Observations from a Hill

Shameless, tawdry, unseemly. Doris's performance in the House this afternoon dredged even murkier depths than is customary for him. As expected, what sight we were allowed into the Sue Gray report was limited, cursory and generalised, and as such only hinted at the crux and substance of the final report, the full publication of which is currently delayed - voluntarily - while the Met investigates twelve instances of wrongdoing in Downing Street. The downcast and stony faces of his front bench behind him, mute testimony to his avoidance of the truth in his dealing with House and his constant broken-record doubling down on his current version of the truth. This mendacious, dissembling Prime Minister frankly displays all the characteristics of a psychopath: constantly, insincerely and tenaciously doubling down on his untruths week after week, even when those untruths are self-contradictory and verge on doublethink. He hides behind the smoke of the yet-to-be published report and the Me...

The clock ticks, sonorous, lonely: the echoes reverberating against the inactivity in the halls of government - at least as far as the Sue Gray report goes. Sitting here writing this, the haar rolls over the tide-empty Menai Strait, obscuring Biwmaris and all beyond in a cold and barely-penetrable haze, acting in like manner as the ongoing scheme by Doris, the Non-Gov™ and the Metropolitan Police, to stitch up the British public once again over their own crimes and misdemeanours, burying them in a fog of their own creation. The sad thing about it is, I fear that they might succeed in their nefarious endeavours: in fact we are all firmly stuck between a rock and hard place; if he stays, bad; if he is tested by a vote of confidence, he most likely will have enough support to remain - even badder; if this current can-kicking process continues, the longer it goes on, the less likely he is to be censured; if by some miracle, Ms Gray publishes the report in full anyway, we stand a chance of ...

Today I solved, completely through happenstance, a conundrum that has taxed me for forty-some years since I graduated college in 1978. I've always had a vague memory of an image that struck me back in my college days from some book in the library there. For some reason, I couldn't remember the name of the photographer or any title for the image itself: all I had was a kind of vague gestalt of the picture in the back of my mind. A couple of days ago, we were browsing the bookshelves in our local Oxfam shop and I came upon a copy of "Basic Critical Theory for Photographers" by Ashley Le Grange from Focal Press. Although I've got most of the original source material used in the book, I figured the extra stuff mentioned plus the overall commentary on the other would be a good bouncing-off point for future reading/writing: and it was only £1.99 to boot, so I bought it. This morning I was thumbing through the reference pages and saw the name of a photographer I instantl...

Two days on: still no report, and now we're told that the Met wants Gray to effectively soft-censor her report so as to 'not prejudice their investigations...', meanwhile saying they don't want the report delayed. Any redaction, however temporary, is likely to take the wind out of the enquiry's sails, giving Doris more breathing and kicking-the-can-down-the-road space, and hoping to find some suitably long grass for it to end up getting lost in. The nature of these 'independent' reports is such that the longer the delay in publication, the less effective they are: I would propose that an inverse-square-law-of-cooling-news operates in these situations: bury a report long enough and the general public will eventually get bored of waiting and move on. As I said before, Doris will wait until the feel good factor associated with Covid unlocking kicks in and waffle his way forward from there. Her Majesty's Opposition are effectively hamstrung by Doris's co...

Once again, it's Holocaust Memorial Day: seventy-seven years after the liberation of Auschwitz, when the world started its gradual awakening to the crimes against humanity committed within the perimeters of the camps there. As the living memory recedes with the passing of each survivor, the importance of the day and its observance grows with each year that passes.

Still waiting...where's the Gray report? PMQ's today was a masterclass in obfuscatory bombast versus a stone wall, aided pathetically by carefully curated 'soft' questions from the 'friendlies' (read stooges) dotted throughout the Tory back benches. We were promised that the report was already complete and would be made available earlier today, in toto. The fact that the document has to be presented to the executive before wider dissemination via the library, begs the question wherefore the delay? I'm an old sceptic (noooo!) and am tempted to imagine that a team of forensic spin-doctors are working away frantically as we speak, aided and abetted by a team of silks, slicing and dicing away at the draft report until they are satisfied that they can adequately rebut the arguments therein. If this document surfaces intact for public consumption, I will be greatly surprised, but suggest that any evidence of redaction will be proof of culpability, no matter what t...

On the current events re Non-Gov-UK™: as forecast days ago here in Fairview Heights, the escalating situation on the borders of Ukraine has given Doris a timely international situation to occupy his statesmanly thoughts and time. His statement to the House regarding the situation today threatens to bury the Partygate scandal once and for all, aided in such a timely (coincidental? - surely not) fashion by the prior announcements that the Metropolitan Police would now be investigating lockdown infringements at Downing Street and that this would delay the publication of the Gray report into same. In an almost perfectly-timed piece of political theatre - it's no wonder that the Paymaster General was smirking during the debate following the urgent question raised by Angela Rayner - the executive managed to almost completely diffuse the situation in the space of two hours. No matter how serious the growing situation in Ukraine - and it is potentially very serious, the government should n...

Given the febrile atmosphere surrounding all things Pooh and his Non-Government™ at the moment, one could be forgiven for asking me why I've posted a picture of a knackered old chair. Well, granted more stuff is crawling out from under the woodpile on an hourly basis at the moment - if you've got the inclination and the time please sign this : we need to keep piling the pressure on these dangerous people - but I've decided to keep my powder dry until the end of the week when all will be clear, one way or the other. Either the merde will have already hit the rotatey thing or Doris and his politburo will have buried the Gray report's salient bits and released a heavily redacted version for public consumption and the delight of the captive media. Let's wait and see, shall we? The battered old stick of domestic furniture pictured above I picked up from a pile of left-out-for-free-stuff down the bottom of the High Street the other day: there is a kind of Rachub tradition...

Is eating honey wrong? Some people think so, although I personally don't, and fail to see the justification(s) for that view. The human race has been harvesting this magical sweetener for at least 8,000 years, it's health benefits are well-known as are its sundry other medicinal uses. And it tastes amazing. Honey and live yoghurt (damn, another no-no in certain circles) are a staple in some of the most healthy diets on the planet, and coincidentally, are my usual breakfast fare. The argument goes that harvesting honey is bad for the bees that produce it, that it exploits those species and is leading to their decline through depriving them of their winter stores of food. But anyone who keeps bees to produce honey and who then seeks to jeopardise their hives through such over-exploitation would not have honey to harvest past a single season. Fact. We as a species have managed our relationship with animals generally for thousands of years, but the one creature we have to respect a...

I guess the most frustrating thing about this time of year is just how much the weather trammels what you want to do. I've got a shedload of things I want/need to do in the studio, let alone the needed maintenance to the poor old garden shed, and we need to start thinking about clearing up the garden after the winter storms. But at the moment, it's just too unforgivingly cold and damp to warrant much activity outside the protection of the house. Since I retired, the thought of working my way through the initial pain of a winters morning is frankly beyond me now: no-one's paying me to hurt these days, after all. Still, we're on the upward slope to spring and summer, so optimism it is. I wonder just how optimistic Doris Pooh the Younger is feeling presently, as news of more moves against him from his own ranks has surfaced over the last forty-eight hours: even the press that one would normally expect to at least skirt around his misdemeanours until they were proven absolu...

I have to sympathise with Christian Wakeford: naysayers from all sides won't look at his defection to the Labour Party kindly, and the accusation that one can't or shouldn't change political affiliations will be levelled at the poor bugger as he struggles to come to terms with what actually was a pretty brave and decent decision to make. My take is that he, like hopefully more to come, found his misplaced allegiance to Toryism upended by the realisation that the party he signed up to was not all it seemed and that its leader and his cabal of misfits and crooks were diametrically opposed to the democratic ideals that he entered politics to uphold. A cold shower and reality check, indeed: just cut the refugees some slack, eh? Don't forget, people vote for the person, not the party; at least they bloody well should do...

Probity [mass noun] /ˈprəʊbɪti/  -  Late Middle English from Latin probitas, from probus ‘good’:  The quality of having strong moral principles; honesty and decency. Not a quality much in evidence in Doris Pooh's chaotic playpen. I'd go so far that I'm minded of Al Capone when considering our PM's modus operandi. Although to give him some faint credit, the only defenestrations carried out thus far have been technical rather than physical. The whips were out in force after yesterday's PMQ's rather unedifying spectacle, and the media quickly briefed that all was now, if not well, at least less bad  amongst the disaffected Tory ranks, and that open rebellion is on hold for now. In typical Doris style, he's now banking on the feel-good factor of the English Covid lockdown restrictions being lifted, to smokescreen his way through to the other side of the publication of the Partygate report, if it ever gets aired at all; although I strongly suspect that the Caba...

Given what transpired in Parliament this afternoon, I can't help but write about what should be the imminent demise of the PM's career as the head of British politics; but I've long learned not to count me chickens, etc. The bugger will not leave honourably and voluntarily: he will need to be defenestrated like Thatcher. The writing's not just on the wall, it is blazoned in gaudy neon in Piccadilly Square and far beyond. David Davis wielded the sharpest of rhetorical daggers in PMQ's today and the crossing of the aisle by a Red Wall Tory MP surely augers badly for Doris Pooh: even the people he enabled and championed are lining up for the part of Brutus in this shoddy remake of Julius Caesar. The Bear (or dog - not sure, any more) is still doubling down on the line that we all have to wait for the report of the investigation in order that he can then remember exactly what it was he did wrong, that he can't quite bring to mind just at the moment. The most astonis...

All present and correct: cleaned, polished and fitted out with a new set of D'Addario 10-32 Tenor strings. I opted for Standard tuning in the end: in fifths CGDA. It's a bit scary tuning up the top string up to the A,  so I took it gradually and nothing broke thankfully. Considering the scale length isn't massively shorter than say a Gibson, the tension on the strings is a tad hairy, but these strings would just be too flabby in Irish tuning: apparently you need a .012 top string set for that to work. I can see why old man never got on with the thing, string tension aside: his hands were just too enormous to fret a neck so tiny. I'll see how playing it pans out, although I might give the heavier strings and the lower tuning a try at some point, as I feel that my fingers might not last the course: I play so little these days, the fingers of my left hand have lost their callouses and gone 'office soft' on me. I suppose that should be motivation enough to play more...

  Pictured is a tenor guitar my Dad gave me three or four years before he died. We never did get it strung properly and it has been hanging on a wall with slackened strings and gathering dust for some years now. Time to sort out this injustice - I took delivery of some new tenor strings today, and so my next project is to clean this lovely little guitar up, restring it and learn tenor chord shapes. I've decided that initially I'll try Irish tuning, as this is lower than Standard - only a couple of half-steps up from Spanish guitar tuning - and should place less of a strain on the thing while it beds in again. Also, from what I remember of the sonority of it's body, the lower tuning should sound lovely and rich. Keep you posted!

Just watching the final of The Masters snooker on the Beeb. As my late friend John used to say when we were playing down at his dad's workingmen's club: it's an insanely difficult game to play even remotely well. I was taught to play the game - along with the beautiful billiards - by my family: my maternal grandfather in particular. The Southalls had a six-foot slate-bed tabletop snooker table that was always wheeled out at Xmas, when all the men in the family would play all evening after the Christmas lunch and sundry afters were dispensed with, and were replaced with snooker, beer and tobacco for the rest of the night. I was allowed into that fraternity from about the age of nine or ten, thence to participate into my early teens. I even had my first taste of bitter beer on one such festive evening, which I have to say I loathed at the time: how times and tastes change! My fondest memories of those evenings remain my grandfather introducing me to the elegant subtleties of ...

Political expediency and moral bankruptcy pretty much always go hand in hand: twas ever thus. We've watched a couple of particularly good movies on two successive nights this week, "Don't Look Up" and "Mr. Jones". On the face of it, two completely different scenarios portrayed in two completely different cinematic genres. But at their core, between them, a single truth:  that truth itself it is so easily traduced in the service of politics and populism. The truth can hurt, but lying in the service of political and ideological expediency cuts deeper and causes far more lasting damage. While "Don't Look Up" is played blackly comedic, it scarily encapsulates the surreal lunacy of the Trump era - continuing to this day online, and well off the grid of common sense - serial denial of the blatantly obvious and the insertion of 'alternative facts' into the discourse, creating a wish fulfilment narrative of epically infantile proportions that b...

Back in October last year I wrote about the street photographer in Athens who I photographed back in 1979 whilst on holiday there [Spectral Echoes] . Interesting then to come across the Afghan Box Camera Project  which is dedicated to keeping this style of photography alive, despite its falling out of use almost everywhere in the world. This type of portrait camera was used practically everywhere where there was a plentiful supply of bright sunlight - in Afghanistan principally for producing ID pictures cheaply, but more generally for holiday portraiture - the technique remains in use well into the twenty-first century. There is a lovely little video describing the technique of taking pictures with the Afghan Box Camera (kamra-e-faoree), which can also be seen directly on Vimeo:  Using an Afghan Box Camera  . I really like projects like this, keeping alive historical techniques that one could easily assume had withered and died under the onslaught of the ubiquitous smartp...

Ah well, here we are then: one down, one to go. HRH - sorry Mr. Andrew Windsor - has been cast out beyond the official Royal Pale and denuded of epaulet, mantle and sword. Exile to a remote Royal Holding must surely follow. Don't get me wrong, my levity is not intended to make light of his transgressions, but at least allow me the schadenfreude while it lasts. It demonstrates at the very least that in this hyper-connected, always on world, the old guard are no longer entirely beyond account. What that ultimately means in practice for the man in question is moot, but surely the outcome of his civil trial in the States is not in question and a very large settlement must ensue, possibly followed by further sanctions. Outside the protective bubble of the Royal Family, and having one assumes now 'limited' financial resources, he is going to find things very much more real than hitherto-fore in his pampered life. Not before time.

Just when you think you seen everything - see my two last posts - the physical embodiment of crass that is our Non-Government™ and its ersatz leader, Doris Pooh the Younger, comes right out and dumps a Party Political Broadcast onto mainstream TV, despite there being nothing electoral (yet) to contest, scant hours after PMQs this afternoon. This stunt is proof positive that those in charge of the affairs of State have either descended into a parallel universe akin to an Enid Blyton story, where being a posh child insulates one from all harm despite one's actions; or they've started dropping acid in the Cabinet Office. Really, words f***ing fail me. If Doris thinks that this was a good idea, he's basically even more stupid than I suspected: if the bloody thing was dreamt up by a trusted advisor, then he's an order of magnitude more stupid than I imagined just for sanctioning it. The optimist in me hopes that this was a devious attempt by some Tory saboteur to agitprop P...

Well, t'would seem that a lot of chickens are coming home to roost at last: and before anyone accuses me of repeated ad hominem attacks on our glorious leader, I rather think he succeeded long ago in assassinating his own character and deflating his own arguments by his serial dissembling and his general policy of putting obvious untruths before Parliament and public alike. His non-apology apology this lunchtime in PMQ's was calculated I think to wrong-foot the opposition, but he immediately blew his cover by not resigning immediately and then returning to his usual tack of doubling-down on the waiting-for-the-result-of-the-official-enquiry line, choosing yet again to avoid answering a single direct question. Even some carefully chosen procedurally-bland questions from his side of the House couldn't quell the overall sense of seething anger on both sides of the dispatch box at his performance. This ain't going away, Doris... On a seedier note, it seems that that other ...

I see the Paymaster General has been wheeled out into the firing line yet again by the Non Government™today in Parliament, to repeat ad nauseam the mantra of "...we are awaiting the results of an on-going independent enquiry, blah, blah, blah..." & "...we offer condolences, blah, blah, blah..." in response to request after request from the House for comment regarding Partygate. Hiding behind senior ministers and bland procedural platitudes; doubling down on their position in media interview after media interview, and lying & dissembling at every turn; is the de facto modus operandi of this sneering bunch of shysters with whom we are unfortunately saddled. The Paymaster General stonewalled his way through the entire session, saying precisely nothing, but implying that the result of the enquiry - should it ever be published in a timely fashion - is pre-ordained and that those implicated by the pretty solid prima facie evidence thus far presented - will simpl...

Well, this is a late post: got caught up in a box-set binge-watch loop of The Tourist... Anyway, onward...I was watching a couple of YouTube things earlier today which reminded me of how important good teaching is. The triteness of "those who can do, etc..." really needs no elaboration, it being born of the snobbery and elitism of the artist(e). The irony here is that teaching is an art , and like any art it is born of an indefinable and innate talent to communicate ideas via the conduit of knowledge, creativity and charisma. Knowledge and creativity are but the foundation stones, the keystone is the ability to make those foundations stick in the minds of those taught. One of the videos I was watching was from an old Royal Institution Lecture on explosives, and the lecturer held his young audience in thrall to the kind of stuff that we all grew up fascinated by: basically making things go bang! I was minded of a particular teacher of mine from school: Mr. Rhodes, who taught m...

What is it about the human race that compels it to continue to faff around micromanaging itself to the point of paranoid psychosis? Or treat its own kind as pawns in the abstraction of the capitalist game: disposable commodities to be dispensed with when financial transactions are complete and profit banked? Two things today have crossed my mind: the first, the insane attempt to balance the cost of electricity wholesale cost and the concomitant retail cost to the hoi polloi on an hour by hour or half-hourly basis: this at a time when my credit card payments are always late because the payee's bank still operates a two day clearance on payments, despite the fact that my bank operates a real-time service to like-minded and equipped organisations. My money leaves my account instantly - on the due date - and languishes in the system (presumably accruing interest for the target account holder) for two days, leaving me both out of pocket and due a late-payment penalty for not having been...

Today's i reports of an exodus of NHS staff after two years of pandemic aggravated strife within our medical service, citing stress and poor work/life balance, mental health issues, and I can also report, issues with poor management as a direct result of the insanity of the pseudo-privatised health board structure the NHS has been burdened with for so many years now. I know the health boards of Wales are (ironically, given its inception at the hands of the great Aneurin Bevan) amongst the worst performing in the UK, but the fault for for that lies squarely on the shoulders of the half-assed system and its endless tiers of under-performing, self-interested and frankly hapless management. It's no wonder that the real talent are leaving in droves under the strain of trying to make things work: health care is vocational, not a fucking business - end of argument - and health care professionals have been unfairly backed into a corner where the only choice is 'performance' ov...

There's a lot I could write about today, what with Sleazy Doris, Omicron, Kazakhstan and the bloody weather all demanding attention; but it's the death of Sidney Poitier that made me pause this afternoon, when I got the usual newsfeed beep from my iPhone. He was always a favourite actor of mine, but I'm particularly drawn to my seeing In The Heat Of The Night at the cinema on its release in 1967. I was twelve going on thirteen at the time and I think that pretty much bar none, that film has had the greatest impact on me ideologically, politically and morally of any film I've ever seen. I grew up in to be honest pretty racist times in Birmingham, England; an awful lot of crap was just nodded through unchallenged by most people I was surrounded by: this movie stripped the scales from a young white boy's eyes. Priceless. He will be sadly missed.

The projected rises in energy bills this coming year will simply be too much for the majority in this country to bear, financially. Fact. A fifty percent increase in domestic fuel costs is simply unsustainable. Outstripping inflation by nearly an order of magnitude will severely unbalance an already frail economy, tipping many over the edge into fuel poverty and debt. As is customary, the hardest hit will be those already close to that edge, with the wealthy able to simply shrug off the changes as an annoyance rather than a life-damaging event. We've long had a significant proportion of our population locked into debt spirals because of inequality generally: there are families out there often working several poorly paid jobs simply to stay poor, while we laud the rich who bemoan their wealth as inadequate to their needs, and at the same time see no irony in food banks and begging in our wealthiest towns and cities. For those already over the edge, it's difficult to see how they...

I was having a conversation today about this blog and my writing of it. The topic of yesterdays post came up: mathematical learning and more specifically, calculus. The sad truth of it is that most people are put off, or more accurately, actively discouraged from learning mathematics, and calculus in particular, by the way it is taught. As I've said before, I count myself firmly in this category of the actively discouraged, arbitrarily excluded from so many subjects that I could have enjoyed so much and potentially excelled in, by the 'niceties' of the educational conventions and poor pedagogies of the era (this probably still obtains to this day, sadly). I learned more about algebra and logic than I did in school, after graduating in Fine Art nearly a decade after leaving that school, by teaching myself to code on the crude microcomputers of the late 1970's whilst working at the University of Birmingham [blog-posts passim]. Calculus was still a mystery to me as it was ...

Further to yesterday's post and things mathematical, I can't find any concrete references online to the Midlands Mathematical Experiment, under which aegis I was 'taught' maths. All I remember was the 'roneoed' textbook that my teacher was constantly having to correct, due to the large number of errors in the text. Coupled with my teacher's rather heavy Glaswegian accent, the poor pedagogic methodology of the 'experiment' served pretty much to obscure the purpose, point and detail of the subject on offer. As I wrote yesterday, I left school without maths; my intended route into studying chemistry at university thwarted - in those days, a maths A-level was mandatory for the further study of science. I don't regret for a moment having chosen the arts as an alternative, as the choice hasn't dictated my life one way or the other: I've studied whatever I've fancied in an ad hoc, autodidactic fashion ever since. But I have maintained a life...

Now here's a thing: one of my favourite YouTube channels is Mathologer - disclaimer: I'm the bloke who failed to get maths O Level (GCSE to all under the age of forty-something) twice, and even managed not to get maths CSE (you really will have to Google that one) as a last resort - about the only thing in that department I've ever been good at is mental arithmetic and estimation, particularly where money is concerned. As a one-time acquaintance of mine once said, as far as math (he was North American) is concerned, the ability to make change is the most important skill you can teach a kid. Do that, and the likelihood of them ever getting ripped off is greatly reduced. In fact, I can still work (a little rustily, admittedly) in the old duodecimal system of UK currency, although the practical motivation to do so has long disappeared with the demise of the use of old money in the last pub in Britain to continue using it (The Douglas Arms, Bethesda, North Wales), decades after...

I first came to Wales in the late sixties at the age of twelve, with two uncles; to go rock climbing. We camped in the teeth of a storm by the shores of Llyn Ogwen, beneath the looming greyness of Tryfan, the rockiest of the mountains in all of Wales. At the time, I was unaware of my Welsh roots [blog-posts passim], but I felt at the time I was home. Tryfan is a very special mountain in a very special place. It can be busy in summer, although not to the same degree as Snowdon, but approach it from the slightly more challenging routes it offers and you'll be rewarded handsomely.

The New Year's Day Doctor Who has come and gone, leaving us here feeling that the franchise is now most definitely in need of a reset. As in much of current cinema output, this last iteration of the good Doctor's tale has sought to wrap up a paper-thin storyline in a synapse-mangling edit. Take a simple idea and lard it with as much action and as many special effects and fast cuts as possible to try and disguise the lack of any real narrative. This is the total opposite of the greatest of Doctor Who stories, where well-wrought narrative more than compensated for the creaky sets and embarrassing special effects. I for one - as a lifelong fan, having been a viewer since 1963 - would welcome more challenging writing at the expense of production values. Some new blood is required, methinks, or the Doctor will disappear again, possibly for good.