to our old pub in the interim. Talking about life and careers got me musing on just how I got where I am at present and where I might be going henceforth. Fact is, I left school halfway through sixth-form without much of an idea what the future might hold and not much particular concern either. Eventually fetching up at my first art college in the Potteries - North Staffs Polytechnic, I embarked on a lifetime of improvisation and expediency: going with whatever presented itself and guided accordingly to the next step. I remember us going for a drive around the Black Country with Dad when I was in junior school, just cruising around and having the boundaries of that very particular area delineated from its neighbours. At one point, we passed a Labour Exchange (look it up if you're not old e...

Pictured is a rather old Pentax Spotmatic body undergoing a bit of minor surgery for sticky mirror syndrome. The gear and pinion just to the left of centre work with the L-shaped lever just to their right, to both cock the shutter and mirror trains, raising the mirror, firing the shutter and returning the mirror to its position after the shutter closes. The problem with cameras as old as these is that the lubricants for all of these actions dries over time and stuff stops doing quite what it should. After firing, the L-shaped lever should flip out of the way of the spring-loaded lever that runs in the slot you can just see beneath: a small pin on the top of the gear should just flick the L and release the mechanism to reset the mirror. If this fails to whack it at just the right speed, the mirror sticks up. The usual trick is to apply some very light oil to the gear and pinion, and to the small shaft of the L-shaped lever. I successfully rescued an SP500 this way [blog posts passim] an...

A bag of daff bulbs to be planted this autumn, ready for the spring next year - a positive and practical move on a very small scale in a very small part of North Wales. I just hope that all the fine talk and 'plans' for the environment and our future being touted in the run-up to the Glasgow COP26 talks actually result in something equally basic and practical: it's not often I agree with the opinions of our Monarchy, but we do need more action than talk. We really are running out of time...

Jane and I went over to Menai Bridge for lunch today and had a walk around Church Island beforehand. This tiny island is reached via a walkway over Menai Strait and is one of our favourite places for a stroll when we're out that way. I took a few photos using the Minox 35PL I mentioned the other day (Mounting Fuji) to finish off the roll of film. I didn't bother taking anything with my iPhone this time round, so we'll have to wait a while for the results to come back from the lab. The island (Ynys Tysilio in Welsh: named after Saint Tysilio - Ynys being the Welsh for island) houses Tysilio's church, the current, tiny and atmospheric little chapel dating back to the early fourteen hundreds, although the saint and his original founding are rather earlier - a plaque above the door of the current structure reads that he founded the church in 630 AD. I love this little place and have visited it often over the forty-one years we've lived here. After the rather short circu...

Another day, another project! The camera pictured is an example of the smallest 35mm film camera range ever produced. The Minox 35 series were a remarkable example of German engineering and followed on from their long and storied history of producing the iconic 16mm 'spy cameras' that featured in so many real and fictional espionage situations throughout the Cold War. Introduced in 1974, and still being sold by the likes of myself several years later, many examples of the various models in the series are still out there, to be had for a few pounds on eBay and the like. I have a 35PL which appears to function OK: I'm currently running a roll of expired colour film through it on test at the moment [blog posts passim]. The one featured in the pic has an obvious shutter problem - like it doesn't actually function properly! I'm certain the issue is just dust and lubrication, like most old mechanical cameras: admittedly there is a simple electromechanical component to the...

Oh, what are we to do with Pooh, Who, to be fair, is a bear Of little brain, but has It can be said,  A vaulting ambition to be King of the World. Thus far, our ursine PM has managed to confuse and discombobulate the core of his own party, and to a good degree his own cabinet, by hoovering up ideas left and left from pools of philosophical and economic thought that his Neo-liberal forebears - the children of Thatcher and Adam Smith - really must gag on in contemplation thereof. Oh, do shut up, Eeyore, you gloomy old sod. And Piglet - another G&T if you please, my good porker, I can feel another U-turn coming on. The thing is, Pooh is a creature of the mob: he gravitates towards publicity - any - and the rewards that obtain from the fame and notoriety it brings - he has a skill, call it a native cunning if you will - to appeal to those whose interests he really has absolutely no concern for: red wall voters, his own party or business itself. He presents himself as the toff on t...

I fell down the eBay rabbit hole earlier, searching for more bargain bundles of old photographic kit, more often than not stumbling on little piles of crap for too much money; stuff that back in the day was the stock in trade of the less serious end of photographic retail: worth little then and worth-less now. Anyhow, in searching for Alice amongst the dross, I came upon a Soviet era 16mm high-speed cine camera, one " SKS-1M-16", which looked  rather  familiar to me as it was a straight clone of a  Fastax that we used to use  when I worked in Mech. Eng. at Brum University all those years ago [blog posts passim]. You can see the exact similarity from the eBay pic on the right, compared to the picture from my old Focal Press textbook on High Speed Photography [left]. The only real difference is above the viewfinder on the Fastax, which has an extra port for overlaying extra data on the film as you record the event itself. These cameras had a revolving prism shutte...

Yesterday I took the car in for its MOT in Bangor, and took the opportunity to have a leisurely amble around town, making mental notes for a photographic project I've had in mind for a while, and eventually ending up sitting in the sun down by the pier for an hour or so, reading. I took the pic above as I'd noticed the distinctly autumnal colouring of the small tree in the centre, in contrast with an otherwise summery scene. Jane thought I'd filtered the image, but this as it was taken on my iPhone, unadulterated. Point taken, though, the colours do look slightly exaggerated: a bit like Fuji film. This brings me to one of my current film forays: I've just loaded up a roll of out-of-date Fujicolor 400 negative film into a Minox 35 - this promises to be pretty much the ultimate shoot-from-the-hip camera as it's so tiny and quiet in operation. When I get through the roll and get it processed, I'd like to try printing the negs onto Multigrade B&W paper, as I...

Good evening from the Hill, and a splendid sunset has lit upon the place I call home: we'll lose the sun erelong behind the low hills that flank Bethesda to the west. Autumn has finally arrived. I was going to issue forth with a caustic rant about Pooh's Marbella jaunt, leaving us all to ponder just what the bloody hell he thinks the job of PM is actually about, all the while claiming it to be a 'working' holiday - go tell it to the Marines, Pooh: you wouldn't know a genuine day's work if it jumped up and slapped you in the face. But I won't, as whatever the brainless bear does will always be passed over lightly by those that have influence in current UK politics - 'that's just Pooh being Pooh. But he's actually a decent sort of bear, really: good school, and all that...' As I say, Autumn's here, as evidenced by our Silver Birch finally turning russet, the fall soon to come. I wish his fall would arrive as soon.

A mixed bag of stuff going through my head today: I initially wanted just to comment on the piece in the FT Weekend about whether the music business can rid itself of its historically normalised sexual abuse. Centering on the R Kelly case, it highlights the depth of the problem and the difficulty faced by those who are trying to reform a hitherto entrenched culture of misogyny and paedophilia, and bring the industry into line with society. I was reminded of the art school scene in the 1970s - I went for my interview at what was a politically radical college in 1975. One thing that stood out from that meeting [with an all male interview panel] was a comment made by one of the lecturers, whose name escapes me, that they always 'allowed' a number of female candidates in, irrespective of merit, because 'they were decorative' [I paraphrase as the exact wording is lost to memory, but the crux and substance is accurate in intent]. This struck me as extraordinarily crass, even ...

Following on from yesterday's post: do my eyes and ears deceive? Has the OECD really pulled off the coup that we've been hoping would happen for the last decade or two? On the surface it looks like the realisation that global corporates are out of control and need to be brought in line with the rest of the business world has finally got through and something is actually being done about it. This ambitious multi-governmental move purports to be moving towards the demise of tax-havens, and to the enforcement of corporate taxation across multiple national domains. Whether this is genuine progress or just lip-service, only time will tell: I'll be looking for more flesh on the bones of the story over the next few days. I do hope it's not just smoke and mirrors, as the world really does need a reset on big business and taxation: we were taken totally by surprise by the speed of the rise of tech and the internet; and like all disruptive periods in history, a small number of in...

It should be a workers' market out there at the moment, with more vacancies than candidates driving up offered wages to entice people into posts. Ordinarily, a good thing, but the skewed economy we suffer doesn't quite work in the naïve way that the government suggests. In the sixties and seventies this might have been the case, with worker representation via strong unionisation ensuring that wage levels were adequately remunerative. These days, the concept of an 'adequate' remuneration is elastic at best. The so-called 'average' annual wage in this country is £31,000, a wholly misleading statistic, as are all averages: the reality still is that the vast majority of people earn far, far less than this; with most earning less than what was a decent wage thirty years ago. I read in today's i that Sir Peter Bottomley considers an MP's salary of £82,000 per annum "...really grim... [to live on]" To most of us, that stipend would allow us to live w...

Lunch with Wendy & Phil at The Anglesey Arms today,  a good long jangle and some good beer and food. Afterwards, we took a short drive out to Bryn Celli Ddu: a Neolithic site excavated in the 1920s, and situated between Llanedwen and Llanddaniel Fab. The approach to it used to be across the surrounding fields, very often quite boggy. CADW, the Welsh monuments agency, have constructed a good, dry and sheltered walk-in that skirts the field housing the mound, revealing its presence only at the very last step of the ten or fifteen minute walk from the car park: a nice theatrical touch which saves one's first sight of it till just the right moment. Above is taken looking out from inside, against the sunlight. An atmospheric place and well worth a visit.  

I'm not entirely sure what is going on in British politics just at the moment, with the Tory government offering conference what on the face of it are largely socialist ideas. With the single exception of taxation, and that's moot, given the centrist nature of the current Labour Party; they are touting a high-wage, high-skilled, high-productivity economy. Quite how all this is to be paid for, save by raising taxes, is unclear. Certainly, a high wage base would bring more movement of money, as more people are actively brought into the economy instead of lingering at its margins as at present. But the onus of all this falls squarely on the shoulders of business [as it should, in my book] and quite how this will sit with those whose margins and dividends will be hit remains to be seen. I for one welcome any move towards a genuine 'levelling up', but I somehow can't bring myself to a) trust them to deliver in any meaningful way, and b) rid myself of the sneaking feeling...

OK - let's get meta. The above image is a quick iPhone snap of a photograph I took in Athens, just below the Acropolis, in 1979. The guy featured was a tourist portrait photographer of a kind that was already a dinosaur: his camera was designed to shoot directly onto photographic paper - aided by the stupendous Greek light. Processing this in the camera box/darkroom would produce a negative image, which was then placed in the fold-down holder seen at the front of the camera, and then re-photographed to produce a positive image, in turn processed in the box/darkroom of the camera and resulting in the finished portrait for sale to the punter when dry. In the image above, you can also see the reflection of my right hand in the glass of the photo frame in which the original picture has lain since God knows when: the print was made in the darkroom at Mech. Eng., Brum Uni, when I worked there - over forty years ago [blog posts passim]. Layers of observation and history woven digitally fr...

In the light of today's outages of FaceBook, WhatsApp & Instagram, two recent articles I read kind of stand out - the first was in the current issue of Wired, and the second from this weekend's FT magazine. In the FT, Tim Harford talks of the potential benefits of AI, and its drawbacks as it stands so far. In his description, AI currently is neither a murder weapon nor a cure for cancer, but perfectly good for knocking in nails. Given the experiences of one woman, reported in Wired's October issue, by Maia Szalavitz, I don't think I would be quite so generous, on the face of it. The details of her case are grim: a US psychology graduate living with endometriosis, she suffers a very bad episode that sees her in hospital on opioids for the extreme pain she is suffering. Admitted for observation and placed on intravenous analgesia, all was going normally until her fourth day there. Out of the blue she is effectively accused by a different member of staff from the one w...

No matter what anyone might offer as an excuse for the situation, the economy is struggling, and badly. The reasons for this are complex and historical; not simply Covid and Brexit related: they're just the accelerants in the bonfire that's been smouldering away for decades - mostly under the watch of, and at the behest of successive Tory-led governments, no argument - and which has now decided to team up with climate chaos - again of our own doing - to throw us a perfect shit-storm of economic woe. Always hands-off in principle, the Tories normally sail through on a rising tide of temporarily-induced prosperity (for some), usually by flogging off to the private sector either what was hitherto publicly-owned, or in more recent times, giving back to the private sector that which the British public have bailed out without consultation after the private sector have buggered up what should have been a perfectly good business: think banks here, people. Long supply chains, low profit...

This week's FT Weekend carries the leader: 'The Mixed Success of Furlough Schemes', referring of course to our adoption during the pandemic of what is essentially a US phenomenon. It makes no mention of the Dark Money alluded to in the same organ a few weeks ago (FT Magazine July 31st/August 1st), referring to the substantial funding contributed to the Tory party by prominent business people; apparently, largely in return for the ear of the significant within the circles of power. By contrast, I read a piece via openDemocracy today, reporting that the furlough scheme has been defrauded, mentioning one company's activities in particular: KAU Media Group; a marketing outfit with no relevant experience or skills-base, who were awarded two PPE contracts last year, each of around £20M. Despite the firm's employees being furloughed under the then new scheme, they were expected under duress to continue full-time working as normal, on 80% pay. This is just racketeering. If ...

Pictured is the Pentax SP500 that I wrote about last year [Autodidactics and The Internet] - an eBay rescue from around 2018. As you can see, it's a beautifully-preserved example of the marque, and only cost me twenty-five quid at the time, which I consider to be an absolute bargain. It had a minor lubrication issue which, as I wrote at the time, was easily solved. What is historically significant about this camera is its relationship with its more famous sibling, the Spotmatic - the one every camera buff over a certain age remembers as being the iconic '60s 35mm camera of choice of just about anyone in the fashion and documentary photography businesses as the time. The salient difference between the two is the question of its apparent maximum shutter speed. The SP500, as can clearly be seen in the photo, was sold as having 1/500th sec. as its fastest speed, whereas the 'upmarket' Spotmatic could claim 1/1000th sec. - a whole stop of exposure faster [for those out there...