Observations from a Hill

Soccer is normally regarded as 'The Beautiful Game', but after this afternoon's conclusion of the Williams/Trump World title semi-final, surely snooker better deserves the appellation. Right to the wire - almost a penalty shoot-out - Trump took the last frame, slotting in two cross-doubles during a protracted safety/snooker attempt by Williams to steal the frame and the match at the last knockings, needing three four-point snookers to draw level and force a black re-spot. That really would have a nail-biter to cap an already edge-of-the-seat match. On to the O'Sullivan/Higgins match, then!  

  Diary post - too knackered to think: glorious sunset, despite the frankly chilly breeze: feels like it's coming from Siberia... Still, I guess that the temperature won't be much higher in Greece at the moment, so maybe Spring might eventually crawl into the open - let's hope, eh?

  I can't keep up with UK politicking at the moment. Every day, some fresh scandal or other seems to surface from the Mother of Parliaments: scurrilous sexist and classist 'news' now followed by Doris defending the freedom of the press and the right of the paper in question's refusing to acquiesce to the Speaker's call to interview - as an ex - 'journalist' whose style and content also tended to the scurrilous and often juvenile in nature, I'm sure he would like to keep things 'free'. But the issue with the Rayner case was much more of intent, and to be honest, journalistic quality. The fact that a national newspaper ran an article written by its political editor as shallow and frankly puerile as that was, frankly should open that organ up to scrutiny, as well as its sources. These papers are comics masquerading as newspapers: both the person who offered the 'story' to the paper and the highly-placed 'journalist' who hacked out...

Diary post: blackbird song always heralds Spring - pictured above is the little beauty atop our telegraph pole (apologies for the image quality), singing his heart out this evening. The pity is the air temperature isn't exactly Spring-like at the moment, but it's early days, and the birds know what's around the corner; so all good...

Been bemoaning the erosion of expertise and specialist knowledge in the workplace: replaced generally by 'on the job training' and CBT - an acronym which can be read in many ways, but we'll gloss over that - generalism, jack of all etc. now being thought of as the way forward. Whilst there is always room for the adaptable and versatile, we still need specialists with specific skill and knowledge sets. The case in point being a reminder of the Post Office scandal [blog posts passim], in the form of a review of a new book on the subject I read this week. Truth is, in the days of the General Post Office, all systems would have been specced in house by experts of long-standing and only contracted out to external companies under strict supervision by those experts. By contrast, watching the World Snooker Championships, I'm grateful that the commentary thereon is given by people who know what they're actually talking about...

More house-clearing today, and we think the last of anything personal to the family has been removed from Louie and Mac's house. The above fell out of a bunch of stuff I was looking through after we got home this afternoon. It turns out to be one of the most poignant documents I've ever come across. The death notice of one Thomas Morris, 19209, Private; Machine Gun Corps: killed in action on the 29th of August 1916. The [form] letter is signed for a Captain, Officer in charge of Records. Tragedy subsumed in bureaucratic process. A working man's life's end reduced to a bald statement of fact for his widow.    

There's an awful lot of misunderstanding and misinformation out there about just what the 'internet' actually is. I think I've touched on this topic before, but a couple of things have made me sit up and take notice this week. From the frankly inane, cf. Nadine Dorries' pronouncement that her department aims to make the UK's 'internet' the safest 'internet' in the world: as the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport - itself a rag-bag of, in reality, too-diverse-to-put-in-a-box-categories - you would think a basic understanding of the topics in hand would be a handy thing to have before expounding to the press. But no. It's common enough to hear phrases such as "...my internet's not working..." from most people, whose experience of the 'internet' is simply and virtually the same as consuming stuff on TV or talking via a phone: the fact that all three spheres of communication are now tied inextricably ...

  Pictured is my latest acquisition for the workshop: a test-dial indicator for the lathe. It's resting on Mac's original copy of The Amateur's Lathe, by Lawrence H. Sparey, published in 1948. The device measures surface difference and deflection in 1/1000ths of an inch, and is used in setting up machines such as lathes and their workpieces, in order that accurate machining can take place. I bought this one online for the princely sum of fifteen quid, and whilst it ain't exactly a piece of Swiss precision metrological kit, it should do OK with my eighty-odd year old lathe. The interesting thing here is that in the section of the book that introduces these devices, it quotes a price of two to three pounds as a guide for purchase: a large chunk, if not all of a working man's wage in those days, and thus a serious investment for an amateur engineer.

Johnson still doesn't get it, does he? No amount of swanning around wearing turbans in India can detract from the growing political storm here in the UK surrounding his serial misdemeanours and untruths. I'm not sure exactly what his currently-planned exit strategy might be: he could of course have left a monumental stitch-up in place, involving his Reichspolitzei [read The Met] and the dark cabal that is his Cabinet [Doctor Caligari, anyone?]. But I very much doubt it - chancer that he is, he's winging it yet again, hoping that the lickspittles will yet come to his rescue once more - except that yesterday, the worm(s) finally turned while he was away from the fray, self-confident in his omnipotence. Oops. And I hadn't realized until this morning that the wrecking amendment he had tabled had a three-line whip, only to find that there weren't enough of his party playing ball to shove it through the House, resulting in a remote-control U-turn from the subcontinent. Th...

Doris Pooh the Younger is finally in retreat, albeit in absentia, as himself is in India 'on a trade mission' and out of earshot of all the nasty things people are saying about him in Parliament today. Bet his ears are still burning, though. The Paymaster General was wheeled in at the end of proceedings to trot out the Johnsonian Get Out of Jail Free card of waiting for the conclusion of the Met investigation/publication of report and blah, blah. To no avail in any case, as the decision was made without a vote, there being nary a single No from anyone on either side of the House. The matter is now before Standards. There were many Tory dissenters - some incredibly eloquent in their condemnation of and subsequent distancing from their inglorious leader. The debate took a religious turn at intervals, which gave the affair a somewhat old-fashioned or even American flavour. Still, what was said was heartfelt and genuine, unlike the serial 'contrition' shown by their erstwh...

  Doris apologizes approximately once every three minutes - abjectinsincerely, and doubles down again and again in PMQ's (again), and again, and again, and again... How much longer can reality and credibility be stretched? Do us all a favour...

Blackbird song back in the garden, big-time! As always, one male finds the high point on the holly behind the potting-shed. A veritable symphony of birdsong this afternoon, which is such a pleasant contrast to the discordant sounds of Tories squirming on the barbs of opposition to their misdemeanours and their infractions, in Parliament this afternoon. I will have something to say on some of the bullshit aired today by our reprehensible PM and his cabal of evil-doers, maybe tomorrow, but today I feel like warmed-over leftovers due to some manner of (non-Covid) virus that I picked up some time in the last week. Paracetamol, wine and pizza are prescribed to alleviate at least some of the symptoms...

Just finished watching what has, in recent years, supplanted "The African Queen" as the standard, terrestrial TV, Bank Holiday offering: "The Great Escape". Tomorrow, Parliament reconvenes after its Easter break, and where, we are told, Doris Pooh the Younger will offer yet another fulsome - read insincere - apology for his Partygate wrongdoing and his subsequent legal censure therefrom. Of course, any question of his standing down voluntarily will, of course - ahem - be out of the question, as far he himself is concerned. He - Pooh - is, of course, according to his caste, destined to rule. It was written in the stars, or rather in his upbringing and education. Proles and the hoi polloi in general should have no say in the matter: just pay due deference, peasants. The achievements of the Tory Party - in what in its modern shape is after all not that much older than the Labour Party - are numbered in the 'achievements' of Empire. A legacy whose nastier side ...

  Looking back to last year's Easter Sunday post, I see it was cold then - Easter was a fortnight earlier than this year - but, today started off reasonably warm and very sunny, reaching a pleasant if not exactly formidable twenty Celsius. However, the clouds rolled in, along with spits and spots of rain, and the temperature plummeted by ten degrees in half an hour: still, we managed Easter lamb for our afternoon repast with good friends and a happy dog. Pasg Hapus 'chi gyd!

  I read with amusement - schadenfreude, even - a piece in this weekend's FT by Chris Giles on '...relearn[ing] the painful inflation lessons of the 1970s...'. His view is that the decade was a financial disaster, which, I would hazard, depends on your perspective. As someone who was actually a young, working-class adult in Birmingham at the time, I fared pretty damned well, within the obvious constraints of my class and background, not even noticing particularly the effects of the oil crisis and the three-day week: we were already used to power cuts and scrimping through the immediate aftermath of WWII after all. My recollection of the Seventies is of practically full employment, a National Health Service that worked exactly as it was originally designed, and pretty much free tertiary education to those that merited it, regardless of family circumstances. That decade kick-started many a working-class kid's life and prospects in a way unimaginable in recent decades. We ...

  So: if refugees are deemed to have arrived illegally in the UK, they will be transported to Rwanda and 'processed' there, almost certainly never to return as their transport is one way, and they will end up 4000 miles adrift of their original destination, probably with few resources to hand. And , they won't be guaranteed asylum in Rwanda either, especially if they are LGBT+. Also , if they arrived on UK shores having travelled via a safe 'third' country or countries, they will de facto be considered to have arrived 'illegally', as they could/should (according to the rules themselves) have sought asylum in the first safe country they entered. So: Catch 22 and off to Rwanda. There is no way they can get into the UK without either direct sponsorship or by parachute. Not too many options there, then. This is your caring, sharing UK Government, folks; think on it when next you get chance to vote.

I wonder if there are any more nails left to drive into the Government's coffin, in what sometimes seems to be the most protracted political suicide attempt in history. What the Home Office is up to on the migrant front is anyone's guess. What is the point of what is a claimed £120M 'trial' that in scope amounts to Rwandan facilities apparently capable of housing a mere 100 individuals and with an annual 'processing' capacity of some 500? [source: BBC]   Considering that nearly 29,000 people crossed the Channel last year and that a significant number of those will have fallen into the category defined by the new bill - should it get through Parliament - one wonders exactly how this monumentally Byzantine scheme will help anything or anybody in any way, shape or form. Doris claimed in his speech this morning that the introduction of this new legislation would "...disrupt the business model [of people smugglers]...", a wildly optimistic and logically fla...

  In the absence of any semblance of genuine contrition or acts of falling on swords by our glorious leaders in the wake of partygate and the subsequent fines, I leave politics to one side in favour of tonight's sunset, pictured...

  Doris Pooh the Disgraceful, and most would have it, now disgraced. But the bear is doubling down yet again and playing the dutiful Prime Minister card. How much  thinner can he shave this bullshit veneer? And know what? He'll simply re-enter Parliament and continue blaming the opposition in general and Labour in particular for 'playing politics' and diverting attention from the issues that matter: the economy and war in Ukraine: "...we've already 'moved on' from cakes and parties, paid the fines and said sorry, folks; nothing more to see here..." Except there is. The economy is tanking, not "...the fastest-growing economy in the G7...", inflation outstripping wage increases by at least 100%. Energy prices - fuelling inflation - have gone through the roof overnight. There's transport chaos in the south-east - a direct result of Brexit - with the movement of goods, and hence businesses, compromised for the foreseeable future: stores are a...

Pictured is the latest mini-project, in progress. I figured that if I'm going to research the Mozzie book properly, I'd need to organize my thoughts, and the old slip-box idea came to mind. I'd got a spare packet of 5"x3" index cards, but no box to organize them in. Likewise, I didn't want to use the Zettelkasten I'd started earlier [blog posts passim], as I want this one to be focussed  on the project at hand. I couldn't for the life of me find a box that would suit my needs: both functional and aesthetically pleasing to use, so I decided to make my own in the style of a tatty eBay find (I did try eBay, but there was nothing at anything like a sensible price). So, out came some more of the salvaged pitch pine from Capel Bethania and I knocked up the above this afternoon. Tomorrow I'll make the divider thing that will hold the cards upright, out of the same timber. I've quite enjoyed making the thing thus far, and have learned as usual from mis...

Doris Pooh the Younger's personal political enclave is shrinking by the week, ably assisted by none other than the Bear of Little Brain himself, as his erstwhile allies fall by the wayside having shot themselves in their PR feet as predictably as the sun rises and sets. The latest self-immolation, of course, is our Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi 'Dishy' Sunak, who, like Doris, is pathologically un-self-aware. What irks Doris, aside from the negative - to use the current bollox-phrase du jour - 'optics' from the party and governmental point of view, is that his Chancellor is simply, stupendously more wealthy than he is. Let's face it, Doris is a poor little mite from an underprivileged background, ain't he? Do me a favour... So it looks like more shifting the Cabinet furniture is in the immediate offing. The Bear is rapidly running through his stock of scapegoats to chuck under his bus: he could end up like Putin, holed up in a stronghold and surrounded b...

Interesting - the Grand National won by 50-1 outsider Noble Yeats, ridden by amateur jockey Sam Waley-Cohen, and the Women's Six Nations match between England and Wales won by a country mile by the all-full-time professional England, versus the hybrid amateur/full-time Wales. Compare and contrast.  

  Above is the partially re-assembled hedge-trimmer freebie from Lou's house clearance. I found this in either the shed or the garage, in a fairly grubby and parlous state, with two dodgy tape repairs to the mains cord. I spliced the cord with some choc-block to see if the motor still worked: it did, but was obviously disengaged from the blade drive. So, it was take-it-apart-time. The numerous screws holding the thing together are T20 Torx, many of them in deep recesses. I don't possess a screwdriver to suit and considered making some sort of hybrid from a driver bit and some tubing, but the screw wells are just too small for anything other than a bit brazed to a piece of rod: I don't have brazing or welding kit, so I took the kludge route and ground down the blade of a long screwdriver to fit the screw heads. With a bit of cleaning up, the blades of the trimmer oiled, and the case firmly screwed back together, I fired it up, and it works perfectly. There are a couple of ob...

So here we are, people - after overseeing a shit show of a response to the currently awful, and soon to worsen exponentially, energy price crisis: to which they've also added yet another layer of pain in the form of yet more tax rises - Pooh pontificates from his Hunny-Pot-On-High that the hoi polloi should "Turn down heating... Eat cheaper food..." [source: i 07/04/22]. Dear God Almighty, has this man no shame, empathy, sympathy or any semblance of perspective on the lives of real people out here in the real world, where trust funds and stupidly-well-lined bank accounts simply don't obtain for the vast majority? He and his devious, lying, privileged, overfed coterie are basically leading us all down a path which leads to one place: penury and serfdom. The Bear-Of-Little-Brain-With-A-Silver-Spoon-In-His-Gob really is simply a total prat, and a dangerous one at that...

Following on from yesterday's post, I was musing this morning on just how insane the concept of 'retail' electricity, gas and water, etc. is. As someone who grew up in the era of nationalized utilities, post Second World War, the idea of wholesale/retail suggests commodification and competition; not exactly a natural fit where these services are concerned, and just plain bonkers to my mind. Nationalization was always the logical direction in which to go with utilities, even in the days when production - certainly of gas and electricity - was extremely localized. There are two main points of contention here: commodification of what are life-essentials, and competition in a single-supplier market. The first point is essentially a moral objection, and the second concerns the basic mechanics of 'free market' capitalism. Everyone needs, to more or less the same extent, certain basic things, not just to sustain life, but for that life not to be unbearably spartan: heat li...

Well, we now know exactly what the energy price rises mean to us personally. Our electricity charges [we are all-electric] have risen by 50% within days of the start of April, effective from the first of the month. For us, at the moment, given the current weather, this means a jump from around £400/month to a projected £700, assuming that we will need to continue at the same rate for the next month or so - bear in mind that although we will manage, we are both retired - we're not wealthy, but we're OK. What was an already onerous burden has been ratcheted up by what is really a quite daft increase. We already pay a premium for the 'privilege' of paying monthly on invoice: in fact, we pay more for our energy than even the poor sods with the heinous pre-payment meters: the only mitigating factor here being that we have financial control over it. Those on Direct Debit will suddenly feel a very big pinch in a few weeks, the only control over which they will have is being to...

I've decided, probably somewhat foolishly, to just go for broke and write the book on G-ASKH, the Mosquito that Uncle Mac and many others lavished so much time and effort on until its untimely demise in 1996. This will require a level of diligence and effort that, to be frank, I'm unused to; I just hope I can pull it off. The story is such an interesting one, it just needs to be told in a bit more detail than hitherto. There's loads of stuff out there, but it's mostly fragmentary: odd magazine articles, etc. The truth is, there's more depth and nuance lurking in this aircraft's history than appears in the stuff written about it to date. I also have the personal, family connection with it, which makes the project perhaps a tad more imperative for me. I have no idea whether I'm up to the task, as my writing has hitherto been in the pretty fragmentary form of this blog and a few pieces written many years ago; but whatever the outcome, it's worth a stab. Kee...

  Once again, European history appears to be turning on the Baltic. As we hear daily of Russian crimes against Ukrainian civilians, so the Baltic States are, in tandem with Western European countries, radically increasing their own defence spend and support matériel for Ukraine. Estonia in particular, a country with a population approximately that of Birmingham, UK, has sent $200M worth; and was indeed the first nation to send such support. The criticality - aligned along NATO's Forward Presence - lies between Estonia in the North and Poland to the South, with Latvia and Lithuania in between; the Russian satellite of Kaliningrad being isolated between Poland and Lithuania by the Suwalki Gap. Today's news of the discovery of a mass grave of civilian bodies apparently executed by retreating Russian troops adds further to the pressure on Western governments and NATO itself to respond to what are manifestly crimes against humanity. This is, it seems, the return of history - post-Ne...

Just a diary post today - went over to Beaumaris for lunch with the family and took a tour around that quarter of the island, including Bull Bay, pictured. A beautiful day, though a chill wind prevailed. We're privileged to live in this extraordinary place, and I will never tire of it, nor take it for granted as long as I draw breath. Hwyl!

  Grand statements, fine words and admirable thoughts are nought without action: mere philosophizing in the echo chamber of political society to affect concern and intent. Intent that seldom results in actions affirmative to those causes emptily espoused by the ineffective, pompous and self-serving. Intent wrapped in deceit, sleight of hand and mendacity. Sans polity, politics is empty. There was a time when it was accepted currency that a 'Gentleman's' word was his bond and that the hoi polloi were invariably scoundrels, wastrels and ne'er-do-wells  - which was as much bollocks then as it is now - Doris Pooh the Younger has demonstrated unequivocally that his (stupidly expensive) 'Gentlemen's' education has bestowed on him a grasp on reality and moral compass normally associated with the psychopath [comments?] He 'got Brexit done' and we were shafted. He told us to 'stay at home, save lives, etc., etc.' during the first lockdown and he and h...