Observations from a Hill

Women's Euro 2022 final. One of the best contests I've ever seen. The women's game has rekindled my interest in soccer: the men's game has been atrophying under the weight of big business for too long and lacks the urgency, fluidity and art of the women's game. The same applies to cricket, rugby, and so much more. Things are looking up in the world of football, as in so many other spheres of life: it's a great pity that politics isn't keeping pace with reality in like manner: we embrace positive change in sport, but when it comes to the governance of the country, we are content to accept, frankly, the dog-ends and dross as 'normal'. A sad state of affairs...

As much as I love the long forms of rugby and cricket, which sports have seen numerous variants - most particularly in cricket - emerge over the last few decades, I do like watching rugby sevens, and I am grudgingly warming to T20 cricket. I'm still not sure The Hundred adds much to the cricketing party, but we'll see; but whatever brings the crowds in, getting people engaged with sports they would not normally have thought of watching, in particular cricket, is a good thing, hopefully engendering a desire to engage with the full, and I would argue, the real and proper forms of these games. I note that professional soccer has never been tampered with in like manner, aside from the woeful introduction of the dreaded penalty shoot-outs. Interesting...

If anyone's still in doubt that our grip on the world is slight at the very least, and that our tenure as it's appointed 'guardians' could so easily be terminated at a moment's notice, I commend to you this afternoon's family shenanigans. We were due to meet up at a certain junction on the M56 motorway in order that we take a family member back home to Wales for a few days break, while the others, living in Lancashire, had a short holiday in Scotland. All well and good, on a day when all things are equal and the travel-gods are looking down favourably on one's endeavours; however, as always the unpredictable ogre of the M6 appeared from his lair and scuppered the whole deal. We got a text to say that our familial counterparts had run into a traffic jam shortly after joining the motorway. We had yet to start our journey to meet them, so asked for updates, as and when the situation changed. About forty-five minutes in, we heard news that the other party were s...

Evening all, just a slight diary post tonight, as I'm watching the opening ceremony to the Commonwealth Games in my birthplace of Brum: nice to hear my accent - much derided by the ignorant - out and proud! Pictured, however, is my latest acquisition, a watch produced in Sweden from ocean plastic: a product of a movement to dredge some of the polymer crap we've infested our seas with, and recycle that plastic into products such as the watch featured - part of the Time For Oceans project, which raises funds from the proceeds of sales to further the aim of going some way to cleaning up our collective mess. A small thing, but worthy. And a nice watch... 

Shown is the start of my disassembly of one of Dad's old printers - regrettably, I binned another at the tip a good while ago - in the hope of salvaging some good and useful stuff that would otherwise end up, uselessly and environmentally-badly, in landfill. I'll post a picture of the spoils that came out of the thing in another post, but there was - I guess, not unsurprisingly, given the nature of printer/scanners - a wealth of re-usable stuff. Aside from the various circuit boards and the case and bits of steel chassis, there were oodles of nylon gears, three good DC motors, drive-belts, and various sensors and encoders: all of which are eminently re-usable for other projects. I think I might be doing a good bit more of this Re Up stuff in future...

The strangest thing about capitalism as it stands - notwithstanding all the corollaries of climate disaster and world poverty and, well, just about any ill that you can name or even conceive of, is that it just fails on its own terms. Free markets are not free, and most entrepreneurs will fail, not through lack of hard work or even through a lack of decent ideas; but simply because they run out of time and cash in the pursuit of their dreams. Privilege, luck, and politics, to a very large part, hold sway and ultimate influence over success: whatever that is and however you measure it . The lie to it all is that hard work alone will ensure, nay guarantee, a triumphant elevation to the ranks of the wealthy. Not so. The problem with capitalism - to which, fundamentally, I hold no negative brief - is that it ain't [properly] regulated, and it ain't open to all on the equal basis so vocally touted by [conservative] society. Wealth, birthright and sundry other [largely] unearned adva...

So it's now official: the NHS is in crisis and close to breaking-point; as if most of us in the real world didn't already know it, despite the blatant untruths voiced ad nauseam by Johnson's PMQ grandstanding and retweeted unquestioningly by his gang of lickspittle apologists masquerading as a cabinet and government [for God's sake], throughout his - mercifully short, and we sincerely hope, properly over - tenure as *cough* Prime Minister. However, it looks as if his desire to continue wreaking havoc on our country in his pursuit of personal gain and aggrandisement is undiminished: Lord Cruddas and around 10,000 party members are conspiring with the Bear of Little Brain to get him back in the saddle, despite his having been forced to resign in the first place, defenestrated at the hand of his former concubines, sorry: colleagues. So Trump, so Johnson: both pathologically deluded, both pathetically clinging on to their ego-driven status as 'world-leaders', both...

Diary post... duck tonight, with roast potatoes and steamed veg and my homemade - natch - gravy; well sauce, technically, as it was reduced rather than thickened. Well tasty. And by the way, the weather is still weird... as for Boris, intending as he appears to be, to stuff the Lords with his mates will, I've no doubt, be a topic I'll return to fairly sharpish, but for the moment, I'm kicking back with a full belly and a glass of wine... Cheers, m'dears!  

Diary post - another strange day of weather after the peculiarities of the last week: started with a chill breeze and a trip to Lidl for shopping. When we left the store 30 mins later, the wind was Med warm and the sun was out. Through the afternoon, the wind has just built, and fine rain has set in. Not sure what will follow, but we'll roll with it...

Like most people - at least those with smartphones of one sort or another - I have an app for just about everything, from Altimeter to Zenbeats, via a frankly bewildering array of noise-making devices, and photography apps by the dozen; newsfeeds, journals, e-readers and so on: you get the picture. Amongst these are the usual suspects, such as the BBC and sports apps, and Twitter - the only social medi( a )(um) I engage in; and then only to give vent to my sarcastic tendencies and constant political ire - and a rather fine daily distraction in the Oxford English Dictionary app, which throws up a word of the day each morning. The two met with some serendipity today, in the form of a tweet from @BillMaureen which featured a video of dozens and dozens of trucks lining the hard shoulder of the approach to the Channel Tunnel; and today's word from the Oxford app. Responses to the video seemed mostly to take the form of the low-grade nationalist xenophobia we have come to expect in our ...

  I was amused to chance on something today - from a totally left-field source, of which I was completely unaware until now - that kind of neatly sums up the current state of our government, as parliament enters recess for the summer. I am a subscriber to a numerous and varied - nay, eclectic and eccentric - number of YouTube channels: I know, at my age... The channel I discovered this particular random little fragment on, is Mathologer's. Whilst I still struggle with getting my head around mathematics - as opposed to basic and mental arithmetic, which I'm still pretty good at - I enjoy attempting to get to grips with Burkard Polster's excellent expositions on all manner and grades of mathematical niceties (and oddities). Today, I was attempting - still, fifty years after failing maths miserably, twice, at school - to come to terms, yet again, with The Calculus . Why, I don't really know, but I guess it's an itch I've been trying to scratch ever since, and I sim...

  This noon we bore witness to the risible, unedifying, and frankly unsavoury spectacle of Doris Pooh's final parliamentary performance at PMQ's today, where he managed to stretch the definitions of showboating and grandstanding to the very limits of semantics, and demonstrated, once and for all, that his grip on reality is and obviously always has been, tenuous at the very least. One thing I hate about the Conservatives, and Johnson in particular, is their singular, irrational, and cynical approach to the role of government - given that we can honestly consider ourselves to be planted firmly in a 'modern' era, long-divorced from the feudalism of ages past - which can be summarized thus: their approach to the complimentary governmental requirements of taxation & spending. When Johnson slates the SNP - a frequent personal Aunt Sally of his - for their continued seeking of independence from the Union, he cites the benefit Scotland derives from '... the massive fis...

    The weather, particularly today, has been a tad scary, even up here, and we've only seen 35 Celsius in our garden, this morning, in North Wales - wildfires in the south of England? We really do have to get a very firm grip on the climate situation, as it is obviously getting frighteningly out of control: the sight of burned-out homes on the outskirts of London really should bring this whole thing into focus, and yet politicians still drag their feet and concentrate on their own career futures, rather than the future that awaits them and the rest of humanity: there is no escape route based on class and/or money, you eejits; we're all in the same boat, and it's sinking rapidly...

  It's been hot, hot, hot, today, and I'm not much disposed to rational thought at this juncture. The Welsh high temperature record has been breached in either Ceredigion or Denbighshire, depending on which news report you look at: whatever, the temperature down in our bottom garden hit 35 degrees Celsius this afternoon - and - it was humid to boot, rendering being outside for too long a tad uncomfortable. But by this evening, both temperature and humidity had abated somewhat, to a rather cooler 29 Celsius, with a bit of high cloud to help temper things further. That's not to detract from the fact that our climate here in North Wales has grown consistently hotter for about the last decade, with the last five years throwing more extremes at us annually. And still the politicians drag their feet over it: 2050 will be far, far too late: the tipping-point will be long gone by then. Meanwhile, Doris thinks it a great wheeze to have a joyride in an RAF fighter jet: words are inad...

Well, here in Fairview Heights - at 20.00 hours: in North Wales , remember - the temperature has cooled to a balmy 27 Celsius, down from its afternoon high of 32. We expect a tad more extremity tomorrow. One would think that, given the immediacy of the myriad of problems facing the vacuum of governance currently extant, the temperature of the Tory leadership debate would be similarly elevated; but no, we are treated(?) to a display of vapid flummery and self-promotional nonsense by all concerned. It really is of concern - really of concern - that none of the eejits seeks to engage even remotely urgently with the fucking elephant in the room : climate change, preferring instead to trot out the usual 'economic' arguments against doing this or that thing, citing growth and inflation as the most important things to deal with first. Excuse me, but in this burning, flooding chaos of a world that we currently just about inhabit, the niceties of macroeconomics really don't cut the...

  Just started watching a documentary on Tamla Motown: Marvin Gaye's seminal album, "What's Going On?", changed the direction of the label by pushing firmly into the sphere of politics, and a desire for change in the world despite initial reluctance on behalf of the label. Pieces in the FT this weekend would seem to indicate a similarly radical shift in the Tory demographic over here, in the aftermath of Borisgate and the defenestration of the bear of little brain. Simon Kuper posits the notion that the bear has well and truly scuppered the resurgence of Tory posh-boy Eton/Oxford entitlement we've seen since the years immediately leading up to the Financial crisis of the early/mid 2000s, with Cameron's ascendancy to the premiership, by souring the brand - hopefully for good - in the eyes of Middle England, with his determinedly gentleman amateur, I'm here-solely-because-of-my-superior-station non-engagement with the nuts and bolts of his job and his commi...

This year's Proms kicked off in great style with Verdi's Requiem. It reminded me that although I don't believe in that strangest of obsessions, The Bucket List, I would still like to experience Verdi in the Arena of Verona - Nabucco in particular, as did my late workmate Bryn - a singer himself - in the months before he died. One thing that these great Christian classical pieces won't prompt me to revisit is the dogma of the faith I was brought up in. As I've said before, I've espoused Zen Buddhism since I was a teenager, and although I love the symbolism and ritual of High Church, and the cosy fraternity of the Low Church, I find it all a bit reductive compared to the open-ness of Zen: the Requiem's words are all you need to come the same conclusion...  

It ain't over till it's over... Doris hasn't left the building yet, the leadership contest grumbles on, and parliament is about to enter recess for the summer. As long as the chump is still "in office", he still has all the power that goes with the office of First Lord of The Treasury. He can still stuff the Lords with as many friends and cronies as he can, while he can. There's still damage to be done. I just wonder what his Parthian shot will be...

Pictured is the result of the turning exercise I mentioned the other day: yes, it's a crude finish, but the mitigating circumstances here are that my lathe is over eighty years old and *very* well-worn, and that it is over half a century since I last tackled turning down a piece of steel quite as chunky as this. The modicum of knurling on the shoulder of the piece was really a token gesture, as the lathe really isn't chunky enough to withstand the kind of lateral force necessary for the tool to cut into anything harder than aluminium, or with a following wind, brass. Still, it was an instructive exercise that went rather better than I expected, and the piece will form the bearing for a belt-tensioner for the old lathe itself, rather than the originally-intended change-wheel stud: I now feel more confident in approaching that one head-on. Keep you posted!

Here's the thing - a Tory leadership contest, an article in The New Statesman, a film about the Everest business called "Sherpa", and the freak weather currently descending on Europe - have coalesced today to further convince me that some form of state consensus and control - preferably global - is essential to rein in the excesses of capitalism and to at least mitigate the damage already wreaked on the planet and the majority of its inhabitants. One, a speech by a candidate for the Tory leadership, Kemi Badenoch, which offered more hands-off government, couched in the apparently empiricist terms of the engineer she erstwhile is; two, Nicholas Lezard's piece in The New Statesman about the erosion  of society's appreciation of the value of the humanities in tertiary education; and three, the continuing spectacle of rich people 'mountaineering' on Everest. And four: the mad weather. Kemi Badenoch's pitch was intelligent, considered and her delivery appea...

Just a small diversion from the hurly-burly - sorry, tedium - of the Tory leadership race(?). I was watching some YouTube footage of the Goodwood Festival of Speed hill climb earlier, and found myself captivated by the ascendancy of EV in the event. The ultimate winner: the McMurtry fan - that's fan as in fan-driven downforce - car, driven by Max Chilton, blitzed the record for the hill at 39.06 seconds. Having watched some serious iron; including F1 cars, other EVs and old-school muscle cars get nowhere near - well, it's all relative - this thing was like watching Tron in real life. The weirdest thing about it was, every time a conventional combustion engined-car got a fast time, all I could think was "...that's not a bad time for an old-time ICE car..." - that's how damned good the EV competition is, and frankly that's the future: the bravado and coloratura theatre of the - even the glorious American V8s or the banshee Le Mans and F1 cars - simply didn...

  Just a brief diary post, tonight: a pleasant evening spent with friends and family... later, just sitting in the evening sun and reading Jim Perrin with a glass of wine. Not 'alf bad, eh?

  Well, the chunk of steel I showed you in the lathe yesterday ended up in the form of the above - please ignore the finish: I took the thing a couple of thou too far roughing it out. I decided to try and cut the largest metric thread I've got the tools for - 12 mm - which necessitated turning the end of the stock down to 12 mm: quite a lot of material to remove, but an interesting exercise, as I don't yet really know the limits of this old lathe. Turning the spigot for the threaded portion proved to be relatively painless: I seemed to have guessed the right chuck-speed and feed-rate to avoid the smokies, unlike yesterday, when I turned the 'bearing' part of the shaft... What I was most chuffed about, though, was hand-cutting the thread, which, I have to admit, is a bit chunky for the tools I have to hand, but a good challenge well met, I think. I started the thread with the piece in the chuck of the lathe, and the die/wrench supported and held true by the quill of the ...

OK - chicken and egg, and a universe out of nowt sort of stuff today. A while ago, I mentioned that I needed to sort out a replacement for the missing change-wheel stud on my ancient Myford lathe, so that turning down stuff could be semi-automated and less of a ball-ache. I've resisted getting started on this for a while, due both to my extremely rusty lathe skills, and to a lack of faith in the old beast itself. Armed with a new tungsten carbide insert tool, I fooled around some and finished a small piece for the dial test indicator stand in steel and tried some high-speed finishing on a small piece of aluminium, both of which turned(!) out OK. When I tried to rough out the 3/4" steel stock to the required diameter for the change wheels, I realized that the 10 mm tool was really too small for the job. Fortunately, amongst the HSS tools that I inherited with the lathe, was a monster (for this size of lathe), ideal for the job. I'd forgotten that using a small hobby lathe i...

  I hope that today's events mean that I won't have to waste any more of my life ranting about Pooh and his spectacularly offensive lifestyle and politics. It would seem that his party are already trying desperately to put some distance between themselves and their cuckoo leader: the expediency of his vote-winning bonkers persona having descended into megalomaniac farce in the - oh, so short time - he has been PM. The party sowed, they now reap. What can be remade out of the remnants of this sorry lot remains to be seen, but I, for one, hope that the logical outcome of this woeful period in British politics - the effective exile of the Tory Party for good - comes to pass at last. But some of the vox pops I've heard today would indicate otherwise. Please, people: just wise up...

    "...standing at the Crossroads, believe I'm sinkin' down..." Both the Tory Party and Doris made pacts with the Devil, and both are now reaping the whirlwind. The resignations are piling in, and the exhortations from even his closest allies for him to resign increase by the minute. They say be careful what you wish for, and signing up with dark forces always comes with serious caveats: in this particular, both sides traded their souls, each in pursuit of their own venal self-interest, and the blood-drenched contracts they signed are now being dragged out front and centre by Beelzebub's legal team, demanding reparation. At least the writer of Crossroads appears to have benefited from his putative pact with the Devil, apparently granted previously absent musical abilities to produce twenty-nine timeless songs; covered to this day, nearly ninety years after his recording them. Unfortunately, Robert Johnson met an untimely, young death, heralding the twenty-seven ...

To lose one cabinet minister, Mr Johnson, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose [two] looks like carelessness... The rats are finally starting to smell the smoke of their burning vessel, and are taking to the lifeboats before their careers are also reduced to ashes in the Bonfire of the Vanities that is Doris's government. And not before time, although I suspect that Javid and Sunak's decisions to resign this evening were expedited by Lord McDonald's open letter and subsequent press interviews. I rather think that without that final coffin nail, they might well have kept schtum in the hope that this latest disaster would wither and die in the sandstorm of BS and denial that has become the Tory norm when dealing with their internally-generated gaffes and scandals. Now the veil is down and actual, verifiable facts have hit the fan, the only thing that remains to them is damage-limiting distancing from the PM. It's currently eight o'clock on the evening of these fir...

  The thinning-down of the state and the rise and rise of autonomy for the Executive continues apace. The Minister for the Eighteenth Century, Jakob Fees-Dogg, is quoted in today's i - in a pre-emptive attack on his own ministers' reluctance to follow his diktat on civil service cuts - "You must watch out that we don't try to get around [the proposed 91,000 civil service job-cull] by changing the definitions". This from a member of a government that chops and changes semantics to suit its ends at almost every available turn. Pot, kettle, black, methinks... He also expounds on the need to get free of "... ridiculous, pettifogging [EU retained rules]..." citing the EU working time directive on firms reporting extra staff hours - beyond 48 weekly - saying "...an administrative burden... it doesn't serve any particular purpose...". Like protecting workers from being forced into working spurious overtime at no extra gain to themselves, for exam...

I'd just like to offer up a quotation from Helena Kennedy, QC, writing in this weekend's FT on the British Bill of Rights that our government are in the process of launching and are promoting conspicuously vigorously: "The true objective of this bill is not to restore parliamentary sovereignty. Its purpose is to consolidate executive power and reduce scrutiny...and it will chip away another piece of the mortar that holds together the rules-based order that Britain helped create after the second world war." If we truly want the kind of leadership exemplified by a former, deranged US president, attempting to wrest control of his official vehicle from his aide in order to support an ongoing attempt at insurrection; then, by all means, continue to support Doris and his danse macabre, and see where it gets you. Fortunately, the bear of little brain's support network seems to be deserting him at an ever-increasing rate, the latest being the stable of fawning print media...

  A long-overdue repair to an old friend pictured: the loop on the old belt in the centre gave way some years ago, and has been hanging on by a thread for the best part of a decade. As I wrote in my post of September 8th, 2020, "Greek Myth", Jane and I ended up by happenstance on the tiny Cycladean island of Siphnos in May 1979. Just before we moved on to the island of Milos, I went to the local market and bought a fisherman's sweater of the coarsest and oiliest wool imaginable, a fisherman's smock/shirt, and the above trouser retainer. The shirt lasted about five years, the sweater a decade or so, but the belt is still in daily service after forty-three years, pretty much as I imagined it would be when I purchased it: it started life as sturdy as a piece of horse-tack. It was made of a pale-ish reddy-brown hide and stamped with patterning along its length: it's thickness some 5 mm. Over the years, it has darkened until almost black, and to an extent, thinned down...

  What is it about this world that we hold 'business' in the highest regard, above all other considerations: culture, philosophy, faith - humanity itself - as if it were independent of humanity, and de facto divine? Two things have struck me in my reading today: The first was a short interview with economist Esther Duflo in The New Statesman this week, arguing again, as so many of us have been doing in recent years, that the only way out of the current economic and environmental mire we are currently in, is to reset and remodel. Our current world politico-economic system(!) is just plain broken, and offers no solutions to just about any of the world's problems: rather, it simply reinforces the archaic hegemony of wealth and privilege, over common sense and humanity. The second was the comment made by Bernie Ecclestone - he of former Formula One hegemony - stating that he would take a bullet for Putin, in his words '...a first-class person...' and that the reason for...