Observations from a Hill

  On a slightly lighter note than my last couple of posts, 2022 appears to be on its way out, and good riddance, I say: it's been a cruel year for most, and we need to put it behind us. Pictured, our New Year's Eve culinary masterpiece: the bacon & chip [for non-Brits, bacon & French fries] butty. Comfort food for the seasonally-afflicted. Calories and fat, umami in abundance; about the only thing I can actually taste at the moment, so full of winter head cold am I. I'm afraid there will be no seeing in of the New Year this year, as a nice bottle of wine and a hot electric blanket beckon. At least there will be no life-threatening hangover, as in my youth, to put the mockers on New Year's Day...

  OK - Hancock and Johnson are both getting their legal fees covered out of the public purse to contest charges various relating to their nefarious activities whilst in public office during Covid: they're not alone in their wrongdoing, so expect more burden on your collective finances to come. Large swathes of legal aid cover were removed by the Tories during their current - and hopefully soon-to-be-curtailed - tenure. Legal aid: put in place so that the under-resourced - read poorer - could at least get decent representation in court, criminal or civil. A kind of National Health Service for the legal sphere, picking up the pieces for those unfortunate enough not to have been born wealthy and connected. How so that the wealthy and connected Hancock and Johnson are getting public aid to fight against the cases against them of offences against the public offices they held? How so is it that these two, who, let's face it, both have earned, and continue to earn handsomely from esse...

... gotta love 'em, don't ya? And I'm not talking about fake-tanned, dentally invested hyperactive Instagrammers and the like. Nope, I, of course, refer to The House of Lords, currently crammed with, and likely soon to be even more over-stuffed with newly-created 'Peers of the Realm', a phrase in itself that reeks of unearned privilege and rank: except that most life peers have 'earned' their 'right' to their title through patronage of one kind or another. I'm not talking about the large number who are there for the genuinely good reason of actually having been of some genuine service to society, and who feel that the Lords is a good platform from which to continue their life's work. I'm talking about the wealthy, overwhelmingly Tory, benefactors, whose ennoblement is due solely to their contribution of enormous wads of cash to the Tory Party coffers, and access to that very exclusive club of plutocrats that they can give to their patrons...

  I still feel like shit, although rather less so: I think the old immune system is getting the better of this little swine, touch wood. One thing I didn't include in yesterday's bifurcated rant was that we should remove the ability of high-fee-paying public schools to claim charitable status: an historical anomaly dating back to the Middle Ages, when schools such as Eton College were founded on exactly that charitable basis, to allow poorer commoners a chance of a leg-up in life. Much has changed since, and reform is required. Also, I mentioned in passing: religion vs the secular. Trevor Phillips wrote in the Times - quoted in the i , yesterday - and accurately, that ethnic and religious minorities are not the ones abandoning faith; rather the erstwhile, Christian majority of this archipelago. Where I distance myself strongly from his stance, is in his assertion that the largely white and middle-class 'intelligentsia' are strangers to doubt and feel that they/we have a...

Tonight I find myself still full of a foul winter cold - the first since pre-covid - and quite grumpy. I was going to reflect on the axis between belief & faith and agnostic & secular, prompted by a short comment by Trevor Phillips in the i 's Opinion Matrix today, but I'll leave that one until my brain's cleared a bit. So, in lieu of that for tonight, here's the text of my email rant to the Lads this evening... As always: the government screws things up, does fuck-all to even attempt to reverse the damage it's caused, then the hot polloi are asked politely to contribute a ‘modest’ sum per month on Direct Debit for whatever is the struggling cause du jour. Domestically, we now have   the vast majority of the population struggling   to hang on to any semblance of normal, civilized life, while they themselves are somehow expected to ‘volunteer’ their money and ‘free’ time to help other people in the self-same boat as themselves. Meanwhile, we are experiencing ...

Boxing Day, Saint Stephen's Day, The Second Day of Christmas. No sign of snow here of any kind, deep, crisp or even, even; just plenty of people counting the cost of their winter fuel. Personally, I'm full of cold and rather unpleasant to be around. Hoping for better tomorrow, but at least the nights are drawing out at last. Spring is on its way! Catch you tomorrow...

Christmas 2022: attenuated somewhat by loss and illness, but enjoyed, nevertheless. Hope you also had a good day, wherever you are! Talk tomorrow...

  Happy Yuletide to one and all: both to those who celebrate tonight, and to those of us who go mad with the food and drink tomorrow. OK, just one last pre-festivity thought. I've just been watching a couple of YouTube posts, which while centring around two completely different spheres of human activity - chess vs heavy engineering - had in common the Indian subcontinent and intrinsically the same narrative. The key to this tale is YouTube and its comments feature, where, as I'm sure you're well aware, allows all and sundry - on a publicly accessible post - to, well, comment on the content of the video in question. All well and good in theory. Except that, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, &etc., the breadth of opinion expressed stretches from the informed to the dangerous via the asinine. I've written many times about technology, learning about stuff, and the fundamental need for people to understand the basics of using tools to not only repair broken stuff, but t...

  I sense a turned tide toward re-empowerment, reclamation and re-formation. Re-formation . Society seems slowly to be re-forming despite the weight and decay of the last four and-a-bit decades of oppression by the Masters of the Universe™: the suits, bean-counters and the false prophets of neoliberal macroeconomics, that pseudoscientific snake oil and its odious salesmen.  This, for the first time since Thatcher commenced dismantling pretty much all the social and moral achievements of the post-war era, by blindly following a rule-book cobbled together by the nascent MOTU™ [apologies to the electronic musical instrument manufacturer that shares the same acronym] in the mid-seventies. From 1979 onwards, there has been a concerted, cynical and venal dismantling of the civil, political and social rights of the working classes, underpinned by revisionist and increasingly Draconian anti-union laws which have attempted to drive us back into the nineteenth century. To be honest, thi...

In case no one had noticed, this winter has been shaping up into something of a Dickensian, or even Medieval, season of ill-will to all - or pretty much all - men [caveat: unintentional genderism, just trying to get the appropriate literary tone here; apologies]. Even the shine of the thinnest veneer of remaining advertising cant has failed to distract a mostly betrayed population from the immediacy of their impoverishment at the hands of our pathetic excuse for a government. The Tories have even actively sought to avoid active discussion on the daily 'live' media, simply because: a) they have no policies, b) they have no excuses, and c) they have no scruples. They, in a word, are afraid of their electorate - us - their employers; to whom they should be both subservient and answerable in law. The way things are going, it's going to take Marley's Ghost a double-shift at half-pay with no seasonal adjustments for unsociable working hours, to make anything like an impressi...

The public should be aware that a dangerous radical is on the loose in the halls of our government, spouting political propaganda and threatening the stability of our country. This man and his fellow conspirators would have the economy throttled and the wealth of the people sequestered to the party coffers and its benefit. Big state at its most heinous? Stalin's Russia? Orwellian dystopia? Nope, it's the Tories, yet again proving that they really do only care for and consider their own welfare and prosperity: 'The Natural Party of Government™' feeding the Great Lie of equality of opportunity to its electorate: a drip-feed of mendacity so constant - aided by the Tory media - that it has seemed for too long to be the natural narrative of British politics. Steve Barclay, Health Secretary: for 'tis he pictured and fram-ed, continues to exhibit hubris, effrontery and obnoxiousness in equal measure in his frankly insulting, and I would argue libellous and therefore action...

  I wrote the following yesterday, but have held the post back until today to allow Irene the space to tell folks in her own time... This morning, our friend of over forty years, Al Moores, died. His Parkinson's finally did for him. We took Irene over to the care home and the three of us sat quietly with his body for a time, before Jane & I left her in peace with him, and to wait for Al's brother & sister-in-law to arrive. "A good man down..." is how his childhood mate, Pete, framed it, when I rang him to let him know that the inevitable had happened. The nature of our relationship with Al was curious, to be honest, as he and Irene were an incredibly emotionally private couple, not letting much out in the open, and just dealing with stuff themselves. I suppose the glue that held the four of us together was the holy trinity of food, drink and music; the die being cast from the very first. We met via a chance conversation about the camera and guitars visible th...

Look's like Trump might have his day in court at last: just not the way he might once have wanted. He is to be referred for criminal prosecution on four counts of violating federal statutes relating to the January 6th. Capitol infractions. Not before time. Meanwhile, however, on this side of the pond our government is actively supplying taxpayer's money to fund Boris Johnson's defence against the partygate inquiry, and its probable findings. This is, it has to be said, the shamed and ousted Prime Minister who has subsequently this year earned at least a million quid from four after-dinner speeches alone. Why are we being expected, against our will by a mandateless government, to cover the legal costs of this posh, amoral spiv? I mean, really? At the moment, one would think that even this hapless bunch of chancers and grifters would engage the services of a decent PR agency, who could at least try and cover up their crass nepotism and make it palatable for general consumptio...

The other day, I finally located the whereabouts of the chess sets and clock I thought were lost. I knew they were in the house somewhere, but I'd just lost track of them over the last decade or two. I was starting to clear some of the stuff from the crawl space we like to call a loft, in readiness for the work on the chimney for the planned wood stove, and came across a cardboard box containing various games, including my competition chess set: the big 'uns pictured, the two travel sets and the chess clock, also in picture. Result and sigh of relief: the competition set and clock alone would cost a fair bit to replace, now. The cloth chess board was one I silkscreened when I was a technician at the Art College in Bangor, back in the late eighties: my next build is going to be a full-sized competition board using some of the reclaimed pitch pine boards from James & Leo's chapel on Anglesey, which will replace the one I made in the mid-eighties, when I played for The Bul...

There should be a manual on 'How Not To Run An Economy', which should be required reading for all right-leaning (in particular, Thatcherite-apologist) neoliberal (in particular, UK Tory governments), to be issued to each, and every MP, on reaching office. After Brexit and pandemic and Trusso-bleedin'-omics - never mind the previous Eton mess-ness that this lot has dumped on us over twelve years of faffing around with internal party feuding; we find ourselves in a bit of a hole regarding recruitment, with more job vacancies than candidates for said posts. And yet, as reported in today's i , pension firms '...may be forced to talk us out of retiring.' At the same time, the article states that 20% of 16-64 year-olds are 'economically inactive - whatever that is supposed to mean: a person can only truly be defined as 'economically inactive' when they are dead and buried/burned/composted - everyone drawing breath is, in some fashion, economically active...

  The defining characteristic of the human race is its ability and will to create pure abstraction and beauty out of the chaos of existence, in the forms of music, prose, poetry and visual art, despite all odds to the contrary. However low or high the form - a distinction itself devised & imposed by the unimaginative and un creative - the creative instinct at its heart is the purest expression of what it means to be human: no other earth-bound species thus far has developed an artistic and musical history [that we can understand or begin to codify in our terms] such as ours. It's deeply unfortunate that creativity has, for the last few centuries at least, been commodified by those un -creators, whose sole talent is the accumulation of wealth, and to whom works of art, music and literature are merely tokens of exchange in an economic mechanism. This deeply entrenched attitude enriches only the moneyed and privileged, whose appreciation of those works is pretty much essentially ...

The wind-up to Christmas seems attenuated this year - I might add that our default position is that the sooner we can get Christmas over, spring seems so much closer (grumpy, ain't we?) - and the air seems to have been sucked out of it all; not even the usual Gadarene commercial scrum seems to be much in evidence. Somehow, the static freeze of the last few days, winter blues and mortality's siren call have frozen proceedings as firmly as the ice-rime that still grips the garden , notwithstanding the cost of living and fuel crisis, to boot. But if I hear anyone blaming all this on the current clutch of strikes, I'll swing for them: strikes are the result of external economic and political causal factors brought about by the government's abject mismanagement of it all. Period. One certain redemption from the clutch of the cold and the dire state of the world as it stands, is the beauty of Snowdonia: pictured is Menai Bridge from Llanfair PG, across the strait, with the m...

  ...that Jane and I had our first date: and it's also forty-three years ago to the day that we got married. Now before any bugger goes "Ahhh, bless..." we are not your archetypical stairlift and slippers old dears. But I guess that anyone who bothers to read my often vitriolic and profane commentary on the state of this world will already have guessed that. However, it does seem like an extraordinary amount of water under the bridge when viewed from this distance in time; although to be fair, both of us having pretty much eidetic memories and a rather youthful political vigour about us, we ain't changed much apart from the obvious and inevitable physical signs of age. We'll just keep on keepin' on: it's been a damn' good ride thus far, and we're in it for the long haul... [Pictured: the two of us in around 1973...]

Over the last couple of posts, I've pretty much nailed my colours to the mast - when do I ever do otherwise? - regarding the parlous, precarious and downright perilous nature of UK society today: as usual, colourfully. If anyone's offended by my language, tough; it reflects my righteous anger at those who assume themselves to be my betters by dint of being wealthier. I said in closing yesterday that our government, whatever the backgrounds and self-assumed rank of the individuals within its numbers, has a collective and institutional duty of fealty to its voters and constituents: they are our paid servants , not our masters. I stand by that. It is taxpayers' money that pays the not inconsiderable salaries and expenses of MPs and ministers, in an implied contract of employment [in law, an implied contract of employment is as binding as a written one], working for us, as a society - as their employers - not the other way round. It was especially galling to hear that Stephen B...

  Here's a thing. There was an outburst by a back-bencher in parliament some time ago, just after Sunak was crowned PM by his party - elected or mandated he was not , but whatever - stating that a nurse would have to work for 20,000 years to match the immediate Sunak family's net worth, a period which actually, after tax and NI are deducted, would be even longer. At the same time, reflect that Sunak - wealthy as he is - in the global scheme of all things money, is a relative pauper, with nary a billion to his family name, bechod [that's your actual Welsh: Google it] . Compared to Elon Musk - he of Tesla, Space[Se]X and utterly, utterly questionable moral and philosophical outlook; in sum, the world's richest dickhead - a qualified nurse in the UK would have to work for around 5,500,000 years - before tax etc., natch, just to equal his pile of moolah as it stands today. Put that in further perspective: Homo Sapiens - you and I folks - have been around for just 300,000 y...

I wonder whether there is anyone in our government who actually understands just how broken our country is. Just how dysfunctional the services and institutions that used to underpin our society have become, under the ethos of [neo] liberalism. We now have a status quo where our National Health Service - the bedrock of the civilized and civil society we once were - has been bled to the point of collapse by the kind of politicking morons who now accuse the nursing staff of bringing politics into the NHS by threatening strike action: the crassness of that commentary absolutely beggars belief and is quite simply the worst possible insult to those on the front line who, because of shit right-wing politics and mindless economic theories, have been forced finally to take a stand against their own impending collective demise as a profession at the hands of our government. Because of the blind pursuit of corporate profit, personal greed and obeisance to that 90-year-old and seriously outdate...

Just a diary post, as I've been distracted by much other stuff: the first real signs of proper winter here in Fairview Heights, the snow much appreciated by mental-pooch Lady, who I dog-sat this morning. Talk about sheer joy of movement! It doesn't look like the snow will be much more than the thin coating we've got at present, but ya never know, folks. It's pretty cold at the moment, but we still have power: that could all change, of course, but there you go...

Pictured is one of the most underrated guitar players I can think of. Taken in 1968, the photo shows a young Danny Kirwan, eighteen years old at the time of his joining Fleetwood Mac. He died at the same age as I am now, four years ago. Yesterday, I was mulling over his talent and his contribution to what I've always felt was the finest incarnation of the Mac, his musical synergy with Peter Green magical to hear on Then Play On: still one of my favourite albums, and on singles such as the much abused Albatross (how much advertising revenue has been culled from that slice of my generation's musical history?), Man Of The World, Green Manalishi & etc. Whilst never the improvisational or touch equal of Green - let's face it, the very best of the best as BB King testified to - Kirwan's string attack, timing, vibrato and musicality make him one of the very best guitarists of his generation. Check his stuff out if you've never heard of him.

  Brief nod to the Bonzo's in the title, but I'm actually referring to something Joe linked me to this very day: Tim [Sir Tim: he of the creation of what we would now term 'The Internet'] Berners-Lee's seemingly trivial but actually very prescient idea of a compulsory button for all web browsers: the 'Oh, Yeah?' button. This would give a user the opportunity to doubt and then question the veracity of whatever it happened to be they were looking at, forcing the purveyor of said information to cite source and precedent. This, of course, was a natural for an academic like Berners-Lee, and for his nascent World-Wide-Web, which was, after all, conceived as an extension of his academic universe: a research and dissemination tool to further the goals of academia itself. That the bloody thing grew like Topsy to where we are today only emphasizes just how prescient the man was: fake news, alternative facts and bare-faced untruths spoken at government levels all screa...

  I should have been driving down to Birmingham tomorrow for my Aunt Margaret's funeral. But winter lurgy, a very concerning weather forecast and old age have convinced me that driving 120 miles just now is probably not a good idea. I've always maintained that the Dirty Harry quote '...a man's gotta know his own limitations...' is probably the best advice anyone could follow. I tend to forget I'm getting close to seventy, and whilst in pretty good shape, the cracks are showing, and I have to just take things at an appropriate pace. The thing is that Jane & I were watching - here's meta for ya - a programme on Talking Pictures TV that was aired in the late fifties, referencing the First World War. The realization that struck us was that both of us had grandfathers who were directly involved in the Great War: both non-combatants, but both at the very sticky end of it all. Jane's grandfather was a medical orderly in North Africa, and mine a stoker on th...

  I'm angry, angry, angry. You might well ask, so what's new? Two things, one trivial, one slightly - I'm employing radically ironical understatement, here - less so. In the first instance, I simply have lost my best reading glasses, somewhere between leaving the pub - two drinks only! - and arriving home: this annoys me greatly, but in no way gets near to my ire at the sorry performance of the incumbent administration [UK customers only] regarding the PPE procurement debacle. His Majesty's Opposition tabled a debate in the house, which was duly handled admirably by them this afternoon, offering the government every opportunity to come clean and open the books surrounding the VIP fast-track procurement process during the early days, weeks and months of the Covid-19 pandemic. No acceptable reply was forthcoming. No explanations, no apologies, not even any real attempt at mitigation was offered: just the usual, bullish bullshit and bluster, trotting out the same crap and ...

  Kind of following on from last night's post - how can you not? - two things are stand-outs for today: one is the revelation that power retailers, in close consort with magistrates, are targeting the poorest in chasing their revenue, in obtaining special warrants to force consumers onto prepayment meters: guaranteeing that they will simply go cold and be unable to cook or even wash properly in what is shaking up to be a very cold winter. Secondly, we have the prevailing establishment attitude that strikers are acting unfairly in their attempts to achieve fair pay and conditions, because they will affect ordinary peoples' Christmas plans. Ordinary people. Christmas. Who on earth does the establishment believe that strikers are? Some alien species from the Planet Zog? Imports covertly smuggled in from that dangerously subversive entity, the EU? Or 'economic' migrants from countries whose collapsed economies we have colluded in effecting over the last couple of decades? P...

  I'm not sure where this 'new normal' is leading us. One thing is for certain, many more people than is usual will die this year, as a direct consequence of this government's mishandling of our economy. Period. The government continues, relentlessly, to uphold the first law of conservatism: don't touch the markets, capital will sort itself out and restore balance to society. This is palpable nonsense wrapped in a cosy blanket of hypocrisy and untruth: these people are paid handsomely to represent their constituents, which for some of them is an automatic shoo-in whatever happens, as they hold the modern electoral equivalent of the Rotten Boroughs of old: basically a dead cert, preaching and appealing solely to the converted - meaning comfortably wealthy - and guaranteed their place in parliament, no matter what tosh they spout. The cracks, however, are showing, and the Red Wall seats will be the first to turn turtle: there is more common sense borne of desperation,...

  Caught a bit of a 'seventies WWII film earlier, that as usual, given it was about resistance action involving the Brits, featured the Sten gun, a cheaply-made submachine gun designed to be both simple to manufacture and to field maintain, aimed mostly at close-fighting commando and clandestine operations. A significant number of these weapons were manufactured at the British Small Arms Company (BSA) works, in Birmingham. BSA over an extended period manufactured arms, bicycles, and later, famously, motorcycles, which were among the world's finest until the Japanese motorcycle industry kicked into gear in the late 'sixties, and showed the world a new future for the motorbike, producing more powerful, cleaner and more reliable bikes than the Brits or the Americans could at the time. Nevertheless, some of the most memorable two-wheel transport of all time was produced in the UK from the 'twenties up until the eventual ascendancy of the Universal Japanese Motorcycle of the...

Our journey through the Circles of Hell [™Dante Alighieri-ish] is about to enter the Ninth level. We have dwelt in the Eighth for some years now, as Canto XXI outlines: the political grafters, serial liars and fraudsters have held sway over our lives for long enough for the cracks now to be obvious as yawning, and widening daily. To hear Re-Smog wiffling on about being loyal to one's [Tory] party after said institution has effectively fucked one and one's career over, in the desperation s of defending the indefensible, is pathetic and welcome in equal measure: we know the party's over when the host has pissed his pants and insulted most of the guests in the service of his own ego and fading influence. Schadenfreude is such a wonderful concept in this context. The Ninth Circle, of course, is Treachery, to which I think Lord Snooty might have been, without the slightest hint of subtlety or finesse, alluding to. This lot will back-stab their way out of their now degraded and ...

Just watching the movie "Fantastic Four" (2015) again - Doc Doom's just making his nascent appearance as they rescue Victor from the other dimension - shit's just kicking off. Reminds me of the great comic-book allegiance debates of my youth. Our postwar generation grew up on a diet of westerns, war movies and imported American comics, and playground tribalism centred as much around these non-native cultural tropes as football or music: the Blues, Villa, or Baggies? Motown, Stax, Atlantic etc.? All this was supplemented with Marvel or DC Comics? I personally cleaved only to the tribe of the Baggies (West Bromwich Albion) in football, but read both DC and Marvel, alongside titles such as Astounding Stories, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and of course, Mad magazine. I wish I'd still got my Howard the Duck comics, though: Marvel's late - well, compared with FF, Spiderman, Thor, et al. - and very great invention that hardly gets mentioned these days, probably due ...