Observations from a Hill

  Two pieces from today's i highlight just how out of touch the Tory government is with reality and its electorate. The first, most obvious and egregious was the one highlighting the delightful comments made by the local Conservative Party chairman of one of the Red-Wall constituency associations, Newcastle-under-Lyme: Graham Hutton. According to this clueless, empathy-free zone of a man, the cost of living crisis is 'overplayed' and "...an awful lot of people who use foodbanks do so because it's free food, and they wouldn't pass on something free." He suggests that the next PM should focus on small businesses "...that are the backbone of this country." In that simple, factual assertion lies the rub that lends the appalling lie to the Tory claim that they are the party of business. The second piece reinforces the reality of this received fiction. Most small businesses feel marginalized and betrayed by a government that, whilst it stepped up to t...

Jane, James & Leo heading for The Three Tuns, Bishop's Castle, this evening, for supper; myself, obviously, bringing up the rear and taking the picture. A pleasant couple of hours around the table, with decent food and drink, and good service from a slightly-stressed member of staff: understaffing being the norm, now, post-pandemic. These businesses are only just recovering from Covid, and now they're faced with hyperinflated fuel and general running costs that, in the absence of positive leadership and governance - state wide - will probably see them wither and die. In the case of The Three Tuns, although they've weathered hundreds of years of vicissitudes, failures and rebirths, this might tragically be their final hurrah. Hope to God not...  

  Bank Holiday Monday and a trip to Church Stretton with an aching back, precipitated by turning around to pick up my morning tea: you know you're getting old when even that trivial an activity demands a warm-up routine to prevent injury. Managed to get lunch in The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle on the way back to Lower Down - a couple of donated Ibuprofen, a couple of beers, and a pitta stuffed with barbecued chicken and salad later, and I feel at least anaesthetized enough to get on with the evening: red wine, The Proms, and a lightly deranged Black Lab Cross beating up a stuffed toy bird. Oh, and the picture? No reason...

  Two things have occurred to me since yesterday about this year's visit here. The first and most obvious is the parched and parlous state of the gardens (pictured). In the quarter of a century of holidays here, I've never seen the area so dry, and frankly, today, airless. This part of Shropshire is normally one of the greenest and lushest parts of the UK: some of the best agricultural land you'll find. At the moment, everything has been toasted crisp and dead, with almost no respite in the form of rainfall: a portent of things to come? The other thing is more abstract and psychological in nature. We've been holidaying here on and off since 1998, and one's internal narrative is always that during one's stay, the place is somehow one's own, despite the knowledge that hundreds of other people have stayed here in that same theatrical mind-state. Yesterday, to find another family settling in somehow broke the fourth wall of that narrative, disrupting the illusor...

  Just a diary update - we’re now ensconced at Lower Down, despite arriving here this afternoon and finding another family already settling in for their holiday. It appeared that we were double-booked, so as they were here first and had a young child, we bailed to Bishop’s Castle, while the owner of the cottage was contacted by all parties concerned. Turns out, in the end, it wasn’t our mistake - so here we are…

Going away for a few days, tomorrow; fed up with the current politico-economic bollox and the stupid, stupid, stupid lack of engagement by the principal actors of our supposed government, in what is boiling up to be an economic crisis to rival - ultimately, if left to their mindless laissez-faire principles(?) - the Great Depression. Some semblance of attention or care would be nice from these halfwits, but I fear I'm pissing in the wind with that one. Instead, I commend to you the above snap of the lilies outside our front door, this afternoon. Kind of appropriate, given the lily's association with death...

Pictured is the venerable old Spotmatic I got off eBay last year some time. A new battery and a roll of Washi F loaded - an X-ray film, no less - so strangely inflected results await from it's highly orthochromatic emulsion and lack of an anti-halation layer: much mistiness, contrast and grain in the offing! I'll take this and the Nikon F2, which still has a roll of out-of-date colour stock in it, down to Shropshire this weekend. Maybe take the Rollei SLX, too, if we've room left in the car. Keep you posted while we're away...

I was mulling over just how we've arrived at our current point in economic and political history, and that we really don't seem to have learned much at all in the last century and a half or so; let's face it, modern political and economic history is still that: modern. It's not like where we are at present was baked into humanity in the Garden of Eden, although the apologists for class and the establishment still cling to the idée fixe of inherent privilege and class hierarchy: concepts which we thought naively had withered on the vine of history decades ago. To this end, I have just downloaded "Das Kapital" [Marx, if you didn't know it already, and you should], and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" [Walter Benjamin] to my Kindle, to dip into whilst in Shropshire next week. The facts of capitalism don't change - commerce, in my opinion, is not inherently bad: business and basic capitalism foster change and progress - but...

Apologies for yet another prosaic diary post, but if I vent politically, it will get very unpleasant and possibly offensive to some. So I'll leave commenting about the current shitshow for another day. As you can see from the picture above, the studio rearrangements are well under way and the storage continues to accumulate and, well, gets filled almost immediately. It seems that you can't ever have enough shelving, no matter what. At least I've got my guitar amp and stuff all in one place for a change - although I'll hold fire on storing my guitars down there until I've got the walls and roof sorted - they'll stay up at the house for now. I wish I had been able to get a place like this together years ago, when I had friends still alive and capable of taking advantage of a decent little bit of rehearsal/jamming space. Whatever; time passes, people pass: just got to roll with it and enjoy what's left of the ride...

Well, I think I've got a plan for the order of business in making this part. I've decided that as the end of the piece nearest the chuck will eventually be a narrow flange of around 3/16" - and hence will prevent me from holding the piece in the chuck to start the thread on the stud (the end nearest the camera) - I'm cutting the spigot longer than needed, so that I can leave the piece centred on the tailstock while I cut the shaft itself to size and back as far as the flange. The next step is to cut the stock to just over the full length of the finished piece, size the spigot and cut the thread to form the stud. Then I'll size the bearing itself, up to the shoulder of the flange and part that off rough, before turning the piece around in the chuck and gripping the piece by the bearing surface, so that I can face off, and bevel and knurl the flange: hopefully job done! BTW, as I've mentioned before, I won't be stressing my antique old lathe trying to part st...

The 22 mm steel stock in my lathe ready for centre-turning. I'm going to finish up on making the replacement, second change-wheel stub for the lathe itself. A rough sketch of the project can be seen scribbled on a bit of wood in the background, just forward of the tailstock. My jury-rigged support holds the end of the billet long enough to establish the centre-drill, after which it can be dispensed with and the piece held on the dead centre for machining. I've got a few choices as to how I approach this. I'd like to leave the centred end as the flange, and machine the bearing surface and the spigot to carry the thread for the clamping nut, back from there toward the chuck. Except I don't have a left-hand turning tool. However, rather than fork out speculatively, I think I'll try rotating the tool in the tool post, as the TC inserts are symmetrical and I reckon that I can get the right cutting angle that way: we'll see, but it will be fun trying. Keep you posted....

The world really has turned on its head when Michael Gove appears - appears - to be talking sense. He knows his front-bench career is over, so it serves him no good purpose to follow the flock of Truss' acolytes jostling for their future cabinet prospects - in much the same manner as happened with BoJangly and his lickspittles hanging on to his every idiotic pronouncement and retweeting them as tablets from on high - rather, he now seeks to take the somewhat safer ground offered by the slightly less bonkers Rishi Sunak. Unfortunately for those of us without large asset portfolios and private incomes, multiple homes and access to private jets, yachts, etc., neither candidate has any monetary or fiscal policy whatsoever, cares not a jot about climate change, let alone have the vaguest idea of possible solutions to it, outside of shuffling the deckchairs while we all sink without trace. The rich might be afforded a little respite from the global catastrophes that are rapidly unfolding...

Looks like our [probable] next PM might be in a future financial hole, even before the final ballot that will lead to her 'coronation'. It seems [papers, i ] that the figures she was working to in crafting her Thatcherite tax-cutting economic strategy for her first [and probably last] term in power fall somewhat short of her expectations: by about 50%, according to The Office for Budget Responsibility. It never ceases to amaze me that the Tories always - always - accuse Labour of being the party of tax and spend, which would seem at least fiscally responsible; as if it were in some way a negative. They, by contrast, seem to believe that taxation is inherently bad, seek to avoid it wherever possible, and simply rely, like Truss, on 'headroom': slack leftover in the economy for whatever reasons, usually fortuitous, nay, even serendipitous. The trouble with serendipity is, it don't always come your way, and really can't be relied on when you're in charge of th...

Well, thanks to the miracle of penicillin - Phenoxymethylpenicillin, to be precise - I can now eat solid food and drink stuff without the sensation of inhaling broken glass whilst being simultaneously stabbed in the throat by demons with hat pins. And this after only five of the twenty-eight dose course - which I will of course complete, as I've always done; well except on the one occasion I was prescribed Erythromycin, which nearly killed my gut, but that's another story. That's what I love about penicillin, it gets to work pretty quick, which affords early relief from painful infections, allowing you to get back on track quicker. I reckon I'll have seen the last of the symptoms of this bloody thing by the weekend, but I can feel the little bacterial sods retreating and regrouping, like some hideous, microscopic, guerilla army; hiding in dugouts and waiting to push on again when my defences are down. So I kind of see the rest of the course as an exercise in carpet-bomb...

Well, it's day three or so of grumpy old sod with a sore throat, although the affliction has an upside for everyone else in that I can barely speak, let alone swear at politicians on the TV and radio. [Above, my favourite cap, which looks and is an awful lot older than the photo suggests.] Still,  I made reasonably swift progress towards getting treatment this morning, having successfully navigated the GP practice's automated system through to the receptionist, so I could book a doctor callback. The first attempt started with the following exchange... Receptionist: " ... I can't really hear you, your line's very clicky ..." Me: "... I'm afraid it's my voice that's clicky..." . At least that lightened the conversation, which always helps when you feel like death warmed up, and so unused as I am - I'll come to the reason - to the current processes, that presently I assumed I'd been cut off when the line went dead, rather than re...

  Another late diary post tonight: even more sore throat, even grumpier - looks solidly like strep throat, the tell-tale pale patches having appeared on my throat earlier today. Looks like my once-a-decade appointment with streptococcus has arrived after all. So all I've got to do now is navigate our post-covid surgery regime in the morning, which is still operating a - frankly unnecessary and Byzantine - system. This involves ringing the practice reception and asking for an appointment, which now for whatever reason [unclear], cannot be booked on the computer by the receptionist, as only a doctor can make an appointment [since when?]; upon which you are told that you'll get a callback at some unspecified time from a doctor themselves , who will give you a brief telephone interview, before allotting you a slot for a visit at some time later in the day: during the pandemic, this made perfect sense. Strikes me that there's a lot of duplication and waste of effort going on he...

  A bit late off the mark tonight, due to a bit of grumpy and reticent demeanour occasioned by a mother of a sore throat - thankfully not tonsillitis for once, although I'm due my once-every-decade-or-so bout anytime now - but painful and annoying nevertheless. I blame the pollen and shouting at politicians, myself... We had a bit of that promised rain last night and the high cloud this morning held the temperature down to 21 Celsius - what used after all to be a good UK summer average temperature - with a bit of late afternoon sun to finish the day off. We'll see what tomorrow brings, weather- and throat-wise. 

  It's been another very warm one today: thirty Celsius in the shade and fierce sunlight, blowtorch-like in its intensity. I'm sitting here drinking a cold San Miguel with fresh lime juice and watching the haze and high cloud move over the sun, a herald of cooler days, and maybe welcome rain, to come. As the temperature drops slightly and the hairdrier heat abates somewhat, a nebula of midges emerges and dances like an orphaned electron field, apparently fixated on its nuclear vacancy: and then, Sol reappears from behind the clouds, and they're gone as sharp as they had arrived...

OK - I've had enough of politics and ranting for one week: besides, it's too damn' hot up here in Fairview Heights to do or think much of anything at all, at the moment. So in lieu of all that, and apropos of - as I always say - not a lot, here's a short poem by Roger McGough from his anthology " defying gravity " from 1992...   The Bright Side Things are so bad I am reduced to scraping The outside of the barrel. And yet, I do not despair. In the yard there are many Worse off than myself. (Well, four: A one-eyed rat A three-legged cat A corpse and the lavatory door.)

Two things. Firstly, I live, as you know, in North Wales, UK; so not the Tropics, then. Nevertheless, the temperature at 17:22, as I write this, is 32 degrees Celsius, less than a fortnight since we reached a peak of 35 degrees up here in Rachub. I have lived in the area for forty-two years, most of my adult life: and have experienced hot summers, cold winters, wet autumns and stormy springs. But the weather we are presently seeing, consistently, is of an extreme nature outwith my personal experience. Secondly, the picture above illustrates some sort of tabloid newspaper that Jane had thrust into her hand in Bangor today. Now, I'm as against book-burning as any right-minded individual, but I would suggest that this particular periodical gets as close to straight-into-the-fire-with-it as it gets. It manages to be homophobic, anti-trans, climate-denying and an awful lot more, in its scant 23 pages of 'content'. It even manages to trot out the old conspiracy theories surroundi...

I was going to reflect simply on the heat of the afternoon, the glorious blue sky, and the glass of red in front of me. But I can't ignore the boiling, visceral anger that this bunch of abject, useless, pointless failures - the Tories and their non-government - raise in me. It gets worse by the hour, let alone the day. The disturbing prospect of a reborn ultra like Truss getting her mitts on power is more than any mere mortal with an ounce of humanity to them can suffer. One of her acolytes - sorry, supporters - is the execrable Iain Duncan Smith, a middle-class boy of similar age to myself, from not a million miles geographically from where I was born and brought up: Solihull, but which as far as those of us from The Green [blog-posts passim] might just well have been Berkshire or Mars. His philosophy is exactly that of Truss': cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes. He - and she knows full well - that tax cuts will only benefit the better-off and the rich. The majority of the UK pop...

Given the current, frankly astonishing lack of engagement with either the populace or the problems we collectively face at the minute, our government seems to be continuing, as ever, down the path of reflexive laissez-faire that characterizes the Tory Party and their supportive ilk. Reading today’s Financial Times - yes, it pays to keep track of what these people think and say - I was particularly vexed by the tone of the opinion piece by Janan Ganesh, echoing as always the trite left/right economic bifurcation of old. I quote: “The reflex case against the left - how will it fund it’s Jerusalem - becomes more potent, not less, when revenue dries up.” This has been the stock right wing standpoint for as long as I can remember.   But no-one - no-one, ever posits the same ‘axiom’ regarding the right. Their position, when in government, is precisely the same as any other: they are required to raise revenue in order to do the job they are elected to perform: govern the sodding country ...

A stroll along Bangor Pier in the sun, Scott Walker streaming over the sound system as our fish and chips cook, The Hundred on the box [archaic reference to a TV for those too young to know], the prospect of a new PM - eventually - who will introduce a raft of ineffectualities that will scratch the surface of our extant economic woes not one jot; and the current escalations in energy price-cap predictions that will see some people's energy bills reach approximately 50% of the State Pension. Oh, and yet more chaotic weather and subsequent water shortages to boot. Lovely! - at least the walk on the pier was. And I'm slowly warming(!) to the format of The Hundred, although cricket it ain't: more flat-bat baseball; but sort of entertaining. The fish and chips are good, the music's good, the (sort-of) cricket's good, the sun's good - even if it is a portent of something much less so - and the politics? Crap. The only good things happening currently are on the surface...

We live in an era of theatre politics. Politics without substance, save the electability of the protagonists and the modus operandi necessary to achieve that election. In previous times, at least, despots would simply take control of the military, the media and the judiciary and seize control by force, rather than masquerade as 'democratic'. Wait - hold the phone - the government already has 95% of the media in its thrall - and pockets - and it now seeks, via the appalling Raab-creature, to throttle the very life out of the judiciary, rendering what he must see as a-government-in-perpetuity, outwith the scope of the law and the common good.  Our elected representatives, remember, are attempting to set themselves outside the scrutiny of the populace that elected them and the legal system that regulates larger society by common assent. If their motivations are merely personal, egotistic and pecuniary, all to the good: they can be dealt with. If their motivations are rooted in dee...

 A brief hiatus from ranting tonight: above is the hydrangea on the side garden, with the cypress behind, in the mid-evening sun. The weather seems to be shaping up for a warm one this week, so my concerns over the next few days will be avoiding a conflagration involving the tinder-dry  stuff in the garden and on the Ffridd beyond, and the inevitable bites from the increasingly hostile and virulent horde of insects that we're host to, here in Fairview Heights. Still, we are after all part of nature's pecking order, and the presence of the little critters is only natural after all, although some of 'em seem to have made their way this far north and west as a result of mankind's climate interference, so no grounds for complaint. Just an observation...

Just watched 'The Day The Earth Caught Fire', a 1961 sci-fi film about a man-made climate Armageddon. A prescient document couched in fantasy fiction, the parallels with today's situation are significant. The differences between the fantasy and our current - and probable future - reality, are both substantive and stylistic. The basic premise of the film is that thermonuclear tests across the world have thrown the planet off its axis and shifted its orbit toward the sun. That we have engineered a near-irreversible climate catastrophe by far more mundane means is, in itself, a tragic tribute to our species' inability to either appreciate on any fundamental level our symbiotic relationship with our home planet, or to have the political and economic will to address the problems we have created, and to implement the solutions to which, that are fast approaching being beyond our reach for good. The differences between the fiction and the reality go further, however: in the fi...

Two things I've read over the last two days make me wonder just where the bejeezus we think we're headed as a species: intelligence as members of the highest family of higher apes seems not to count for much when it comes to plain common sense or just sensibility. A piece in the paper yesterday about the ridiculous private-jet activity prevalent in not only the fuckwit 'celeb' circles, but also within the elected ranks of British politicians, raises so many issues over climate-chaos that the blind-leading-the-wilfully-fucking-senseless is the only phrase that springs to mind. Liz Truss taking a private flight to Australia at a cost to us, as taxpayers, of £500,000, being the tip of a very large and rapidly-melting iceberg in the farrago that is our 'response' to the just-ever-so-slightly pressing issues that we face: she could have arrived much sooner on a scheduled flight, and at a far, far, far lower ticket price, meanwhile contributing a much smaller carbon ...

Working on the principle that you simply can't have too much shelving in a workshop, I've just reassembled the old steel shelving unit we rescued from Lou's garage, one of the three last things to go after the house and shed were cleared: the other two being a bureau-bookshelf and upright piano that the boys now have in the chapel. The unit in question is the one at the rear of the picture, and is of the old-school 'Dexion' type, which is an unholy pain to assemble, but good and strong. I attached it to the German (Lidl) unit in the foreground with a couple of bolts from Mac's extensive collection of bits, also rescued from Lou's. I'm absolutely certain that this will far from the last storage unit I install in the studio, as there's so much stuff to collate and store. But hey(!), keeps me occupied!

By the by, I'm watching The Hundred for the first time, and frankly, given the hype about its hi-energy, ultra-modern buzz and American flava, I'm afraid the game falls far short of its expectations vis-à-vis excitement. It's over-thought-out in terms of rules, relies too much on flash(?) graphics that communicate little, and daft music between every bloody 'play', 'power' or otherwise. Not at all convinced, and I think it makes a good argument for T20, which is something I never thought I would ever say. At the same time, we now see that the government does not intend to ensure that soccer is taught equally across the sexes in schools, despite the slightly prominent success of England in the Euros: a classic case of hearing but not listening; along with The Truss's pathetic dissing down of Nicola Sturgeon as 'an attention seeker': guaranteed to bolster support for the SNP, north of the border - and I've nothing agin that! - diplomacy, not. ...

  Boris Johnson is truly a remarkable man - really! - remarkable in the truest sense of the word. Let's face it, who couldn't fail to remark on his current outburst of narcissistic idiocy, his now accusing the 2019-er's of effectively scuppering his position as autocrat-in-chief of UK Plc, his point being that he alone got them elected, and that they owed him an oath of blind allegiance, no matter what. A blind-er, more entitled individual is, to be frank, difficult to envisage: North Korea would be a more fitting political environment for the tousled oaf. But it's ever been thus: deflect your own shortcomings onto the less-powerful or the power-less. Accuse those who are less privileged and have little voice against the weight of money and the establishment. Johnson's trite PMQ's waffle about the Labour Party being in the pay of '...Union Barons...' is simply the empty rhetoric of the scoundrel who chooses to ignore the unprincipled source of Tory Party...

  Sort of watching - well, not really, it's on in the background - The Hobbit, which brings to mind the cult of Tolkien at school in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Several of our number took to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, a particularly fine edition of which was housed in the school library. The most frequent borrower of those volumes was Pete Ridgeway, who I'd known, along with Clive Hill, since infant school; both having moved to George Dixon School Juniors at the age of seven. I've written about mine and Clive's friendship before, but I don't think I've thus far mentioned Pete. He was always a solid, athletic lad, but by the time we were reunited at senior school, he was creditably leviathan in stature. His outward appearance was impressively intimidating, but to those who really knew him, he was a gentle, if large-boned, aesthete, whose faves were the aforementioned Tolkien and the illustrations of Arthur Rackham. Whilst still at school, he'd r...