Observations from a Hill

As they say, truth is always stranger than fiction. Early last year I wrote about my Great Great Aunt's involvement in the running of the White Horse Inn at Clun, Shropshire. Today I asked the current landlord whether he knew much of the history of the pub and his antecedents. I told him that one of my relatives had run the place some hundred or so years ago, to which he asked "What name?". "Graves" answered I. He then filled in a few gaps to the story: apparently, [Job] Graves had disappeared quite early on in their tenancy, but my Great Great Aunt Elizabeth Graves[neé Southall] was owner of the place until its sale in 1921, along with the adjoining buildings on the corner of Market Square and a parcel of agricultural land to boot. The picture above is of a framed facsimile of an auction poster of that sale, which has been staring me in the face for nearly thirty years, every time we visit the place. I've been blithely unaware that my relative's name is...

A dog and a log fire: what's not to like? Apologies for the rather lacklustre photo, but a black pooch backlit by the firelight sort of forms a black hole, and I didn't want to use flash and spook the Lady, so there we are. A cold day and a cold night in prospect, but at least the storms have abated for the while.  A better few days are forecast, so we'll see how the week pans out. We await instructions in the light of the  new Covid variant - if the government can stir its collective arse and decide something that makes the remotest sense - breath holding, not. Catch you tomorrow...

Where have we seen this pattern before? A new Covid variant is announced, the information about it is understandably conflicting, but it is marked as a 'variant of concern'. When taxed as to their plans in response, the government shies away from plan 'B' and continues apace with its laissez faire 'let's see what happens' approach. Up until recently, most of the British public have reacted well and complied with the restrictions inevitably imposed in a global pandemic, despite the vacillations, dual standards and false starts - not to mention the financial sleaze - of the government. We are on the whole genuinely sensible - as are most of the human race - and will generally do anything that is logical and reasonably asked of us in such a situation. The problem is that when your government sends out so many conflicting signals, the margins of sensible society start to rear their heads big time - the anti-vaxxers, flat-earthers and sundry other tinfoil-hat-wea...

I was listening to photographer Giles Duley talking on Radio 4's Soul Music this morning. Retelling his return to photographic reporting in conflict zones after being seriously injured in Afghanistan - losing both his legs and an arm to a landmine - and his subsequent work on the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe, and the thought struck me that perhaps the only way to change the appalling attitude of the UK Home Office and our Home Secretary in particular to the plight of these people would be to force Patel and Johnson - in fact the whole damned Cabinet - to spend time on the ground in the places that these poor souls are trying to escape - real time: no guided tours, no political showmanship, no flim-flam. Preferably with no hotel rooms and preferably for at least a month or two - I think we can spare them for a few weeks - just to give them a flavour of exactly what it's like to be a human being trapped in a situation over which they have no control, in a land whe...

As is usual when current events are just too depressing to comment on, a diary post tonight. The wind is knife-sharp today and the first wintry flurries of sleet (not to be confused with hail - a largely thunderstorm and summer related phenomenon) have made an appearance. The prospects for the weekend aren't too great with Storm Arwen making an appearance: the North-East of Scotland and England already being hammered. With a bit of luck things will settle down by the end of Sunday. The mountains have a dusting of white and were surrounded by the most ominous cloud cover most of the day: not a great day for walking on the hills. I'm just glad I no longer have to work out in this weather, it really can be seriously unpleasant climbing poles and going down holes at this time of year: all behind me, thank Christ. Still, Christmas will soon be over and Spring beckons, the turning of the year as far as I'm concerned: onward to Summer!

The phrase 'Economic Migrants' - much touted by the right-wing press and our decidedly unsavoury Home Secretary, Priti Patel, as recently as today in Parliament - fills me with righteous anger: especially now in the light of the tragedy that panned out in the dangerous waters of the Channel this week. Where on earth do these pundits get their authority to play God with people's lives? The simple fact is that if you are willing to risk your very existence, and your family's, to make your way across continents and the busiest shipping lane in the world in the heart of Winter, you will have good reason. Visiting KFC and Starbucks or hoping for Universal Credit will not be on your agenda. Who in the Lord's name has the right to triage these human beings into random groupings whilst they're in one of the most lethal transits possible and to decide their reasons for risking life and limb in so doing? People in dire straits in war-torn countries and dictatorships have ...

Back in the nineties, we used to play a computer game based on RMS Titanic, which consisted of solving a series of problems/challenges before the inevitable happened. It was one of the first immersive games I remember and was actually quite impressive technically, given the state of the tech in those days: and it was fun and instructive to play. We could have navigated our way around the real ship, it was that accurate and detailed. Like most such simulations, once you've cracked the game, the shine goes off the experience: like noughts and crosses, it soon becomes pointless, as in the eighties film 'War Games', where 'Tic-Tac-Toe' taught the war computer 'WOPR' the futility of Global Thermonuclear War. If only things were so simple now. We're are all tied up in knots by algorithms that most people are still truly unaware of and it seems uncaring about. But life carries on: the rich become richer and the rest struggle: the only option seems to be 'ga...

Judging by Doris' Pooh's unbelievably execrable recent performance in front of the CBI, it's no wonder that chaos prevails throughout the land or that it appears that the very fabric of our society is under threat. Forget the pernicious influence of social media, gang culture or even the pandemic & climate chaos - the existential threat that we face as a society is crass and class idiocy - the total inability to actually organise *anything* or do stuff properly at great expense to the rest of us. Venal interests aside, our sorry excuse for a Prime Minister is simply, plainly, sadly inept. Devoid of any shred of talent outside of self-promotion, he is lazy, will not read the briefs given him and is frankly totally incapable of 'winging it' when faced with the consequences of his own, wilful lack of preparation; improvisation, let's face it, an essential skill for the committed bullshitter; all this the knock-on effect of years of [Tory instigated] erosion of ...

Leo has just pointed out that there's some interesting stuff buried in Guardian Online and the BBC Online this morning, relating to an agreement reached by the Welsh Labour Government and the minority opposition party, Plaid Cymru. That this news hasn't surfaced in print or on TV is significant: it's either an attempt to bury the piece, or as is more likely, the usual English attitude that not much of significance happens on this side of Offa's Dyke. Whatever, we don't give much of a toss for metropolitan England for our part either. The agreement is an operational and voting one, rather than a coalition, per se: with no government appointments for Plaid envisaged. However it means in practice that Labour will have a practical working majority over the official opposition, the Welsh Tories. The significance of this arrangement can be seen in the proposed raft of policies outlined in the buried news articles: The establishment of rent controls Free childcare for all ...

I've got quite a few cameras and lenses to test, a good deal of well-expired 120 roll film to expose although very little 35mm left in stock, and a load of film I ought to get on and develop: the B&W stuff really needs me to get on with starting the darkroom build, but the weather's turning cold, the studio workshop is colder still and the cottage income is on hold until early next year. I remember also that I was intending last year to get some glass plate ortho for my 5"x4" and that my Dad's Super-Baldax 6x6 really deserves repair. There's a couple of Minox 35's that need attention and the GAF rangefinder needs finishing before test. Oh, and the two old Pentax's that need their slow-shutter-speed trains looking at, maybe, although they're useable at normal speeds. Lots and lots to do, then. Who said retirement was about boredom and not having anything but daytime TV to occupy one's time? Aside from the cameras and the darkroom project, th...

Just a quick diary post tonight as I've been preoccupied with watching the last of the autumn international rugby. Currently watching France v New Zealand - France are playing a blinder. A brilliant try between the posts converted for 37-25... and the final score is 40-25: a magnificent win for France and a great day for the northern hemisphere as a whole. I wish my old mate JC was still around to have seen his country beat the All-Blacks in Paris after so many years - three years before he was born in fact: 1973.

It's a complex thing, society - it does exist, folks - despite the quackery of the neo-liberalist factions, the greedy, and the entitled who are still living in the eighteenth century. Fact is, the planet is basically buggered and COP26 has offered so little and kicked the can down the road so far that optimism is pointless. Radical change is needed on every level: politics as we know it is showing itself to be fundamentally flawed where it comes to its basic premise, its raison d'être, its purpose: to serve the people of the world and to let's face it, make the world work. Current economic theory - macroeconomic theory specifically, is basically wrong, and I've felt this way for over forty years, since I first chanced on this heinous distortion of reality. The thing is, without absolute reform of world economics and subsequently politics itself, the environmental issues we face will never be resolved. There are two things at issue here, one abstract and one so very rea...

Well, today the Tories unveiled the current 'version' of their plan for the improvement of the trans-Pennine rail network - the 'Northern Powerhouse Network' - promised faithlessly by his Majesty the Emperor Doris of Pooh. Except that the plan had changed. Radically. Well, watered down really; much to the dismay - didn't see this coming - of the very Red Wall voters who had ennobled (sorry) enabled Doris' accession to power in the first place. Now you would imagine that strategically this might seem to be a bit of a faux pas, or even a self-inflicted shot in the foot, but I guess Doris has convinced himself - yet again - that his voting public just won't notice on account of his obvious charm and charisma *cough*. He didn't even grace the House with his presence at the launch of his vastly truncated plans, but rather chose instead to swan around taking photo-ops on trains for the national media. This pattern of behaviour is typical of Our Glorious Leader...

'Acts of great public service' - your Great Leader Doris in this afternoon's select committee meeting, referring to to ennobled Tory donors with respect to moves to prevent cash for honours peerages being dished out in future. In almost the same breath, he'd justified it all by saying that the only alternative for the Tory Party's future functioning was a publicly-funded political system, as The Labour Party could trust to draw on substantial resources from the Trade Unions; sums not available to the Tories without those donors. Surely this pointedly elucidates just how far out of date the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland are. A party originally of the landed, privileged and aristocratic, who by dint of birthright owned most of the wealth of the nation in their hands, and whose party consisted almost entirely in those very classes, was originally wealthy in a way that kept them at the forefront of political power in these islands...

The above pictured is very soon to be a thing of the past. The Victoria Hotel in Menai Bridge is soon to close under its present family ownership, who have understandably sold up to a large chain with pockets deep enough both to refurb what is after all a large and expensive to run old hotel, and to weather any further pandemic-related financial setbacks that might befall the hospitality business. I've been eating their estimable bar snack of a cheese and crispy bacon toastie here for over a quarter of a century on and off, and drinking occasionally here for much longer than that. The place closes for three months in a few days time, to re-open under the Greene-King umbrella Chef & Brewer. Another personal venue gone for good, to add to all the others that have closed or mutated over the last few years. Over the road to The Anglesey Arms it is, then...

I've had such a day of ranting about the idiocy of just about everything - Doris, COP, Covid, the insanity of 'modern' business practices, crap workers' rights - und so weiter, that I'm stepping back for an hour or seven to let my blood pressure drop to a safer level. So - today has otherwise been a misty affair punctuated by a very enthusiastic Lab-Collie charging around the gardens like a beautifully demented loon, chasing a ball and carving great divots out of the grass like a dirt-biker hammering around the sharp turns. Joyful to watch, even in the soft drizzle that's been the main feature of today's weather. Otherwise, I've started to replace the light seals on the little rangefinder camera I renovated the other day (pictured). Once that's done, I'll get a film through it and see how well it goes: as I said before, I think it will turn out to be a good 'un and a keeper!

I've just witnessed one of the most embarrassing government press conferences ever: forty-five minutes of squirming waffle by our Glorious Leader, Doris Pooh, unfortunately somewhat tempered by the obviously intelligent and considerably more erudite Alok Sharma's contributions to the affair. I've just said to Jane that ordinarily one would enjoy great schadenfreude watching the Leader wriggle on the myriad hooks of press questions, but this performance by the end was so bum-clenchingly awful - think dragging someone off the street into the Royal Institution and shooing them onstage to explain Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in mathematical detail, despite them not having even a GCSE in Physics or Maths - and it was so much worse than that - that I felt some deep down human empathy for the eejit. I squashed that emotion sharpish, as to be perfectly frank he don't deserve the sympathy vote from anyone, folks. If I were a Tory - and I have never even remotely consid...

We took a spin over to Caernarfon the other day and had a wander around the place - it is a very nice town, and we hadn't been there for a good while. I used to get there frequently when I was working - like pretty much anywhere else from Barmouth to Aberdaron and Deeside. We did a trawl of the charity shops for potential bargains, but not a great deal was on offer, unfortunately. You takes your chances, and sometimes the net's empty! We were looking into the window of a small place just off the Maes, as we were walking back to the car park; where there were several old film cameras on display. A chap in the shop gesticulated for us to come in, so we we did. The two chaps running the shop were more than photographic enthusiasts, but photographers themselves, I guess both now in their eighties, but committed to keeping the gallery/shop going as long as they are both still vertical. They even sell film, so I intend to become a regular visitor to their little emporium! I've us...

Smug, privileged, self-serving: this image sums up your Prime Minister and his ilk to a tee. A more odious individual is hard to conceive of. The worst of it is that an awful lot of working-class people voted for this dangerous idiot. I didn't, and neither did anyone else of my (boomer) orbit. But some of you buggers out there were taken in by the arrant bullshit these people peddle. I bet you would have bought snake-oil, too. These people are poison to the rest of us, period. Wake up and vote the twat out at the very first opportunity allowed to us. Please. We're in the shit otherwise.

Pictured is my Ibanez Artcore jazz-box, an eBay bargain from about five years ago. I got the Ibanez vibrato arm (I can't bring myself to use the incorrect 'tremolo' or 'trem arm') similarly from eBay a year or so after I bought the guitar. The roller bridge was bought just after that. I'd always wanted a jazz semi-acoustic: something inside me has always wanted to be Barney Kessel or Joe Pass, although I know that ain't never going to happen, but whatever! I did think that it might inspire me to at least make the effort to learn at least a couple of jazz standards, but so far it's not thus transpired. I think maybe I'll change back to the flat-wound strings and give it another crack. I owe it to myself and the guitar to at least give it a try!

It's one of those days when I should really have a shedload of stuff to say about the current realtime update on our Glorious Leader's shenanigans; but I really, really can't be arsed: today's revelations and Doris's pronouncements - ("What, me worry?") - are just too depressing. I can't think of a time in my life when politics was ever this bad, and believe me, it has been pretty bloody bad from time to time; all Tory administrations and New Labour alike have served as a source of personal Weltschmerz over the decades. The eternal optimist in me believes that this regime is entering its final days and that Doris Pooh is now pissing off people who are infinitely better connected than he: a little posh fish in a very big pond full of even posher piranhas (I know piranhas are river fish, just go with it). His undoing is nigh.

So this is where Pooh was when his fall-guys were fronting the un-front-able at last night's debate on - well, you know what - doing the Doris dance with people 'oop North, in guess what? one of the very hospitals that this bunch of deadheads has practically brought to its knees, just like the rest of the NHS: a visit that really could have waited; pointless and so out of context that it was. What galls further is that it was the excuse given for our pathetically spineless leader's non-appearance at what, after all was a significant debate at which he should have been forced to answer some very awkward questions hanging over his conduct [yet again]. The simple and widely reported fact [again!] that he was back in town well in time to attend the debate further strengthens the view that this man is simply an unprincipled sociopathic coward who likes the money and status of his position, but shies continually away from the responsibilities of the highest office in the land. Hi...

Well, surprise, surprise; Doris Pooh is not present at the debate on Parliamentary standards: the very debate that has been triggered by his own actions in last week's abortive attack on Parliamentary democratic process. The collective smirk of the Tory party is being wiped off their collective physiognomy, with the entire Opposition laying into - entirely justifiably - every last infringement that the Bear-Of-Little-Brain has committed since becoming Prime Minister. And the Leader of the House simply sits silently without contribution - his job is House business, after all - in his place, normally to the right hand of the Prime Minister; predictably absent, as I've said. Now we have Alberto Costa (Conservative, Leicestershire South) arguing that the processes operated in enforcing standards are flawed and that reform of those processes is necessary. This is generally agreed upon on both sides of the House, although Sir Keir Starmer's contribution to the debate as Leader o...

There is good lead piece in this week's FT Weekend, House & Home section, which clarified an aspect of super-wealth I'd not registered before. Imagine if you will, that you are a self-employed jack of all trades tradesperson who turns their hand to just about anything and everything; taking on one-off jobs or short-term contracts without any single formal business structure. Throw in an ad hoc accounting system with sporadic and somewhat opaque book-keeping, minimal tax payments and a general air of inaccessibility, your money held in various current and savings accounts and credit spread across a dozen cards. Now imagine you want to buy a property, maybe to live in, maybe to rent or maybe to just sit on and flip as the price rises. You go to a bank or building society and ask for a mortgage; preferably deposit-free and below normal interest rates. Oh, and you just haven't quite gotten around to this years accounts and you've been on holiday for the last three month...

Well, we lost the game, but I think there's a lot of good stuff to take away from today's match against the 'Boks, but whoever it was that invaded the pitch as we were about to score what would have been the first try of the game really needs his nuts putting in a mincer: if you're Welsh, böi, it's deportation for you. As always, Wales' defensive play and kicking game are brilliant, but our forwards have simply no answer to the South African pack: every knock-on is a guaranteed penalty, and today it showed in spades and ultimately lost us the game: scrum or maul, they're just superior in both muscle and guile. But on the plus side we kept the margin small and to be honest, the match was won by the Springboks (aided by the twat from the crowd) rather than lost by Wales. Da iawn, hogiau!

Well - the latest mini-project is sorted and ready for testing: the above is an EBay find that, even though costing not a lot, was nevertheless in a pretty sorry state when it turned up the other day. The camera was a cheapish point & shoot 35mm camera made for GAF by Chinon way back in the mists of time. I fancied it because I've been on the lookout for simple auto-exposure street film cameras lately: something to just capture stuff, firing from the hip; so to speak. This one one was jammed solid, although a cursory look showed that the shutter and aperture blades seemed to be working OK. It was just that the film transport mechanism was pretty much locked solid. I did the usual thing and took off the bottom plate to see what I could find. Not being familiar with this camera, I took some time to work out just how the mechanism should work, in the absence of any online information to give me a clue. After a bit of head-scratching and disassembling, I figured it out and with the...

Well, that didn't take long did it? Yet another U-turn followed by yet another "resignation". Doris's plans thwarted yet again: I'll bet he'll be counting lost personal revenue whilst plotting another hare-brained scheme for next week. He's so used to getting his own way - let's face it, his previous jobs have pretty much encouraged this - that he must be getting sorely frustrated in a rôle that by definition is pretty trammelled by rule, precedent and convention. Not really maverick territory and you ain't King Of The World, Doris: much as you might like to be. Still, it's good to know that the more sensible heads in the House didn't intend being steamrollered into going down this dangerous little avenue, and that the face at the centre of all of this buckled under the pressure and did the only credible thing in the circumstances, or did he need a heathy boot in the backside by his party when they knew the game was up? I'll say one thi...

Now I know that the Star Chamber was instituted as a means of reining in the rich, powerful and otherwise ungovernable: a kind of all-powerful meta-court of final resort. But over time it was bastardised by the powers that be and mutated into the ultimate means of coercive control: making up the rules expediently to suit the needs and wants of those in government. And in like vein, here in 2021, Doris is at it again. Under the cover of COP26, his government today forced through a whipped vote that threatens to undermine Parliamentary procedure and probity - in my book, this looks like an open charter for sleaze and self-interest. Whatever suits this lot gets passed into process, or so it would seem. Now it looks eminently possible that paid lobbying could become a de facto acceptable feature of our so-called 'democracy' rather than the shady and immoral backroom dealing it really is: political decisions made for and on behalf of the highest bidder. Sounds like a banana republic...

Money, 'the markets', competition: the fundamental planks of 'society'; the origins of which are inequalities born of unequal-ness of strength and the acquisition of 'wealth' and hence privilege through violence. Still, even now, when our species faces its own extinction at its own hand, the talk surrounding the COP26 conference revolves around 'who did good' and who are the bad guys. This is the fundamental problem: playground politics, pissing contests and willy-waving. A hefty dose of growing up is in order, and we need to start eschewing the global capitalist model sharpish: it ain't working and in any case, people, we really can rewrite the rules; money and the markets really are a fiction we created in the first place. Believing in the primacy of the abstraction of the market as somehow outwith the control of the human race is at best naïve, and at worst cynical. It is a religion by any other definition, and one we could well do without at th...

It's not an option and we have little time left...