Observations from a Hill

Doris appears to be on the run at last, but breath-holding would not be advisable, due to the ever-present risk of asphyxiation under the blanket of bullshit that is the Tory Party, and it's cabal of no-mark apologists for the arch-prat that is our so-called Prime Minister, the aforesaid Doris Pooh The Younger. As we crawl, ever-so-slowly, into summer via the doldrums of an indifferent, North Wind driven Spring, the prospects for most of us seem as bleak as they have done for decades, with pretty much zero actual leadership - supplanted by febrile Doris survival shenanigans - our future in the lap of the Gods, it would seem, given the random nature of Western politics at the moment. The best we can hope for now is that enough of Doris' acolytes, lickspittles and hangers-on amongst his back benchers will see that he is taking them - and us - for a very long ride to the edge of a cliff beyond which is mere oblivion: all in the service of his own, personal, political survival, at ...

So - Doris, in his frantic scramble towards the light of his rapidly diminishing popularity, wants a return to Imperial weights and measures, amongst a raft of other spurious distractions from his travails. Just who he's actually aiming this deckchair shuffling at is unclear: I'm old enough that I can easily work in either system, moving from metric to the old stuff at will, depending on what I'm working on at the time. I even mix inches and millimetres on the same project, more or less at random. While I was still a telecoms engineer, though, I worked exclusively in metric, as everything we did or used was metric, down to measuring cable runs in kilometres rather than miles. Anyone under forty, though, won't have much of a clue as to what a quarter of sliced ham, for instance, might actually weigh. To be precise, it's four ounces - a quarter of a pound - or 113.398 grams. I admit that at larger, human scales, such as this example, I prefer the old measures, as the...

  The role of critic or reviewer can appear a thin and shallow one, or, as in the case of the celebrity critic, intrusive and overbearing. Some indeed make careers out of their own personalities, which they willingly tout over and above their subjects' achievements, sometimes in the service of arch humour - Dorothy Parker, for instance - or in cementing themselves in the history of a field in which they otherwise play no part: Clement Greenberg on the American Abstract Expressionists - writing about the various and varied works of a collection of hitherto unconnected artists,  and concocting a narrative of a native, white 'American' art movement where none previously existed. The former much-quoted as deeply, spikily, humorous; the latter, much contested as confected, self-serving and historicist. However, sometimes, one crosses the path of a piece of critical writing that transcends the trite, the self-aggrandizing and the stylized. In today's Observer, there is a book...

  Finally, this afternoon, I completed the discombobulation of the Bow Back Chair - henceforth to be known as the BBC - into more or less its component parts. Pictured above are three of the seat-frame parts, and as you can see on the two to the left of the photo, aside from the larger holes for the old cane seat, the wood is pretty much peppered with the myriad holes left from removing the hundreds of tin-tacks that had been used in successive re-upholstering of the chair. To be frank, when I first uncovered the sorry-looking woodwork underneath the layers of old cloth, horsehair and hessian, I was pretty horrified at the state of the timber beneath, and even considered the possible avenue of making new seat parts from scratch. But, the price of hardwood, my rather hobbyist-sized bandsaw and limited personal skill set made me consider a rather more mundane solution: filler, sanding and waxing. The test piece I used was the rear of the seat-frame, shown on the right: it might still...

  One step further down the oh-so-slippery slope towards a totalitarian state: Bo-Bo-Bo-Boris The Insouciant has now started down the route of ensuring that he can not be ousted from office, no matter what transgressions he might in future commit, by changing the rules that govern ministerial behaviour, which basically gives him the final say over whether he himself is subject to those very rules, as well as a power of veto over his 'independent' advisor in his instigating any such investigations into conduct. Stitched. Up. Next, can we expect to see a minimum thirty-year parliamentary term - Putin-style - or the abolition of the opposition, or a minimum personal wealth requirement for MP's? This clown is dangerous, and our lack of a written constitution is a wide open door for the kinds of abuses of power that we have seen from this odious oik - and oik you are, Doris, Eton or no Eton - since his party and the electorate gave him the mandate and hence the apparently absol...

  A diary post tonight, despite the unforgivable charade that was the PM's statement to Parliament re. the Grey report's findings: more on that when the bile has abated and rationality kicks back in. We went back up to Chester today to sort out some more stuff, and decided to take a return detour to visit the graves of some of Jane's forebears near Rhuthun, Denbighshire, North-east Wales. Above is the headstone of the near mythical Uncle Armor, who died the year before either of us was born - so not recently, I might add! - always salutary to revisit stony ground and put life and death into perspective...

Did web standards lead to the hegemony of online corporates, despite the best of intentions of Web Two proponents - and what of Web Three, Four...X? As I've mentioned before, I remember the days of the internet before the World Wide Web ('The Internet' in most people's understanding), and certainly well before the current concept of 'my internet'; which even now has pretty much been subsumed into a generic 'white goods' scenario. The rise of corporate control - hegemony, if you like - of 'the internet' was predicted by some of us early adopters/users, well before Google existed, let alone Amazon, eBay et al., were even a glint in their progenitor's eyes. During what we thought at the time were the Dark Ages of the browser wars, when proprietary was king, nothing worked properly unless you ran with the appropriate software to correctly(?) render a website (yes - website, archaic though that term may seem in 2022), let alone perform any commerc...

I started to remove the fabric cover on the chair today, having glued and re-assembled the chair's back. The number of tacks holding the old cloth to the seat beggars belief, and I've still not quite finished the task; but progress is being made, and I think that there's a reasonable chance I can make a decent piece of furniture out of the old thing. I'll keep you posted!  

I've finally got around to starting on the upcycling of the junked bow back chair I wrote about earlier in the year. I've separated the back and its legs from the seat and front legs. Stripping off the cover from the underside of the chair, I can see that it originally had a cane seat, so I've got a feeling I might be (re-)learning yet another skill: the last time I did cane-work was in junior school, nearly sixty years ago: still, I'll give it a go, anyway.  I've started clearing out the old glue residue from the mortices on the back, ready to re-glue and rejoin the back to the front, including removing the remains of the cut iron brads that reinforced the joints between the seat and the rear frame. I'll replace them with glued hardwood dowels when I reassemble the thing. I'm going to leave the wear and patina where it exists on the timber, but there are a couple of places where someone has crudely sanded out some damage, which I'll just smooth out and ...

  Garden update in the absence of any political update - I resurrected a poly-mini-greenhouse thing left by the boys, making an open-bottomed wooden frame out of gash, warped skirting board, and filling it with the contents of two Gro-Bags. The tomato plants to the right - gifted by a neighbour - will be the new inhabitants of the cloche: hopefully a crop of decent tomatoes will result! Keep you posted!

So, Sue Gray, what will your report - ahem - report ? We await with bated breath the revelations that the fruits of your labours will/might bring. A tad worried about the reported 'secret' meeting with Doris - to discuss what? - an independent enquiry should not entail 'secret meetings' with one of the subjects of said enquiry; it kind of throws into question the probity, and indeed, independence of the damned thing. But then again, Doris has his fingers in all the pies and Hunny-pots, doesn't he? I hope to God that we're not to be disappointed/appalled/exasperated-yet-again by the final published outcome of all of this: it's difficult to imagine how much further credibility can be stretched by the Artful Dodger and his gang of delinquents. Time will tell...

  Sitrep, pickled pork curry: not entirely as I expected it to taste, but not bad, nonetheless: finished it off with deep(ish) fried onions and garam masala and a bit more general seasoning. Although I initially felt it could do with more chilli heat, it did build as the plate was emptied: I think it would definitely benefit from some split hot green chillis, though, as much for the flavour as the heat, and some umami. Interesting experiment that yielded edible nosh, though, so not a waste of time, effort or ingredients!

  Pictured, my latest food experiment - which, to be fair, photographically looks like most of the others I've posted over the last couple of years or so - my take on a pickling-style pork curry. The meat is cubed and marinated in white wine vinegar and sliced red onions, with a bunch of pickling (whole) spices: black peppercorns, cinnamon leaves, 1/2 a star anise, fenugreek seeds, green cardamoms, garlic, ginger and sugar, with a little salt. The base sauce is red onion, cubed yellow pepper, cubed large green chillis, quartered sweet tomatoes, fried down until soft, adding small amounts of water to stop it catching and to deglaze the bottom of the pan as you go. The pork, onion and spices are strained through a sieve and the meat fried in oil until lightly browned, then added to the sauce with a little of the pickling liquor and the pickled red onions, brought to the boil and turned down to a simmer, adding a tablespoon of tomato purée. I have no idea how this has turned out, or h...

  I'm not sure quite what we've got inhabiting the halls of government at the moment, but whatever it is, it sure ain't working. Rishi Sunak seems to think a one percent cut in income tax will somehow alleviate the effects of a nine-percent interest rate and spiralling costs of living. Add to this the latest revelations of more than unseemly - read criminal in the foulest sense - behaviour amongst the Tory ranks, joked about by the likes of the absurd and frankly repugnant Fabricant [pictured above] and we are once again left dumbfounded as to how on bloody earth Doris can still stand up in PMQ's and double down, week after week, on his belief-system that he is actually of some use to these islands. And don't even think about the Northern Ireland issue and the sundry other after-effects of our national economic suicide pact, Brexit...

A bit of a meteorological mélange today, ranging from a rather humid 24 degrees Celsius mid-afternoon, to a rather cooler, wetter - nay down-pour-y - hour or so, late on. A rather excellent soup of beans, chilli and chorizo with pesto and Parmesan, now being washed down with an Argentinian Malbec from a German-based supermarket chain [Lidl] - Rachub really is a very inclusive little place - the World in the Welsh mountains!

The clouds parted as the downpour abated this evening, leaving this beautiful sky. The view towards the mountains from our patio is always something to behold: our remaining Cypress is a lot taller than it looks in the picture, and is a nod to our love of the Med: these trees might well become native here in North Wales if the climate changes any more; which given the laggardly response of government to the crisis looks pretty certain to continue on its present trend: nuclear, anyone? Give me a break...

With the win of Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest, I was minded of an album I bought in 1989, by the band The Wedding Present, recorded on one of the legendary John Peel Sessions by the BBC. The first track on this record - 'Davni Chasy' - was released as a single and made the charts at the time, twenty-one years after Mary Hopkins' English-language version also made the charts as 'Those Were the Days'...

  Well, I decided to watch the FA Cup final this afternoon - although I'm not normally predisposed to watching soccer these days - as it seemed like it might be a good game... in reality, pretty close, no goals after normal time and extra time and not at all bad to watch. Then, the curse of modern football - indeed much of modern sport is infected with such short-termism - the penalty shoot-out kicked in (sorry!). Am I the only person in the world who thinks this (relatively, if you're as old as I am) recent construct is a pile of capitalist crap? When I were a lad, things were different and replays were had. But that wouldn't suit the suits, would it? I think there's a case for two half-sized trophies for each of the two indivisibly best teams in the competition - a draw, in other words, just like in cricket. What on earth is wrong with that?

  The latest wheeze by our hands-off, do-nothing-lest-it-hurt-corporate-profit, excuse-for-a-government, is to lay off some 20% of the Civil Service. 91,000 jobs are to be canned because this sorry administration has simply no tools in its limited toolbox left with which to deal with the cost of living crisis. So, the answer to spiralling costs, unaffordable housing and skyrocketing energy bills is to make 91,000 people unemployed? Don't this bunch of privileged, vacuous halfwits realize that it's the Civil Service that actually do the running of this country, and not the government of the day? On what planet does taking another 91,000 people out of the economic loop benefit an economy? 91,000 breadwinners and their families spending less and possibly relying on state benefits, at least in the short term. Never mind the human cost of this cynical exercise in book-balancing. The longer we allow this shower of economic dullards to 'run' our country, the closer we get to t...

The ingenuity of humankind knows few boundaries, and the very fact that we can observe the effectively unobservable, whether at subatomic or galactic scales, is testimony to that. We can both delineate and explore the invisible and the indivisible, and the emerging news of our finally imaging the black hole at the centre of our home galaxy further reinforces the view that there's not a lot we can't achieve with skill, knowledge and tenacity. It's particularly galling, then, that we seem utterly unable to fix the eminently fixable and relatively [procedurally-] trivial problems of our economy, climate and health and social care. These things might be huge issues, particularly climate-change, but the mechanics are eminently do-able and don't require any innovation in the true sense of the word. In short, it's mostly down to money management, which is a pretty well-trodden path, and simply requires those who control money and its directions of travel to ensure that it ...

  It's sometimes difficult to see how we can claw our way back from this utterly fractured and broken world, where nothing seems to function to the advantage of the people who pay for it with the fruits of their - enforced - labours, only to be rewarded with bullshit, obfuscation and to be frank, penury. Even Doris has spoken out against his own Chancellor(!) for not doing enough to alleviate the escalating effects of the cost of living and energy-cost crises in the provisions of a Queen's Speech that he himself signed off(!). Really, is this the best that we can expect? Non-rich people (the majority of your voting public, Pooh!) are suffering financially badly enough as it is: the situation only set to get far, far worse by the onset of Autumn this year, with Christ alone knows what consequences. As someone in today's i said - Katy Balls, in fact: 'Those struggling arguably know a lot more about how to keep down the cost of their food shopping than secretaries of stat...

  Well, the Queen's [proxy] speech delivered as little as the Government intended and most of us expected, with none of the real issues confronting most of us - the economy, fuel costs, the environment, etc. - addressed with any real commitment or honesty. Worse still, the climate question, so far as this administration is concerned, remains unanswered and largely unattended; just at the point when those who are qualified to comment meaningfully are saying that the situation is far, far worse than we imagine. The 'solutions' the Government are punting are - as usual - solely corporate-benefiting: On the one hand, nuclear power: as Caroline Lucas pointed out this morning, slow and expensive to implement, and I might add, with little return on investment and leaving an unpleasant and difficult legacy for future generations to deal with. On the other hand, more new oil and gas extraction: again more than widely agreed to be the major causes of the problem itself. We have a go...

Pictured is my new shelving unit, which I hope will go some small way towards tidying up some of the clutter in the studio. I got this kit from Lidl for the princely sum of just shy of forty quid: the equivalent type of shelving from anywhere else would be north of two hundred and fifty. It's good quality and has proper workshop load-bearing - which is handy as there's a shedload of stuff that needs storing! Despite this being a diary post, I must, though, comment on the political story du jour - BeerAndCurrygate, to be specific - after listening to the Shadow Attorney General being interviewed by Evan Davis this afternoon on Radio Four, I got the distinct impression that Labour have some concrete inside information of a concerted Tory campaign to rake up mud in Durham and thence chivvy the police there into re-opening an already closed investigation: I'm paraphrasing, but 'hit-squad' gets close. I also got the impression that Labour have sufficient evidence of this...

  It's been a slow day here today, and as if to emphasize the fact, a Slow Worm turned up on our doorstep this afternoon, sat there quietly eyeing me as I watched it, then slowly meandered its way back under the flowerpots beneath the living-room window. There you go...

Spent a good chunk of today taking the heart out of the largest Holly in the garden, which just continues to expand like some mythical monster: all you can do is take sharp implements to it every four or five years to check its ambitions. In the foreground, you can see some of the material I took out of the middle of the beast: there's two wheelie bins full of small stuff to boot. Because this particular tree/shrub/monster is pretty mature and has been pruned radically many times before, it's actually not that difficult to deal with: you attack it from the inside, tunnelling your way in from the bottom and gradually working your way up to the top to take out the growth that, in this case, eclipses the view - glorious view - and which needs to be checked periodically. The thing will inevitably look a bit weird for a while, but Holly is notoriously hardy and will grow back from being stumped to ground level: our other one, behind the potting shed, did just that; grew back from t...

Well, it will be interesting to see how the Tories and their media lackeys spin their way out of the election debacle that we are now slowly witnessing. I was disappointed but not surprised that the media seemed to be playing down Labour results this morning, but as the day has worn on and the results for the Celtic nations are coming in, it seems that Conservatism, at last, is on the retreat. The figures speak for themselves: the only losers, across the board, are the Tories: every other party has gained ground. This guarantees nothing for any General Election result, but it is a bellwether that the Tories will ignore at their peril. For my part, I would prefer the Conservative and Unionist Party to simply wither and die for good, as it has absolutely no part to play in a modern Britain. We need - as the Tories are constantly saying these days - to move on. We need to progress, a word at odds with the very concept of conservatism, to a better place: politically, philosophically and ec...

Well, local election day is upon us - it doesn't much affect us, as our seat is uncontested and Plaid Cymru is a shoo-in - but I note from the front-page headline in today's i that Tories involved in this election are asking to be judged on their own merits and for voters to cast their votes on that basis rather than make judgement on Boris Johnson's ludicrous premiership. While I agree that local politics is about individuals and that they should be judged on their performance for their electors, I feel that, at the moment, the Tory Party is so rotten to its core that any vote has to be a reflection on the Government's woeful performance, both in governance itself, and in the manner of that governance. Unfortunately, as always, the foot-soldiers will be the first to fall, but if that's the only way to pull this corrupt edifice down, so be it.

I mentioned yesterday that we had picked up some of the last remaining bits from Lou's house before the house clearance can start next week. One of the collection of small objects I found - in the old coal shed, of all places - was the above. It's a spent .303 cartridge and a hollow 'bullet' that, as you can see, had been in the 'case for a very long time, given the tarnish on the exposed portion of it. As you can just see, the cartridge case is engraved with a monogram of a crown over a fancy 'M', and the 'bullet' is marked Sterling Silver. I was intrigued by this little curiosity, so I did a bit of Googling around and discovered that this has quite a bit of history behind it. The monogram belongs to Princess Mary, and the cartridge case and silver 'bullet' originally contained a pencil, and the whole formed part of one of the gift boxes sent to British troops in the Great War as part of the Princess Mary Gift Fund, along with tobacco, cigar...

Just a diary post tonight, as I'm a bit knackered from the day's doings. We've been back to Chester to meet up with the house clearance chap and came away with a few odds and sods that were left from previous visits. We decided to take a long tour of the hinterland through our ancestral homeland of Denbighshire on the way back, rather than take the usual rather boring run back on the A55 back home. Got back to find my recently-purchased copy of Nick Wallis' book "The Great Post Office Scandal" on the doormat. I look forward to reading it, alongside the several other books I've either already started or intend to start. So much stuff to read: but I can't imagine life without reading... BTW, the image above is of tonight's darkening sky, seen from the garden: the weather seems to have turned for the better at last, having reached the giddy heights of twenty-two Celsius this afternoon... Nos da!

I've just been scanning an article in the April issue of Wired magazine about an OpenAI/GitHub project called Copilot. To the cognoscenti, this probably qualifies as old news, but it had passed me by as I've taken a less than avid interest in software development in recent months. This just might have changed my mind... I don't generally have a great deal of trust in the pursuit of Artificial Intelligence per se, as I will always believe that human intelligence, guile and adaptability will always best a machine, even one of the greatest human mind's devising. But along the way, we can make some useful tools - one of our species' greatest abilities: tool-making - that can also generate more useful tools. It seems that what the team behind Copilot achieved inadvertently, whilst trying to emulate human language and responses, was to allow the AI access to data sets they hadn't thought of including. In scraping the internet for data, they accidentally allowed their ...

I can't help but inwardly smile - make that overtly grin - with schadenfreude for the current (albeit trivial) woes of the super yacht scene, caused in no small part by the sanctions being imposed on the admittedly relatively few Russian oligarch-owned vessels that have either already been impounded, or which are currently flitting from safe harbour to safe harbour to avoid being impounded. All I can say is that it's your beloved free market kicking in, people... Just caught a recent (by now rather out of date) programme about super yachts and their owners/brokers/charter clients, and it's like looking down a wormhole into the nineteenth century world of the country house, only with even more vulgarity, and frankly, even more money. The world of the ultrarich now mirrors the largely faded world of the landed families that once ruled the British Isles. Even the 'great' families of these lands had to eventually admit that their resources were limited and had to marry ...