Observations from a Hill

I am angrier and more aggressively political now, at sixty-eight, than I have ever been at any other stage of my life. The old truisms relating to age and increasing conservatism certainly don't apply in my case, and I suspect also not in those of a significant number of my generation. Whilst the hippie capitalists who emerged from the 'sixties with their silver spoons now turned to class A consumption rather than elocution, have become masters of the financial universe, those of us from humbler, and probably more radical backgrounds, have continued to rail against the world and all its injustices. Of course, the post-war world of my growing up was an entirely different place, marked, for the most part, not by the fairytale world of 'Swinging London', but a greyer one of austerity and shortage, alleviated for the majority of us only by the creation of the Welfare State. For this very brief period in our history, there was a chink of light at the end of the very long and...

Latest update on the Fairview hearth project, pictured. Jane put the first coat of paint on the back and floor of the ingle today. It might look dark grey, or black, even; but it's actually a dark shade of powder blue, not dissimilar to the colour of Bethesda slate. It's a colour called "Hague Blue" by its makers, Farrow & Ball. Cheap paint, this ain't: whisky is cheaper, pint-for-pint, but as my old man always used to say, skimping on paint is a false economy. This stuff went onto raw plaster and pretty much covered in one coat: the second will really only be needed to gild the lily and cover up a very few marks. And we'll still have nearly three-quarters of the two-quart can left for other jobs: sometimes you really do get what you pay for...

  Pictured is the fruit of today's labours: our new log-store, ready for the first delivery of wood, due soon. We still haven't got the stove, but hey, that's a minor detail, sort of. We bought this thing as a flat-pack some weeks back - to be honest, even though the thing was crudely constructed and had suffered some damage in transit, I couldn't have bought the timber at anywhere near the package price. I did all the necessary repairs to the panels and added some better fasteners: those flat-head gun-nails are basically rubbish, structurally. I favour good old ring-shanks and screws. I added the diagonal brace on the right and clamped the rear of the structure to the old iron gate behind (it hasn't moved on that side for fifteen years and is now part of the honeysuckle that grows there). I added extra screws to the roof and I think I'll put further reinforcement on the front lip, as the sou-westerly winds here can be pretty vicious these days, and half a hundr...

Diary post: belly pork strips, roasters and gravy - with a modicum of steamed veg - tonight, the remnants pictured above. As to the state of the world, politics and the rest, I'll leave it till tomorra, mucker!

  One thing that strikes me particularly about the current collective psyche is the almost curated language of emotional response to all the normal, everyday stuff that just happens to us all, at some point in our lives; as if there exists, Truman Show-like, a scriptwriter and backroom of psychologists, sat in some Bond-villain-like eyrie, influencing the collective will. The clichés are writ large: 'reaching out', 'feeling your pain', 'journey': they're everywhere, like some alternate, Stepford Wives reality plane, infiltrating the brains of otherwise sentient beings. As if there weren't more pressing issues to actually, really, worry about. We are better than this, people: falling back on the lazy, pre-programmed tropes, fed, soma-like, via the drip-feed of 'the media', social (!) or otherwise, is just that: lazy. Active participation in, and antagonism towards this frankly hostile world, is the only way to survive and improve our lot as a spec...

Progress report, Fairview hearth, 25/11/22. I've bedded the reclaimed slate slab that I found in the garden when we moved into the house nearly twenty years ago, as the front of the new hearth, ready for the wood-stove to be installed. As I say, I think this might have been one of a pair of fire-surrounds from the original 1870s fireplace, although that is pure speculation on my part. The nice thing about the piece, though, is that it is Bethesda slate and has some traditional scribed decoration on it, which is a good fit for the place. Ignore the carpet: that's going to be recycled as flooring in part of the workshop/studio as soon as I get the roof sorted. All we need now is the stove to be installed, the log-store - next job - to be constructed, and a couple of tons of logs to get us started. Keep you posted...

  I've been consuming YouTube stuff over the last couple of evenings/days about and by some incredibly talented and mostly unsung people, most of whom will never impact any written history, but whose ingenuity and can-do attitude most definitely contribute to the whole that is humanity: the kind of people without whom the human race would still be scratching its collective backside and wondering what berry to eat next. If this sounds like the preface to a survivalist diatribe, just bear with me: it's not. What I'm talking about is something I've touched on before: the marginalization of those outwith 'society' as far as historical significance goes. The posh and the connected get to write and reconstruct their histories for posterity in ways not available to 'the other'. I'm talking about the millions of talented, gifted and innovative people throughout the world, whose contributions are guardedly recognized, exploited, and ultimately filched by the ...

  OK - reading a couple of recently-acquired books at the moment, one fiction, one economic philosophy. The fiction is a novel called "The Memory Police" by Yoko Ogawa; the other "Capitalist Realism" by the late Mark Fisher. I mention both in the light of our current political 'reality' and the on-trend social predilection for 'gaslighting' all and sundry via whatever media channel is deemed sufficiently safe from which so to do. I'll also chuck into the mix The Guardian's revelations regarding Baroness Mone (Conservative peer of this 'realm') and her family's (currently alleged) benefitting from - guess what, folks - the PPE fast-track VIP-lane to personal enrichment that the Tory government cooked up in record time, to milk the Covid pandemic for all it was worth. In "Capitalist Realism", Fisher sought to challenge the orthodoxy of the entrenched political dogma that has set in tablets of stone that capitalism is the o...

I've seen some great 'constructor' stuff on YouTube over the years, but this scratch-built valve amplifier almost takes the biscuit: it's an hour long, but fascinating and worth the time invested. It made me quite misty-eyed with nostalgia for my childhood. I can't remember whether I've mentioned this one before - I don't currently have any indexing capabilities for this blog - but even if I have, it's worth mentioning again. When I was in the third year at senior school - you'll have to work out what that means, these days - I was tasked with a physics homework project to construct a small DC electric motor from various household items. After pissing about in the most futile fashion for most of the evening, I threw the lot against the wall and went to bed in high dudgeon. What followed was a revelation, not only of great parental love and affection, but an exposition of skill and technical knowledge, borne of real, practical experience: not unlike ...

  A climate scientist interviewed on Radio Four's Today this morning expressed sadness and concern at the lack of real work done at COP27. Having acknowledged the 'loss & damage'  decision to help poorer countries deal financially with the real-time effects of climate change, she says that '...meanwhile the world keeps on turning, and warming continues [to push inexorably towards the rubicon of one-and-a-half degrees by 2030]...' ( I paraphrase) . The point of the COPs is to deal with underlying climate change, not simply to deal with the inevitable economic fallout. When push comes to shove, we are all in this together, and kicking the can further and further down the road in order to satisfy the oil producers and the markets simply isn't going to cut it any more, and what time is left to us to effect real change is getting mighty slim: there'll come a point when we won't be able to move fast enough to prevent what some say is already inevitable. ...

The subject of my meta-ish-photo above is memory [I'll return to that originally intended theme at some point], but it could equally be about jazz, as the elements of its iconography are a number of themes expanded, repeated and improvised on. I was watching The Young Jazz Musician of the Year on BBC Four earlier, with, I have to say, decidedly mixed feelings. The quality of musicianship and performance exhibited by the young performers really can't - and shouldn't - be questioned, but the nagging sensation left by the music itself is one of stagnation. As I said to my late, great friend Johnny G - an erudite and learned jazz-fiend nonpareil - a couple of years before he died: practically all modern jazz is stuck in a kind of post-bop limbo: a sort of knee-jerk reaction to the dead-end that was free jazz. But music moves on. The true disruptors are also the true creators of their particular era, pushing the edges of their form whilst staying roughly within some sort of ...

On our way home from Shropshire today, we stopped at Llanymynech to see the old limestone quarries there. A spectacular place, as you can see from the above: climbers can be seen on the vertical to slightly overhanging slab: the figure to the centre of the picture had just decided that the crux on the headwall was too much, and was lowering off back down to the belay ledge. Looking at it side-on, the headwall definitely has a negative lean and looks fairly imposing. Looking online, it would seem to go at UK 6b grade, the very top-end of my former abilities - on the climbing wall - and way above my pay-grade on any real crag, on either end of the rope...

Last day today, and we went to look for the ruins of one of the last true, Welsh, Princes of Wales' castles, near Aber-Miwl, Powys, part of which, pictured. Dolforwyn Castle, built in 1273, and besieged & sacked by Edward the First's English forces in 1277, Llewelyn ap Gruffudd's stronghold was subsequently ceded to the invaders. A shockingly facile précis of events, I know, but the cultural repercussions still reverberate now, over seven hundred years later. I bet no-one outside of Wales was ever given but the faintest clue as to the history of The Marches in history lessons at school: much like all marginalized cultures, ethnic groups and societies, Welsh history has been trivialized as a mere sidebar to the all-important, all conquering Norman English aristocracy and its imperial machinations over the last thousand years or so. If you go by the name Fitzherbert or Paget, it's likely you'll own considerable lands and property, whereas if you are a Jones, a Par...

Curry tonight at Raza's Pizza & Curry house, Craven Arms, an enterprising culinary binary if ever I saw one, covering the bases for most families in one hit: clever idea. Craven Arms itself is an historic market town at the confluence of the formerly arterial route of the A49 and the Welsh Marches railway line. Of much less importance to the national infrastructure these days, the town, at least the main drag through it, shows signs of the steady decline in its fortunes over the last half-century. Its eponymous hotel, situated at the main road crossing, is boarded up and falling into disrepair, like so many large roadhouses, whose function as watering-holes and stop-overs for long distance travellers has long since been made obsolete by faster roads and modern vehicles. The town away from the main road, though, is much more pleasant: a collection of mostly Victorian terraces and shops, well-served for food and drink and basic amenities. It just needs someone with a bit of visio...

  Another lazy start to the day and a drive to Clun for a walk around our usual circuit: from The Square down to the bridge, up past the church and down to the ford at Waterloo, thence back up to the High Street, and fetching up at The White Horse for lunch and a pint. After Haddock and chips (on my part), we repaired to the little touristy crafts shop on The Square, just between the pub and the Town Museum, now closed until Spring. We got some cards for the coming festive season and a small rug, pictured. Jane cooked chilli for supper, and we're now settled in for the evening. Busy life.

Day's end, freeze-frame-still, and chill with the gnawing damp of land-locked Autumn evening: a moonless full-dark, minutes hence. We've had a pleasant sojourn to Church Stretton today, after a late-start-lie-in [it is holiday time, after all], taking coffee and then mooching around the charity and bookshops, and the now truncated but still rather fascinating Antiques Emporium there: and this week there is some good stuff there to be had. We snagged a nice Iranian rug for £120, which at seven feet by four, will be just right for our living room, post re-flooring, and which will look pretty good methinks. Bearing in mind that we have not decorated since we moved into the house nearly twenty years ago - we like to live with a place a while before we alter it ;0) - we can't surely be accused of profligacy in the expenditure on interior design department. It's all a bit late in the day for us, but what the heck: it's never too late to do anything, in my book.

A lazy first day to our mini-break, after the fraught couple of days preceding our arrival here: we got up late, mooched and then went for lunch at The Three Tuns in Bishop's Castle. The weather has turned as expected, with a chill mist for most of the day, shrouding those blue, remembered Housman hills from our view. A pleasant and filling repast: for my part, belly pork, soft and fatty; served with grain-mustard-mash, gravy and apple sauce, with side-veg; all washed down with Three Tuns Brewery's fine XXX ale. To quote Pa Larkin: "...perfick." Being doing a lot of reading around ecological economics today, prompted by the obituary in today's Guardian of Herman Daly, which Jane pointed me at; but I'll leave all that on the back-burner for a few days, whilst we're on hols.

Down in Shropshire for a mini-break this week, although we're not staying at The Dipping Shed [pictured], but at Lower Down instead. It's been a long day with an early start this morning, and whilst the side effects of Friday's Covid jab have pretty much subsided, I still haven't made up for the lost sleep from Friday night, so I'm a bit knackered at present. We had a glorious drive down, though, with only the Vale of Llangollen shrouded for its length in mist and low cloud. Either side, from Rachub to Bishop's Castle, it's been wall-to-wall sunshine and blue skies, as well as being unseasonably warm: the air feels more like early September than the middle of November. Still, it's good to see that they have had plenty of rain down here, to offset the effects of the ludicrously hot and dry July and August [blog posts passim]. Time for a glass of wine and a sit down, methinks. Keep you posted...

  As I mentioned last night, I had my fourth Covid jab yesterday afternoon. Unusually, the shoulder ache was pretty immediate: it usually takes overnight to kick in. Anyway, thought nothing of it, as I've only experienced very minor side effects to previous jabs, and went about my evening as usual, retiring to bed late evening. Then I woke up at ten to five this morning, feeling as if I'd been thrown down the stairs the previous day. Anyway I've felt pretty vague - nothing new there, then - for most of the day, today, and have spent my time consuming YouTube drivel of various flavours. Of course, there is nothing worse when in the doldrums of lassitude than consuming endless YouTube drivel, further amplifying one's inertia and lack of drive to actually do something. Still, it's done, and tomorrow's another day. Hopefully, there won't be further stabbings in the shoulder for another few months, at least: whatever, ya gotta roll with it: we could all have ende...

Well, there we are, then: quadruple-jabbed, Covid-wise. I haven't had so many vaccinations in such a short time since I was an infant, but I know it's worth the short-term achy shoulder thing that all injections tend to leave. What else has happened today? Well, personally, not a great deal; just been arsing around not doing a great deal and trying to ignore the politics for a few hours. Read an interesting review of a new history of Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations" - by Glory M Liu: "Adam Smith's America" - in [last weeks, natch: I told you I'm still catching up with stuff] New Statesman, that opened my eyes somewhat to the man and his philosophy; for philosopher he was, no economist he, as the concept & term for such had yet to be invented when he wrote the oh-so-influential tome. It turns out that most of the presumptions about and interpretations of his work have subsequently become, meme-like, 'his work', in the eyes of thos...

  I'm still trying to catch up on my reading: The New Statesman keeps dropping through the letterbox long before I've finished the last or even the second-last issue. Mostly my fault for having a butterfly mentality, but what the heck: loads of interesting and thought-provoking stuff to take away for next week's mini-break to Shropshire: I'll post appropriately, as and when able. Also, my to-be-read book-list is starting to groan a bit, so I'm going to have to take some decisions and apply a couple of filters to my aspirations in that department, otherwise I'll be in the same predicament as the centipede in the Sufi parable: immobile, considering how to run, without first having mastered walking. Anyhow, it looks like the finance to get cracking on the stove installation, and the rest of the living-room upgrade is imminently available, which is a relief: I've been itching to get on with the job for over a week, now, since the fireplace was opened up and the ...

OK, experiencing a chilli-induced endorphin overload here, so all good on the personal mood front: curry and red wine most definitely combine in the most favourable fashion. Been a loosely-structured day here, today, with a pretty much random assortment of stuff happening: some furniture restoration, noise-making and a bit of minor shopping. Making plans for the living-room floor, and the stove installation, and also researching solar power as an option to supplement or replace our grid consumption of energy; but as I said yesterday, even given the considerable drop in investment costs, it still is beyond the pockets of most people to participate and benefit from the tech. I hope we can stretch our resources to at least make small inroads into our energy consumption and do our bit for society as a whole in attempting to mitigate the effects of climate change. And there is the thing: society. Not the atomized, individualistic and frankly, selfish and egocentric world of the neoliberal c...

  As a concerned citizen of Planet Earth, never mind one concerned with my own dwindling resources, I've been spending a lot of time [on YouTube, mostly, I will admit] digging around for information about solar electricity generation. There is so much information out there it boggles the mind, although I will say this: the investment costs in the technology are really coming down fast. Even ten years ago, the chances of any kind of payback on it all in one's lifetime seemed slim: and therein laid the rub. It's difficult to sell an otherwise sound idea - and alternative and sustainable energy is now utterly, incontrovertibly, the only game in town - when there is no tangible financial incentive to buy. I was just watching a video about Robert Llewelyn's zero-emission home in the Cotswolds [natch], and whilst I love the actor and his work, and his undoubted commitment to environmental issues - he's been doing this stuff for years, now - the glaring issue is that he ha...

Pictured, the finished and drying-out chimney breast/hearth, courtesy of Paul and Inner World: cracking job, all round (I dread to think what the final bill will be, but the quality of the work speaks for itself). The two rendered-over stones in the rear of the ingle were just too large to mess around with, without saying hello to the neighbours in a less than neighbourly way; so features they are. I look forward to getting started on the floor - my job, and one I will relish - which will be laid in a darkish and heavily-figured engineered wood (I don't have any depth to work with for a traditional board floor, so it will be laid atop the existing 1970s Marley Tile flooring: horror story in itself, but at least it's a flat and stable substrate). I've also decided to custom-build a bookcase to fit the right-hand side of the hearth, with three different shelf heights to accommodate paperbacks, DVDs and large-format books in three separate tiers, maybe with a single tier turni...

Pictured is the crux and substance of tonight's Sunday roast: pork belly to the left and roasties to the right. How much this has cost us to cook, I dread to think, and whilst I'm not particularly rant-minded at the moment [anger-saturation-syndrome], the fact that there are so many of us out here in the real, so-called-developed-world, wondering just exactly where the next calorie, therm or unit will come from, or how they will be paid for; is just plain wrong, and stupendously, economically stupid at the most fundamental level: the economy, after all is us. What we earn, consume and pay taxes on, keeps the economy rolling: take us out of the equation, and it all turns to dust. Big Thinks need to happen, big-time...

Never mind the knee-jerk vacillations of this month's Prime Minister over COP attendance, the saddest, but frankly inevitable news of the day is the now definite national Nurses' strike: the first ever such action. Sad, because no-one in the nursing and medical professions would ever want truly to withdraw their labour; inevitable because of the financial stress the profession has been under for so very long, mostly on the watch of successive Tory governments. A toxic mix of ignorance, prejudice and inaction on this revolving-door administration's behalf has seen to it that our health service, and its benighted cousin, social care, have been forced to their respective knees through neglect and criminal under-investment. As Polly Toynbee astutely pointed out in yesterday's Guardian newspaper, further austerity is the polar opposite of what is actually required to drag us out of our current economic death-spiral: investment and spending on public services, fair pay and a...

Listening to this week's Prime Minister oh, so calmly issuing forth on the need to secure our future generations', well, future , I felt, once again, the almost daily déjà vu of the pontifications of ideologues and politicians who seem so blinded to reality by their politics, ideology and ambition, to the absolute, crushing urgency of the gargantuan problems facing us. These people seem somehow inured from the insanely pressing nature of the issue, by a complex and collective personality disorder that can only be the result of wealth, privilege and a blind faith that the ills of this world are the fault of everyone but themselves, and which will only impinge on the lives of the hoi polloi and the developing world, and not themselves. Their laggardly and ideological response to the crisis suggests only that they see themselves as Übermenschen destined for what they perceive as their well-earned place in Valhalla, whilst the Proles and others, outwith the pale , fry, drown and fr...

  Diary post again, tonight, as I'm trying to ignore the interest-rate rise and sundry other cost-of-living impacts that are tumbling in on us all at the moment. Pictured - the last hearth update before finishing, I promise - is the final scratch-coat of render. In the front is the piece of dressed and modestly decorated slate I rescued from the garden when we moved in to the house twenty years ago. I'm pretty sure it would have been part of the original fireplace from the 1800s: the house is over 150 years old, and it seems appropriate to recycle the piece as the front of the hearth, a couple of feet from its original location as one of the two uprights, either side of the ingle. When Paul's finished the plastering, I'll bed the slate on mortar and back-fill the gap between the rear to the hearth he's made, so we can get the regulation coverage for the front door of the stove, before we get it installed. Thereafter, I'll be re-flooring the room with engineered ...

I will forego comment on our woeful government's current non-performance, as I don't think my blood-pressure will take much more today: suffice it to say, I'll get back to you with comment after a good sleep. Rather, I offer a simple, domestic update on our emerging-from-the-ashes[sorry] fireplace. For the first time in over forty years, this house will again have a hearth: the heart of any decent living-space, and the locus of comfort and calm in years to come, as we descend into our dotage [stop!]. The thing is that the renaissance of the ingle will put back into what is, after all, a one-hundred-and-fifty-year-old quarryman's cottage, it's very centre of warmth, without which no-one would have survived in the days before electricity or gas, during the long, cold and wet wintertime. More than that, a fire of some sorts - in our case a new wood-stove - occupying a corner of one's living-space, confers a comfort almost cellular to our being: a folk-memory of our...

  We are, actually, pretty much buggered at present, aren't we? I hate the term 'ordinary people' with a vengeance, but I suppose there has to be some dividing line between the controllers and the controlled, so be it: ordinary people - the vast majority of humanity - are being shovelled into a grave-pit of their [the controller's] collective making, by the idiot and disconnected-from-reality rich, pure and simple. Poor people don't play politics; the Left doesn't play politics on behalf of those they represent. The Right plays politics at every turn, as it is all they know and do: the furtherance of their own pecuniary ends, whilst doing as little as possible in return for large, publicly funded salaries. At every level, right-wing politics and its acolytes are so very, very wrong: their blind pursuit of wealth and power at all costs, wrapped in a cloak of equal opportunity, for fuck's sake; mindless, rootless economic ideologies that are so far outdated t...