Observations from a Hill

  Debouching from a fumarole of our smouldering political volcano for even the shortest break is welcome, and thanks to Jane's throwaway Halloween mention of Spooky Tooth, a band lost so far back in the mists of UK rock history, they are known only to a very few survivors; I have just so done. The title of this piece is the title of the first track from the band's album Spooky Two, which I admit I have only owned in MP3 form and is buried in the bowels of my old iPod, whose current location is moot. Rather, the track was a key feature of my musical adolescence, and is one I still love to this day: it was featured on the Island label compilation album 'Nice Enough to Eat' from 1969. I think I still have three copies of this budget release in various states of scratched-up [vinyl, natch] disrepair. Riff Rock at it's most basic and finest, 'Better...' is a stripped-down but subtly sophisticated little number that chugs and delights in equal measure, at least to...

  Isaac Newton: the gravity guy, right? Well, sort of: considering his manifestly wide portfolio of interests and talents, which covered pretty much every aspect and discipline of what are now quite disparate spheres of activity and expertise, and covering all the sciences, mathematics, engineering and the arts; that might be considered a bit of a reductive appraisal of the bloke. His era of practice is historically known as The Enlightenment, a period of scientific, engineering and cultural exploration and experimentation, like none before, nor since. It was Newton's 17th century forebears, such as Robert Boyle, who founded the Royal Society on 28th November 1660, an institution that continues to operate to the present day: indeed one which is part of the fabric of these islands' life and culture. And there is the thing; although in contemporary society we choose to bifurcate academia into the spheres of Arts or Sciences, often relegating Engineering to some step further down ...

  I've just caught a YouTube of a couple of young Brits in Sweden, buying a '63 Fender Strat. Two things, or rather, three: I'll get to the third in a bit. First off, a '63 Strat is a guitar of which I know something, albeit now at some years distance. My mate from school, Kev White, bought one from a second-hand music shop on Broad Street, Birmingham, for the princely sum of around £120, in 1973 (a new Start was circa £180 at the time). It was a Fiesta Red refin, I think - there weren't many original finishes left in '63, anyway, but whichever - in beautiful nick at the time, and a bargain, even then. Today's value? £25,000, at least. So, the two young kids buying the guitar in Sweden in the video either had to have considerably deeper pockets than Kev would ever have had, or they were ripped off: the price they paid was not disclosed. The guitar sounded pretty vintage, in the way that only very well played instruments do, so I don't have good reason to...

  Just been chewing over things with Jane since she got back this afternoon and, apart from a lot of tragic stuff regarding friends that I won't offer, I lit upon a small and seemingly insignificant event from yesterday afternoon. I was out for a pint with Joe, in The Bull, jangling and railing at the world as only two old geezers can, when I became aware of two youngish blokes - late twenties at most - sat at the opposite table. For the duration of the first pint Joe & I drank, these two sat and stared at their phones - obviously watching videos - and said not one word to each other, or even appeared to recognize they were actually participating in a social situation. And therein lies the rub. Social interaction appears now for anyone - not all, for there are dissidents of all ages and social backgrounds out there - to equate solely to their interaction on social media. Human-human interaction has largely been demoted to some netherworld of un-technologically-mediated pariah-h...

  ...until you get it. Or not. It matters little in the greater scheme of things, which in itself is not a lot, or indeed everything or nothing. That's the Zen out of the way for a bit, folks, or is it? Been messing around with electronica today - pictured, the lash-up of various bits of stuff that bleeps, boinks and blarps as all good experimental musical shit should. Listening to the Captain [Beefheart, to the uninitiated: get initiated, it will do your soul the world of good] at the moment. Listened to a fascinating Radio Four programme about Hammer Horror Film's relationship to 20th century modernist composers this afternoon: excellent stuff. Scott Walker has just popped out of Spotify: his later stuff... Just adds to my musings on memory [vis yesterday's pome], mortality and musical diversity and lack of agenda, thereof. John Peel was the only person I ever encountered whose musical mind was as open as mine still is, with Johnny Kyte and Al Moores close behind - I coul...

    Autumn     The clamour of parties past Reverberates through dust-frosted rooms, Fragmented, yet cohere'd enough To feel present, fast: and Yet evanescent, its presence An insult to flesh and loss, Ghosts lost to memory.

Went for a constitutional along Bangor pier this lunchtime. Pictured is the view from there towards Menai Bridge, which is now closed due to structural issues, and which is causing traffic build-up problems at busier times of the day, now there's only one bridge between the island and the mainland. This will surely accelerate the proposed third crossing concept that has been mooted for some years, now. Time to turn the venerable old bridge over to pedestrians and bicycles, methinks.

Today was a day of crossed wires and crossed paths. Dramatis Personae: Your narrator, Alan, Irene, Pete and Arthur. The task of Pete's visiting Alan at the care home was, on paper, straightforward: Pete up from London to visit his daughter in Liverpool for a few days over his birthday, with a day-trip down from there to here to hook up with Irene and me at Bangor Station, and thence to be dropped off, taxied or bussed to the care-home on the island, afterwards to be picked up by me and for the three of us to get a bite to eat somewhere. Simples. It all seemed to be going swimmingly: Irene & I arrived in apparently good time, so did a bit of shopping and hied back to the station to meet Pete's train; which duly arrived, disembarked and left, and with no sign of Pete. Thinking he might be stuck in Chester, having missed a connection or some such, I rang to find he was waiting in Café Nero in Bangor itself, having arrived a full hour before - we had somehow completely got his ...

  Just watched the latest turnaround Doctor Who: a meta-fest of reincarnations in more ways than normal with regard to this saga. I hesitate to use the awful term 'franchise', and 'saga' is pretty much what the series has proven to be, with echoes of all the great folk myths deep within its narrative structure. Time and mortality, rebirth and reincarnation: the core of human philosophy, it's hopes, fears and understanding. The conundrum of human consciousness and understanding is that we know nothing outside our present being; which is itself fleeting, evanescent, but paradoxically eternal: we see no end to our being, even whilst knowing full well our inevitable non-being. Tomorrow is my sixty-eighth birthday: not anything I would seek to write home about, as I haven't really sought to celebrate my age-stages since I was twenty-one, at the very latest. But the day after tomorrow is the day my Dad died, ten years ago. I like to think the big man waited just those...

The stock platitudes of the Conservative & Unionist Party of Great Britain can be numbered thus: everyone else plays politics , whilst they are serious, restrained and conservative. Everyone else seeks to tax and spend like there's no tomorrow , in order to fund what they [the Tories] perceive to be a 'big state' economy, whilst they believe implicitly in a small state; low on interference with the 'natural' forces of the markets - Adam Smith, et al., yet again - somehow imagining that their distorted vision of utopia will magically appear before them with little to zero effort on their part. Governance requires input from government, otherwise we might as well run with the kind of anarchy that the neoliberals actually desire in the furtherance of their own personal gain. The markets - always in a very precarious state of balance - have reflected this in recent days and weeks: the real Masters of the Economic Universe have spoken, and slapped the Conservative...

  Evening all - I almost forgot to post this evening, so taken with the frenetic shenanigans of the political classes and associated media was I. Well, actually, no, I just got wrapped up in watching Rick Beato on YouTube: top channel, top guy: check him out. Apropos of things musical, I was talking to Pete Evans a couple of days ago - great songwriter and a lovely bloke - about, well, guitars and stuff. I have a few instruments in my collection, and Pete asked me which was my favourite. The immediate answer was my oldest: the old Eko acoustic pictured above, bought for me on a loan basis by my mother in 1970 for £28.00, which wasn't exactly chicken-feed for us as a family in those days, although relatively cheap. I hold my hands up: I still owe her the money, and she's been gone these last fifteen years. The guitar will far outlast me: it's much battered and modified form stands testimony to so much experiment and exploration over the decades since I first had it, even bec...

  Pictured is a new mini-project: a power rail splitter to provide dual rail DC supply for other mini-projects - how very meta - the circuit is from a useful site called eleccircuit.com: pay them a visit if you’re interested in such stuff! I’m typing this post on a small Bluetooth keyboard tethered to my iPhone, as last night’s thunderstorm has taken out our broadband and I’m having to use 4G at the minute. For some peculiar reason my MacBook Pro refuses to pair with my phone as a hotspot, so I’m having to peck this one out, rather than typing it. No biggie, so there you go, just like Tory Prime Minister after Tory Prime Minister: when are they going to learn?

Well, PMQ's today was yet another nail in the coffin of Liz Truss' government's ambition for longevity. U-turn after U-turn - although on the pension triple-lock front a result for us, and no, that won't be enough to sway this old geezer to vote Tory - and to top it all, another resignation from the Cabinet to boot. Not looking good, folks. The one standout from the week's politics so far, though, was not in Westminster, but in our Senedd, here in Wales. Our First Minister, Mark Drakeford, who leads the Labour government here in Wales and frankly does not normally wear his heart on his sleeve, was tasked over the Welsh NHS' performance by the frankly odious Andrew RT Davies, Leader of the Welsh Conservatives. What followed was what can only be described as a passionate, incandescent and truly heartfelt rejoinder to the Tory's continued ruination of the NHS, both here in Wales and in the UK generally, over the past decade and more: the overall funding for whi...

 ... count the ways. No, we'd be here for the next six months, enumerating that one. Not content with practically eviscerating our economy and the standing of the UK on the global stage in a matter of hours and days, they simply do their usual trick of junking the current front-line Aunt Sally's and replacing them like for like with more useful idiots. And without a whit of apology, contrition, or even admission of any guilt: the PM's half-hearted 'we did it too quickly' simply ain't credible, let alone adequate. So along rolls Jeremy Hunt to pour oil on the waters of Truss/Kwarteng's self-imposed maelstrom. Except that in one breath he sought to exonerate his party's [let's face it, continuing, no, continuous economic disasters: there ain't been a Tory government in my lifetime that hasn't departed under the cloud of same ] by saying that governments cannot influence the markets [Adam Smith, anyone?]; and in his next exhalation, excoriating ...

Autumn colours, the sun already waning at six in the evening, the edge to the breeze heralding the weeks of winter to come, and - what's this, centre-frame? - why, it's a bloody great piece of slate on a builder's trolley: the soon-to-be-new-lintel for our living-room fireplace, bricked up since the 1970s. All we need now is a couple of wet weather days so that our builder can divert away from the focus of fine weather outside work currently in progress. As soon as the hearth is opened up, we can give the green light to the stove installers to come in and, well, install the stove: a modern, efficient, Scandinavian wood burner that will be a very welcome alternative to being 100% dependent on electricity for heating. All in all an expensive exercise, but a sound long-term investment all round. I look forward to it. I've deliberately decided to not seethe a word about today's parliamentary farrago: I'll leave that until tomorrow...

Well, there's a bit of personal history involved featuring the above artefact, newly unearthed by Jane today. The object itself spans generations: the 45RPM single record effectively created youth culture in the 1950s [anyone who carps on about Presley 78s - yes, I know... but the 45 opened Pandora's Box and marked out youth from their forebears as a distinct tribe], and had a long and varied history throughout the next forty years, with knock backs and rebirths along the way, as other technologies came and went. It's fair to say that the single's day is probably over in the mainstream, unlike it's elder sibling the 33RPM Long Player, which is set this year to outsell CDs. Although mainstream music culture thrives in the streaming world, the parsimony of its monetizing model from an artist's point of view, its lack of an 'owned-when-purchased-object', and its sterile void of soul as a medium, I think a sea-change will come at some point in the not-too-di...

    Bees are good, bees are good: Ebenezer-beezer good... apologies for that, but it just flashed into mind, in the same surreal fashion that such things used to flash into the old man's mind: I am really starting to turn into my dad as I sink further into old age. Not a bad thing, in my book, so there we go... What I was going to say was that, apart from the fact that bees, and insects in general are indeed good - even when they bloody bite/sting or whatever - for the environment, us and the planet as a whole. We tend to observe wonderingly their collaborative nature - social bees, that is, along with the amazing ant, and its Stakhanovite work-ethic and socialist tendencies - asking ourselves, just how on earth can they do it, whilst at the same time observing that, of course, they lack self-determination and individuality, unlike us, the apex species of Planet Earth. We must, of course, be superior to such blindly collaborative beings, however clever Natural Selection, or if...

Much is made in right-wing political circles of the term 'business'. The Tories, after all, proclaim themselves to be the natural party of business. The reality is, tragically, for hundreds of thousands of genuine entrepreneurs and real - mostly small - businesses, the life-blood of the British economy, is that they are not and never were. In High Tory terms, business equates simply to finance and market trading, brokerage & wealth management: essentially betting for or against the futures of real businesses for pecuniary return: in other words, gambling other people's livelihoods for personal gain. Our current government has no plan, no vision, nor any roadmap save this. Bonkers.

'A rolling stone gathers no moss', 'Neither moss nor sand': disparaging epithets, two among many about an organism whose epochal success, along with the ferns, outstrips all breathing creatures, including the dinosaurs; whose realm in turn makes our human tenure on this small, blue planet seem like an away-day ticket to Southend. Moss, scourge of lawn-fetishists and head-gardeners across the [Western] world, thrives in our little corner of Rachub, slowly colonizing grass and tarmac alike: not content with north-facing stone, tree or wall. A thing of timeless beauty and the embodiment of Zen philosophy, moss is revered in the East, particularly in Japan, and rightly so. Now, more than ever, we need to tune away from the static of corporate greed and the endless assault of empty vessels clanking their way through 'political' discourse in the service of that greed: we will, if we don't address the fundamental, planetary and environmental issues that face us, im...

Utterly dispiriting viewing this afternoon, PMQs: the PM rather desperately trotting out the only vaguely possible positive litany of energy price caps, despite a deluge of questions over the broader economic problems currently at issue. Whenever tasked about the tanking economy, people struggling to cope with *significant* increases in food and accommodation costs, she blithely turned the question around to the triumph[!] of limiting increases in average fuel bills to [only] £3,000/annum. As to 'growth', we are treated to frankly fatuous pronouncements on allowing people to keep more of the money they earn, so that they can spend more, and hence grow both the economy and their own personal wealth. Ahem. Most people will be completely untouched by tax and NI cuts, however large or small they might be: the bulk of working people in these islands don't earn anywhere near enough to pay sufficient taxes - if any - for cuts to make the slightest bit of difference to them; and ye...

  I am, to say the very least, pissed off. Everything, and I mean everything, seems now to be broken. From the basics of trying to access eBay to simply return something purchased in error, to the NHS, to the economy, politics and the environment: all are essentially ,  fucked. And most people seem to be standing around going wha?, must be the way of things, I guess; got to be the fault of International Communism, militant unions and the Hard Left trying to ride roughshod over our freedoms(!). Wake up call! The bugle's sounding reveille: arise from your slumbers and just get moving, people. Stop consuming the soma-bullshit that the self-interested right-wing press keep punting out, Stalin or Goebbels-like, day after day; spitting in the face of the actuality - actual reality: the reality totally and utterly divorced from their twisted and malign Weltanschauung. They are not on the side of the Angels, folks. The current, bonkers regime here in the UK has succeeded in effectivel...

Having just dropped off the car for its MOT this evening, I took a walk down to the pub by the pier. On the way there, taking the cut-through that brings you down by the edge of the strait, I spotted these three boats in an arc, grounded at their moorings, with the mountains in the distance. As the car failed its test for the first time ever - brake-pads - this view was as good as the evening's perambulations got!

  Last night, we watched a DVD that has been lurking on the shelves for a good while now: "Free Solo" - it was released in 2018 - that portrayed one of the most astounding rock-climbing feats imaginable: a solo climb of the face of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, USA. To anyone who doesn't know what soloing is, it's simply one person out there on whatever piece of rock they've chosen to climb, with no ropes, no gear, no escape route: about as pure as climbing gets. Add to this the sheer scale of El Cap - 3,200 feet of climbing, and taking in many 'routes' in the process, some of immense technical difficulty, even roped and 'relatively' safe - and you have an undertaking that I think you have to have some climbing experience to appreciate. I am an ex-climber of no particular talent - a 'bumbler' in the old-fashioned jargon of the sport: well, maybe a little better than that, but not much - but I understand both the physical and mental ...

This afternoon's project, pictured: the Baby Eight step-sequencer kit I ordered a wee while ago from Rakits, arrived with the post at lunchtime. A couple of hours of soldering and squinting later, I've got the above: a fully-functioning 8-step sequencer in a package the size of a credit card and a half. And it works! Although a bit rusty with the old soldering iron - I could do with a slightly more *subtle* one for this kind of work - after a faltering start and with the application of my engineer's vice to hold everything still, it all panned out OK. I look forward to making full use of it in the service of making odd noises, as well as getting hold of more of this kind of kit: I might even venture into designing some of my own. Keep you posted...

      Fading...   Iron-palled, Wicklow'd Horizon: come day's close, Miscible, sky with sea: Môn, Mam Cymru, Chi a Fi.

As you can see from the above, my recently finished change-wheel stud is now in situ, and works like a treat, unlike my MacBook Air, which is currently masquerading as a very stylish doorstop, having apparently lunched its SSD [Solid State Drive, i.e. it's heart & soul] whilst updating the Linux Mint OS I'd had installed in place of macOS - the last update of which had previously bricked the thing - the drive is intermittently either bootable or completely invisible, which is a tad random, but I will get to the bottom of it, one way or the other. One thing that strikes me, is that the oily ironwork of my old man's lathe is a far more open form of tech than the closeted inner workings of the [albeit beautifully-designed] MacBook. I have one or two things left on the change-wheel set to sort, in order to achieve the slow, powered saddle feed-rate I want, but it involves little more than simple calculation and small lumps of steel engineered into keys to drive pairs of whe...

  If I hear the phrase 'economic growth' again this week, I'll scream. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: how on earth do we grow the economy when the majority of the population are scraping the breadline; when people are working two and three jobs and still can't afford to pay their heating and food bills; the people in middle-class jobs on decent incomes who have to use food-banks to feed their families. If the vast majority of a country's populace are removed from the consumption side of the economic equation, how on earth is the economy expected to thrive? But of course, the Tories have never been about growing the economy in any sense meaningful to Joe Public: their sphere of influence extends no further than the larger corporate world and the Square Mile: their idea of investment in the country is to encourage more plutocrats to engage with the rarefied and closed - to most of us - world of "high finance", a world in which the not in...

Above left, the fruits of today's workshop machinations: the change-wheel stud I've been promising myself to make for quite some time, now. The original remaining stud is on the right, its partner lost decades ago - it uses a split pin to hold the change-wheels in place, but I'd decided at the outset to machine a flange to achieve that function: there will be a fibre washer between it and the outside change-wheel to take lubrication and aid smooth rotation. A couple of mishaps in the final machining of the piece, however: I broke a lovely little parting tool that I inherited with the lathe, when it snagged at the last minute, which meant I had to resort to the deprecated method of using a hacksaw to part off the fat end of the piece to form the flange: You'll note the scar to the knurling on it: me being cack-handed with the saw. Sixty-year-old chuck-jaws mean that recentring the piece to face off the end was a bit hit-and-miss: a new chuck would be nice, but expensive....

... just doing stuff by and for yourself. I come from a long line of working-class autodidacts, tinkerers and inquirers, many of whom would have wiped the floor with the current government's crop of insipid, uninspired and uninspiring - privileged and overpaid - halfwits; but that's another story altogether. How much longer these idiots can survive on air-ware, bullshit and bluster, I've no idea, but there's an online petition on the government website calling for an early election to bin this lot. I suggest that as many people who feel motivated to do so sign it - I did this afternoon. However, the picture above would suggest a workshop-based post, and indeed that is exactly what this is. The component I'm holding is the extant change-wheel stud for the lathe that I've mentioned before [posts passim], and the lump of steel in the lathe chuck is the replacement for the missing stud, now in progress. I've sized up the bearing surface and am now going to rough...

... unapologetic Small Faces - not The Kinks as I originally said: brain-fade , I'm afraid - reference intended, although in reality, not a greatly lazy one; but compared to the frantic world beyond Rachub and Gogledd Cymru generally, I guess it holds partly true. Here I am, beim wintergarten, beer at hand, on a very balmy October evening, gleefully ignoring the Tory Party conference for a few hours: there'll be plenty of opportunities to catch up and shout obscenities at the radio/TV/Interweb, etc. over the next few days. Just need a respite from the idiocy for a while. I will leave it there, and return to foaming at the mouth tomorrow...  

Judging by the polls out today, we could be looking at yet another Lady Bracknell moment, regarding the procession and defenestration of Tory Prime Ministers. We're on our fourth so far in this parliamentary term of office, and to be frank, the way this lot conduct themselves, we could soon be looking at a fifth. As this would constitute a pretty firm electoral suicide attempt on their behalf, I think it unlikely, but not entirely unimaginable, given their track record over the last [very] few years, that they will be quite so stupid as to go down that path, but they were indeed stupid enough to elect Boris, and now Truss, so who knows? Given the monumentally idiotic tax-cuts for the wealthy and the cutting of the brake-pipes of the City's pay and bonuses gravy-train, it will hardly be of surprise to anyone that the Red Wall turncoats are turning yet again. Let's hope they have learned the very salient lesson that the Tory Government represents and supports only the very w...