Observations from a Hill

Well, here we are (again), at the end of a second pandemic hit year, with little to celebrate. But I won't be a grouch, grinch or grump today: there is always room for hope at this time of year, and it seems that the current Covid-spike will be a fast-burner and will fade just as quickly. Also, the prospects for a Tory leadership contest and God-willing, an early election where, maybe, just maybe, we'll see these idiots ousted from office, are looking at least favourable. Whatever the New Year brings, as the optimists among us always say, it can't be as bad as the last year panned out. I hope. Glass half full, people! If you're either actively seeing in - or have already seen in - the New Year, have fun, stay safe, and give someone a good hug (negative Covid tests apply, of course!) to share your humanity and goodwill. See you on the next one, and don't be late...

So we're bouncing back down the yellow brick road again. Today's FT front page carries a piece on the return of the Nightingale hospitals - Rainbows in Wales, although the article only talks of England - to somehow avoid the need for further restrictions and alleviate the impact on trade by providing putatively needed extra acute medical cover for Omicron. Two things: the scientific data at present has it that, although this variant is more infectious, it has a much lower impact on the infected, particularly  on the triple-jabbed: secondly, the fact is that the problem will not be the lack of hospital beds - as evidenced by the unused Nightingale/Rainbow facilities during the worst of the first, unvaccinated wave of the disease. Anyone au fait with the data has long recognised that the problems that Covid will cause now we're approaching the medium to long term phase of the disease, is not Covid itself, but the diversionary impact it has on the health service, viz: early st

Something in a piece in today's i by Ian Dunt got me thinking. A friend of ours once said - many years ago over dinner - that despite having no particular religious beliefs or faith, he still felt intrinsically part of the Christian tradition that we all, as boomers, were brought up in. Britain was, in our youth, still largely a church-going Christian country and the influence of the Church was still a pervasive influence on society that only started to slip as we entered our teenage years as the 1960's turned into the 1970's and beyond. Dunt's piece mentioned a moment of revelation in a conversation he was having with a recently-made friend about religion and the concept of grace. He is a self-professed atheist, like so many of us these days, and his understanding of such concepts merely abstract rather than personally felt. His friend, whilst no longer practising, was brought up in the Methodist tradition, as was I, and still felt 'part' of that continuum, wi

Today's post kind of follows on from yesterday's. We watched The Big Short yesterday afternoon; a 2015 film based on the book of the same name by Michael Lewis about the corruption and fraud that lay at the very heart of the 2008 financial crash. I won't wreck the film - or the book - for those who've not seen either: but suffice it to say that the nub of the tale is rooted in the underlying systemic lie of free-market Capitalism: that markets are free and self-regulating, and governed, if at all, by the prudence and propriety of its actors. Not so, as I've said repeatedly before, ad nauseam. Fair trading has always been generally seen as being one jump ahead of your competitor, either by dint of price and/or quality of your commodity, or by seeing advantageous changes in the market before they [your competition] do and acting accordingly to get the jump on them.  Communications has always been key to to trading on the financial markets [blog posts passim] with its

It is with some interest and not a little vexation that I read that the restoration bill for the Palace of Westminster could reach £14bn over the next twenty years, and that the seat of British (soon to be English, hopefully) government will have to park itself somewhere else for the duration, an arrangement which will really annoy Jacob Rees-Mogg. But, no matter how iconic a building the place is, fourteen billion quid: I ask you? According to the Infamous-Red-Bus-Of-BoJo, that sum represents forty weeks of NHS funding that Europe was supposed, allegedly - no - falsely, to have nicked from us over the years of our membership of the EU. If the tidal wave of Omicron infections turns into a tsunami of hospitalisations, the extravagance of such building preservation - never mind the billions already slid sideways into the pockets of every Tom, Dick & Del-Boy that Doris and his mates know - will stick very firmly in the craw of any right-minded person without access to the ticket offic

Watched a recent film on Netflix this afternoon, called The Dig, directed by Simon Stone . Set around the events of the discovery of the Sutton Hoo Saxon burial hoard in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of The Second World War, the film is actually a meditation on time, mortality and human legacy. It also highlights class prejudice and snobbery: the man who did most of the work in discovering and excavating the hoard at the behest of the (altogether benevolent and decent) landowner, the dying Edith Pretty; was a gifted working-class amateur archaeologist, Basil Brown, whose subsequent contribution was never mentioned, let alone lauded, at the time of the hoard's first public showing in London. In fact, he was not credited until much, much later; posthumously. It kind of served as a nice backdrop to our binge-watching the first series of Robin of Sherwood (1983, starring Michael Praed), which portrays the true face of Richard the Lionheart: the much-mythologised but real King of

That's it then, for another year: I hope everyone had a good day/afternoon/evening and maybe even night. I always enjoy Christmas lunch for what it is, but also for the fact that it signals the start of the new year and the lengthening of the days leading to Spring and thence to Summer. We've lost too many old friends this year and our thoughts are with family and friends left behind. All the best to you all.

It's very difficult to feel in any way 'Christmassy' this year: the second pandemic-tainted Yuletide thus far, and it might not be the last such. At least last year there was a vague sense of the Dunkirk spirit floating about - certainly a wilful stubbornness to accept reality in Number Ten - with most people making the best of a bad lot in the hope that the situation would change for the better in the New Year. Alas, this did not come to pass and events have conspired to bring us to a similar point a twelve-month on. We, like most of the people we know, will at least have a good feast tomorrow: two or three hours of respite from the dismal reality outside closed doors. I also appreciate that we can count ourselves amongst the fortunate that can feast and isolate ourselves from it all, unlike so many others. As it should be, this time of the year is a time for reflection and contemplation of the values that make us human: I think in this time of Covid, more of us realise th

I was going to report tonight on the mini-triumph of my getting - not Linux Mint: given up on that one - but Elementary OS up and running on the old MacBook Pro. Got the OS working fine, but can I get any web browser to function properly or not crash? Nope. The Chrome clone that comes with the distro simply won't retrieve anything from the web and a newly-installed copy of Firefox crashes whenever you ask it to do, well, anything. I know the OS is networking properly: I can update and download stuff from the command line and ping stuff willy-nilly. Not great thus far. I'll keep trying though, as this particular flavour of Linux is quite attractive. On a more general front, it looks like yet another suck-it-and-see situation with the pandemic. On the one hand Omicron looks less likely to produce acute disease, but on the other will infect more people more rapidly. Early days yet, I guess. I see someone called Emily Mariko (8.2M followers) has had her video about reheating salmo

So this is Christmas, etc. etc.; just awaiting data and the latest instructions, Covid-wise. I just feel strangely dissociated from it all: probably down to the moderately formless existence (not unwelcome!) of retirement, mixed in with the uncertainty of this bloody pandemic, out of control capitalism and climate chaos. At least we've passed the Winter Solstice and the days will thankfully start to stretch out again as we head towards Spring: joy to the world, und so weiter... I really don't like Winter and its darkness: I'm not well-suited to cold weather and gloom; I much prefer warmer climes... But it is weird at the moment, it has to be said. I'll put it this way: Summer beckons... Happy holidays, as our American cousins will insist on having it!

  Sitrep on the Linux Mint front: I think the original installation was borked, so I've reformatted the partition and reinstalled from the live distro and so far all appears to be good - just updating everything that needs it and then it's time to install wifi drivers that will let it talk to my Broadcom chip. OK - this post is the inverse of last nights - started on Mac OS and finished on Mint. I installed the relevant wifi drivers and rebooted: result! A minor victory, but there you go. So far this reinstall has not fallen over, so I think the original effort was definitely, as I say, borked. I'll keep you posted on progress as I use this system more. Addendum: I spoke too soon, another Firefox freeze has forced me to finish this post on Mac OS in Safari on my MacBook Air. Not sure exactly what's at fault there, but I'll get to the bottom of it, mark my words!

  This post is being written on the distro of Linux I've just co-installed on my old MacBook Pro 13", manufactured sometime in the Jurassic Era. This particular shade of Linux is Linux Mint, an easy install in itself, but the OS will need to prove to be quick and stable to count as an upgrade to the native Mac OS, which while upgrade-stalled by the old hardware, is still pretty reliable. So far, I've had two system crashes, which is never a good omen with Linux, as stability is usually the absolute norm. I think the first one was a flaky video driver, since replaced; the second, I've no idea about. I'm also looking to test ElementaryOS, which is a very lightweight distro and should be quick on an old machine like this: I also like some of the workflow features of it and the thinking of it's development team. I'll live with Mint for a while, though and see how useful it becomes. Keep you posted! Postscript [written on my MacBook Air running Mac OS] - I think

I often wonder what the Right's much touted low taxation, low regulation society might actually look like. From the perspective of an ordinary Joe Soap living on the state pension, all I can see emanating from this future Nirvana is more of what we have at the moment: low pay, poor living conditions, no safety net for the 'sins' of being chronically ill or unemployed or old. The logical endgame of laissez-faire economic policy is where we've been getting to for the last forty years. It wouldn't even be so bad if the capitalists had accrued their wealth honestly in their so-called 'free market'. The myth of the markets is that soft regulation and keeping taxes low incentivises entrepreneurship and encourages business 'freedom'. If this ethos applied to all strata of business activity, this would undoubtedly be the New Jerusalem of enterprise. But it doesn't and seldom has; least of all now. The sheer unassailable facts of the matter are that scale

Took delivery of the above from eBay this afternoon, which cost me a tenner plus post. This was the last incarnation of the Werra 1 from Carl Zeiss, Jena. The Werra's were produced in East Germany from 1954 until the mid-sixties. This one is the 1e and whilst still fairly spartan and lean in its design aesthetic, it is not quite as beautifully modernist as the original Werra 1, which was a lovely squared off slab of minimalism. However, compared to just about any serious 35mm camera produced in the modern era, this is a model of asceticism and I still love it for that quality - and a tenner, for God's sake! BTW, all the functions function as they should, which is a testament to the incredible German engineering and build quality. I look forward to putting some film through it at some point!

Well, the shires are starting to make their voice heard at last. After the thick end of two hundred years, Shropshire North - Tory since The Great Reform Act of 1832 - passed to another party for the first time in the modern democratic era. Even Doris Pooh seemed mightily deflated and unable to offer us his usual 'let's wing it and see' schtick. His customary response would have been to try and capitalise on Labour's poor performance in the poll, but the wind genuinely seems - temporarily at least - to have left his sails. One wonders what was said behind the closed doors of Torydom last night, after the count was over. With the House in recess, we'll have to wait a while before we see how he gets out of this scrape.

Looking toward Glyn Garth Court from Bangor Pier at dusk this afternoon. In the sixties, an apartment at Glyn Garth was a sought after bolthole for those with enough money: Roger Moore had a flat there. While the gloss of tenants such as that has long since faded from the place, it would still be a good spot to live if downsizing: the views across the straits towards the mainland are stunning, and £250-300,000 will secure a bit of mildly tawdry swinging sixties glamour; while some of the flats have even had a complete modernisation carried out. The only fly in the ointment with a place like this are the service charges that come with the leasehold: not something that would have troubled the (then) TV star.

Progress, change, improvement & growth: the bedrock concepts of the capitalist system; the positive spin wrought by those engaged in the endlessly frenetic quest for ever more wealth: self-justification and enablement cast as benign public values never to be questioned, let alone challenged. That scientific, engineering and medical progress are of value to the human race is unquestionable as a broad concept, but as always, the devil is in the detail. Specific lines of progress don't necessarily result in benign improvement, although they might generate economic growth: itself by definition not necessarily benign. For instance, the case of Thomas Midgely Jnr., I read about in today's i . Midgely was a fearsomely inventive and prolific scientist and innovator who, according to historian JR McNeill "...had more impact on the atmosphere than any other organism in Earth's history..." by virtue of being the inventor of not just leaded petrol, but CFC's too... Un

A short piece in today's i reports that Stephen Fry, a long-time campaigner for the return of the "Elgin" marbles to their rightful owners, the Greeks, more than two centuries after their plunder from Athens by Lord Elgin, can be more than adequately enjoyed through modern technology, such as VR. I totally agree with him: this issue has been a long-standing blight on our relationship with Greece and should be resolved forthwith, alongside as much of the other global cultural appropriation the aristocracy and their support network have garnered over the centuries as is possible. The notion that the British Empire should be the owner, curator and custodian of so much of the world's culture, taken at will from its origins, exemplifies the hubris and self-entitlement of a culture and a class that knew no boundaries to its influence. This attitude, regrettably, still remains in the privileged pockets of our society that we have stupidly allowed to remain, despite all the

I read with some interest in today's i that the company that came up with the 'Hands, Face, Space' Covid chant, among other similarly condescending and infantilising slogans, had a further contract awarded for such trite tosh for the second year on the trot; their remuneration now totalling some £77.3M - that's right, folks: £77.3 million quid to produce something that could have been farmed out to primary schools as a competition to produce. The company in question is MullenLowe UK and they are not alone in trousering our cash during this pandemic, for 'advertising & media services'. To put it all in perspective - and these are government figures freely available to all, should one know where to look (the data certainly ain't trumpeted from the side of a bus) - in October 2020, four companies were variously engaged for 'advertising & media services' to the tune of  £15,163,649.62*  £15,421,588.37, spread over a large number of individual pa

I've just watched the final race of the F1 season and I'm not sure exactly what I've just witnessed. It was already set up to be a one-race showdown this year between Hamilton, looking for his eighth world championship to surpass Michael Schumacher's seven; and Verstappen looking for his first title after a tremendous season's racing, finally sewing up a deserved debut championship. If previous races have thrown up controversy, this one's finale did it in spades, doubled and redoubled. We've seen races - and championships - finish behind the safety car before, but the decision, apparently made in haste by the race directors, to let some of the lapped cars through - those between Hamilton and Verstappen  - and then restart the race immediately for the final lap. That this  decision came immediately after Red Bull questioned an initial decision not to let the lapped cars through in order that there was time left to finish with a racing lap. If all of the lappe

Been a bit of a lazy day here - no change there, then - a light lunch out at the Anglesey Arms, couple of pints and a read of the weekend papers, followed by a bit of shopping - Christmas Day lunch sorted! - and back home to watch a couple of rather silly films, followed by the Strictly semi-final, which turned out to be a belter. The final should be one of the best in the history of this seemingly irrelevant but highly diverting programme. Reading the FT over lunch I came across the Technology byline by John Thornhill, writing about networks. He talked about Metcalfe's Law: "[the] systemic value of compatibly communicating devices grows as a square of their number...". It is the 'value' in this phrase that is problematic: the observation about network growth is trivial in and of itself, but ascribing 'value' to that growth is difficult and flawed as a similar generalisation. As Thornhill rightly points out and as Metcalfe himself admitted, it all depends

The vultures are definitely circling above the not-yet-quite-dead-career of one Doris Pooh, Grime Minister of Freight Britain & Somewhere-celtic-being-left-out-to-dry-by-his-non-Government®. After so long, the Pooh with no clothes, the Emperor sans culottes, the desperate fraud, charlatan and chancer extraordinaire, finally looks in danger of being unseated by his mount: his own party, the faithful steed he has consistently  beaten and shafted since they put him in office in order to secure the populist vote and an unassailable parliamentary majority. His contempt for the truth, probity and the common good is trumped only by his frequent and consistent habit of biting the hand/hoof that feeds him. Attempts by Her Majesty's Opposition to shift the portly, privileged ursine have largely fallen by the wayside, serving only as a minor irritant to him, like wasps around the Hunny Pot whilst feeding. This is of course down to the stonking majority the Tories hold multiplied by the co

Who's pulling the strings in the Met over the-investigation-that-won't-happen-into-the party-that-may-or-may-not-have-happened-and-at-which-no-Covid-rules-were-breached? As a former senior Met officer said on BBC News tonight, the concept that crime is not investigated retrospectively is plain nonsense, and that Downing Street is - obviously - one of the most surveilled buildings in Britain and that more than sufficient CCTV footage should exist of any comings and goings on the night in question. Given the Met's history, should we be surprised that political interference appears to be at play here? I think not, and as the Leader of the House took such pains to feign surprise that several Members should dare criticise the police at Business today in the House makes me think that skullduggery is afoot. Watch this space, this shit-storm ain't over yet...  

Listening to today's Reith lecture on military Artificial Intelligence, I was struck by the thought that a guiding principle on the types of deployment of A.I. in warfare is a moral one. That, just like explosive ordnance or chemical and biological weapons, its use would be limited in scope by mutual agreement based on the perceived morality or immorality of that particular deployment. Thus far, historically, we have managed to comply to a greater or lesser degree with these self-imposed restrictions in these areas of warfare. And therein lies the rub. The problem with A.I. is not so much that it is inherently wrong or even unreliable in the majority of its uses - particularly in the civilian sphere - rather it is in its deployment and management by Human Intelligence. Humans, and hence human decision-making and morality, are variable by nature, with some of us tending towards a humanitarian and egalitarian outlook and others toward the amoral and psychopathic, with all shades in b

Sort of following on from last night's post and my previous allusions to energy company issues, I have to say that we are now so far down the rabbit-hole of surreality that I fear for the future of, well, just about everything. I wrote yesterday that we should just nationalise and run properly all of our national resources (I defer to my old man over the eternally-vexed land-ownership question), but our personal, continuing struggle to devine any sense whatsoever from our electricity 'suppliers', whoever or whatever they are, has taken an even more bizarre turn today. Having agreed by email (I can't get any bugger to reply to or even acknowledge receipt of, any letter I've so far written) with the OFGEM-appointed company who've taken over our account from our previous (gone bust?) supplier [that is still listed as operating at Companies' House] that we would write off the unsubstantiated, unmetered and un-billed 'arrears'; we have received a letter t

'For the Public Good' is usually that catchall phrase touted by the political Right to codify their more draconian and malthusian tendencies, and they invariably hide behind the facade of 'momma knows best' when introducing ever more stringent limits on individual and public freedoms - a pretty Stalinist approach, truth be told: wherefore Libertarianism? - The fact is that the Right wants state control when, and only when, it suits them: not the rest of us. They ran a good little article in the business byeline of the  i  today - 'Secret employee', working for the energy-company-on-hold, Bulb, rightly points out the fundamental truth of the privatised power utilities: that is, that the government seems to have no problems in bailing out certain companies in certain sectors - viz Bulb itself, banks etc. - but seems to struggle rather with the concept of nationalisation, which is based on the perfectly reasonable assumption that the industry would be far more effi

Decompression day today after yesterday's drive back from Shropshire, a definitely not doing anything-in-particular day. So I've spent hours not doing much apart from watching old stuff and mooching about. I really don't have much to say about the news or any such stuff today as I've largely ignored the outside world for once. I'll post something (hopefully more) meaningful tomorrow. Nos da i chi gyd.

Machiavellian and devious in the extreme, your Home Secretary, with the backing of her government, is set fair to reduce the UK's parliamentary democracy to something resembling North Korea's regime. This bunch are pushing through amendments via the back door to already pretty unpleasant bills, which will legislate to impact dangerously on your civil rights. I haven't seen anything like this since the darkest days of Thatcher in the eighties - our basic rights to protest and contest government action are being threatened as we speak - this is the essence of current Conservatism, a Conservatism that owes more to the ultra-right than ever before. A Conservatism that speaks the language of both National Socialism and Stalinism. A Conservatism of total oppression. I exaggerate not - this dangerous cabal of self-serving bastards could legislate themselves into permanent office if we sleepwalk into their odious future. I look to my own Welsh Labour government and its newly minted

Well, our short, short break in Shropshire is at an end. Home tomorrow to a cold house. An old friend's wife has died, sadly too young. Things move on without our agency. To quote Dylan Thomas: Time passes. Listen. Time passes. Come closer now. Only you can hear the houses sleeping in the streets in the slow deep salt and silent black, bandaged night. Our thoughts are with you, Clive.

Felled by recent storms, one of the many trees on Walcot Park left in pieces in their aftermath. A light sprinkling of snow last night and bright low winter sunlight this morning conspire to render the scene as peaceful and bucolic, the broken tree sole testimony to the fury of the other night.

Front and centre is a find from the antiques emporium in Church Stretton - itself a much-reduced-in-scale operation since the start of the pandemic - an Olympus Quickflash AFL, a point and shoot autofocus 35mm camera from the early mid-eighties. These things were much vaunted for their performance in their day and were favoured by Andy Warhol. The drawback with the things is the non-removable lithium battery that necessitated an Olympus service went it ran out; not a great selling-point, but it was the first camera to use the new battery technology: a fairly big deal then. It is possible to do a DIY replacement with a couple of modern lithium batteries, so that's the plan for this one. Whether it un-bricks the thing remains to be seen, as the model was prone to all sorts of electronic failure. Still, I didn't pay much for it and it looks as if it had light use in its day, worth a punt, methinks. I'll keep you posted on progress!