Observations from a Hill

Here we are again at the turn of yet another year. There was a time when the wind-up to midnight's chime would have started mid-afternoon, with the lacing up of a far-too-loud sound system in the confines of a small terraced house in Winson Green, Birmingham, and my father shoring up the floor of the front room from below in the cellar with baulks of timber, to support the weight and dancing feet of the later-assembled throng. We could pack thirty to fifty people into our little house for a party in those days: two small rooms, eleven-foot square, and a kitchen of half that width to accommodate the lot; well into the early hours of New Year's Day. Fifty years on, and many, many more such parties under our belts, we find ourselves far less inclined these days to even stay the course of the evening, let alone to the hour of midnight. We might watch a bit of Jools Holland, as has been the case for the last couple of decades or so: occasionally to the end and Big Ben's chimes;

Liz Truss - almost certainly taking the historical biscuit as our worst Prime Minister of all time - believes in 'small' government. What exactly does that mean in the twenty-first century? If government has any remit or even purpose, surely it is to govern, otherwise the word and the concept itself is a non sequitur and invalidates itself. The problem is with thinking such as that of the Truss axis of the Right, is that they still imagine that ultimate power and authority by right subsists with a ruling elite, by dint of status. In medieval times this equated to the most well-equipped bullies, aided and abetted by a religious establishment that existed in a foul symbiotic relationship of succour, support and mutual benefit with the self-appointed 'masters of the universe [as small as it was to them at the time]', which eventually elevated itself to the Divine Right of Kings. These days, the Kings have been shunted into a ceremonial if still enormously lucrative [throug

So, our ex-PM-but-one is giving Sunak, the current - and probably yet again, interim - PM, a hard time over his reticence to 'get things done' in implementing the UK transition to an energy regime that will include more nuclear power. Never mind the fact that Johnson promised the earth and delivered little on so many things, much like his successors; but consider the facts: nuclear power was delivered on the ticket of unlimited, practically free electricity: a lie promulgated to cover for the underlying motive of nuclear weapons development.  During the course of its history, though, in real terms, the energy produced has been significantly more expensive to produce and control, and the technology itself has precipitated a sufficient number of major radiological 'incidents' of potential and actual lethality to render its use questionable at best. Add to these issues the unassailable fact of the impossibility of dealing with the long-term [effectively endless] disposal o

Nice piece in the i  'My View' comment section by Ian Dunt today, ripping one out of the news that we can now officially sell wine in pint bottles again, hooray! Trumpeted by the Minister for Enterprise as '... Our exit from the EU was all about moments just like this...'. It turns out that Boris Johnson's notion that - [measuring using Imperial units is an] '... ancient liberty...' - ignores the fact that the Imperial system was only instituted in 1826 and that his subsequent review of weights and measures initiated in 2016 revealed on consultation that less than one half of one percent of those asked even wanted to return to an entirely Imperial system, and that over eighty percent of the sample were enthusiastically content to continue as we currently are with the metric system. We could of course, as I've alluded to in blog posts past, return to the [ actually ancient, Bozza !] "English System", which of course uses lines, barleycorns, pol

  One of the bundle of presents that Jane bought me for Christmas was the above book. A slim volume, but in itself a much more substantial story of Welsh industrial history. I've read a good chunk of it today, and intend to finish up with the next reading. The industrial history of North Wales is obviously of great interest to me, given our family origins. The appalling treatment meted out to working men and their families by the landowners and their accomplices in pursuit of profit in the coalfields and slate quarries informs my politics and attitudes to authority to this day. I'll let you know more about the events recorded in this little book as soon as I finish it. It makes a good companion to "What I Saw At Bethesda" [blog posts passim], and the parallels between the two are there to be drawn, as they are a microcosm of the greater struggle of the working classes against the combined forces of privilege and capital.

  Looks like we'll be eating charcuterie, salad and cheese for a while, having seriously over-catered for yesterday's Christmas lunch. Our numbers and appetites have dwindled over the last few years, but our calculations on the food front are still based on the hordes of gourmands & trenchermen we used to feed in the heyday of The Gerlan Bohemians. A cold collation tonight of yesterday's lamb, Greek salad, various salamis, hummus, olives and Manchego cheese will stave off hunger - ha! - without filling me up to the painful degree yesterday did!

The aftermath of lunch - the lamb actually - natch - tastes better for being cold on the bone! We've had a fine Christmas afternoon. A couple of drinks in The Bull Inn, Bethesda, followed by far too much food for the five of us; and later, pudding and a quiz with a couple of visiting friends, later on. These days, yuletide festivities tend to be curtailed to the late afternoon or early evening, but I guess that's the way of things as one ages. Still, a New Year awaits, and there's more to look forward to: onward!

  All things being said, and having already commented that for many, this holiday is anything but a break from misery and stress, I can't be a complete churl and rubbish the whole thing entirely. Stepping back from the commercial overload of it all, I put on the King's Carols and lit the stove, and am in the process of thawing out the lamb joint we froze last week, for tomorrow's lunch for family and friends. I'll get it into a marinade overnight, and it will have a long, slow cook tomorrow, ready for lunch at around two. Whatever you celebrate tonight and tomorrow, and with whomever, have the best one you can. Nadolig Llawen i chi gyd. Hwyl fawr!

Went to a soirée to celebrate the 80th birthday of a friend this afternoon. She's doing damned good after the loss of her husband a while back. Interesting mix of Rachub types present: new generations of right-minded people filling the voids left by our diminishing generations of bohemians. Things change, people change, habits change; but basically we are the same kind of people that we were back in our day: the outliers, misfits and square pegs that are essentially the heart and soul of any community. Not a bad way to segue into the next couple of days of festivity, methinks. Happy whatever you celebrate, and back to you later...

Increasingly, I'm minded that Dickens would find just as fertile ground for his tales of woe and injustice in the Britain of the twenty-first century as he did reflecting on that of the eighteenth and nineteenth. One could easily argue that nought has changed but fashion and technology; that the pipe-dreams and fantasies of universal liberation from slavery and penury via the - to borrow a much later phrase - '...white heat of technology...' are in fact just that: dreams. We have made little progress, two hundred years on, from the era of debtors' prison and the the workhouse. It might be argued that the disparity between the richest and the poorest in this land is now at its most extreme in our history. Technology has seldom served to equalise society or relieve the burden of toil from the masses: it simply increases the profit margins of those in control of it: far from being an agency of general good, technology is almost always the willing creature of the capitali

Following on from last night's brief polemic, which itself was spawned - as usual - from a conversation between Jane and myself earlier yesterday; I picked up on a letter in today's Financial Times from someone in Birmingham, city of our birth. In response to the PM's ridiculous assertion that compulsory mathematics be force-fed to all until the age of eighteen - unenforceable, as one can leave school legally at sixteen, anyway - Sandie Hobley rightly points out that, beyond the basics of arithmetic, rudimentary trigonometry and geometry, and I would hazard most importantly, estimation and - heaven forfend - the multiplication tables so hated by modernists, we need little else from maths to sustain us in a our numerical travels through life.  Unless you are an engineer engaged in the complexities of dynamic physical systems, or some such, you ain't gonna need the calculus: any calculus. Unless you are engaged in the abstrusenesses of operating system design, complex set

The longest night beckons, with the turn of the year on the winter solstice yet again. And so now we are on the up towards spring and summer, the weeks of winter set to fade behind us. It would be nice if the optimism this time of year always brings to me could be levelled towards every other aspect of current life on this archipelago or the world in general, but alas, 'tis not so. With the narrowing of life's aspect for so many through poor education - that includes the most expensive available, as well as the most lowly -  and hence poverty of experience and agency, along with the influence of the insidious echo chambers of social media and the many and various reactionary forces at play in the world; we witness daily the crumbling of our social fabric as if dispassionately observing the decay of a museum display in a vitrine, unaware of our part in the play. But play our part we must: this decay must be halted before 'tis too late, and the agents of discord held to acc

  Pictured, the Yule tree on the pier green, Bangor, with the pier behind and the shore of Ynys Môn beyond, across the Menai Strait. Lovely: 'nuff said... 

  What is he doing now? Does Sunak have any sense of personal or political awareness? Does he not realise that cosying up to the far-right Italian PM casts him in a very peculiar, dim light? Does he imagine that this will only sit well with the swivel-eyed loons to the right of the Conservative Party, and does he imagine that no-one else will notice what he's doing and draw conclusions from this most dangerous of bedfellow choices? The optics of this [to use the mode du jour] are not good. At all. He'll be chowing down with redneck survivalists in Kentucky next, or sharing a sauna with some of Scandinavia's less than salubrious firearms enthusiasts: learning how to get by with just the one Black Amex card and his immediate retinue for survival and how to instruct his minions in basic bunkering techniques. Let's face it, he's already ticked the oil Princes' box, so why not go for a full house? Seriously, though, what is he all about? What is he for? Apart from be

In the snug in one of the oldest parts of an inn built in 1472 [The Bull Inn, Biwmares: blog posts passim], this afternoon, with a pint of Bass Ale and a good book sat atop the rather substantial remains of a tree, made over into possibly one of the heaviest pieces of furniture of such modest size I've ever seen. I think I've waxed lyrical about the Bass here before, and as this is one of the - if not the very - last hostelries in the immediate area to serve the stuff, I will reiterate my praise thereof: amber perfection in a glass, and at a very reasonable - these days - £4.20 a pint. Nothing else around here now comes remotely close to the quality and value this represents. Hats off to The Bull for continuing to trade in one of my late father-in-law's favourite tipples: he'll be smiling somewhere up in the ether at the thought. By the way, I'm rather late to Borges; much less so to Bass. Enjoying both...

  "So, this is Christmas; The wind-up's begun..." to paraphrase John Lennon; and war, sadly, is not over by a very long chalk. Another festive season, and The Holy Land that spawned the mythology that the festival emanates from is torn and riven by as much strife as it was in the Biblical protagonists' day. Nothing changes. We're still treating each other as enemies, all the while bulling up the 'season of goodwill to all mankind'. At best this seems mildly hypocritical or vainly optimistic; at worst, it's the existential fate of the human race. No lessons learned from history, philosophy or even religion. We seem hard-wired to continue beating each other with clubs - physical or metaphorical - until we're all completely senseless or just plain dead. But, on an individual, personal level, as much as I don't actually engage with the mythology internally, one special meal of the year, shared with friends and family, is worth some time and indulge

Added yet more to my higgledy-piggledy book shelving today: I've put up for far too long without having my books - which are important to me - being on hand. I guess this chunk represents a quarter or less of my 'library', the rest still mouldering in boxes in various places around the house or studio, or shelved in the cottage for the use of visitors. I will continue to extricate and shelve more over the next weeks, but I doubt I will ever achieve the equivalent of my study in Gerlan Terrace, all those years ago [blog posts passim]. However, I will try my darndest to get close...

I don't know how I missed this one: Clause 34 of the government's new data protection bill will essentially allow the State to snoop into [pretty much every normal person's, at some time in their lives] bank accounts. How is it that the liberalism and small state, pro-privacy thinking of the Tory Party always commutes to a boiled down Stalinist vision of complete control and coercion of everyone but themselves? Of course! It's merely an extension of the Toryism of old: conservatism only applies to the self-defined establishment , and not the hoi polloi, silly me. We've already allowed ourselves to sleepwalk our way into being one of the most-surveilled societies on earth outside of North Korea, so why not allow these champions of 'free speech' to have unfettered access to our every private financial transaction? Except that normal, struggling people don't have access to extremely expensive means to actually stay financially private, unlike the wealthy,

Bear with me on this one, because even if you're not a Welsh speaker, and I can't claim to be one either; a poem is a poem, and Welsh poetry is particularly fine, with a history stretching far, far back in time. The beauty is in the structure, rhyme and alliteration as much as in the inherent meaning of the story told. Moreover, a modern Welsh speaker, as I've said before, can still pretty much read Medieval Welsh: try that in English... This poem is from the thirteenth century, and is by Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Goch. Marwnad Llywelyn ap Gruffudd Oerfalawg calon dan fron o fraw, Rhewydd fal crinwydd y sy'n crinaw. Poni welwch chwi hynt y gwynt a'r glaw? Poni welwch chwi'r deri yn ymdaraw? Poni welwch chwi'r môr yn meirwinaw'r tir Poni welwch chwi'r gwir yn ymgweiriaw? Poni welwch chwi'r haulyn hwylaw'r awyr? Poni welwch chwi'r sŷr wedi'r syrthiaw? Pani chredwch chwi i Dduw, ddyniadon ynfyd? Pani welwch chwi'r byd wedi'r bydiaw? Oc

So, the ridiculous Rwanda saga drags on, with the rushed-through-the-system-attempt-to-circumvent-international-law bill passing to the next stage, despite widespread Tory rebellion - read abstention, the hedge-funder's option - and near unanimous opposition party disapproval. Pictured, the Climate Minister, Graham Stuart, who made a 7,000-mile round-trip from the COP28 conference, just to vote in the divisions over the bill. I guess that some things are just more important than the future of the planet, eh, Stu? Ah, the joys of a cowardly back bench and a massive parliamentary majority; and a minister so committed to the niceties of his ministerial mandate that he is willing to shit all over it for the sake of supporting yet another batshit [official parliamentary term] mad Tory government policy. Nice . Unfortunately, I missed the allegedly vile, utterly vitriolic and violently poisonous contributions of a couple of the more barking Tory members, earlier in the debate: I switched

  Pictured, my little mini-project for the day: finally putting some replacement buttons on my [very] old corduroy weskit [waistcoat], a garment I've owned for fifty years and which was already several decades old when I bought it from a jumble sale in the early 1970s. It used to have buttons with pictures of hunting scenes in them, but all perished over the years, and it remained buttonless for a very long time. I dug the thing out of the depths of a cupboard this summer, and was about to bin it when I decided I really didn't want to part with it; so I put it through the wash - it was pretty filthy - and put it back into storage. Today I thought I might put some fresh buttons on it - no idea what prompted the idea - so I fished around in the big tin of buttons we have and found half-a-dozen matching brown buttons of the right size. I elected to use a contrasting orange thread to sew them on, just for fun. Although you can't really see that contrast in the picture, it turne

  As promised, the recipe for last night's curry fugue: serves four... Ingreedyments: 500 grams of diced chicken thigh meat 2 medium brown onions 2 medium tomatoes, chopped into eighths 1/2 of a green pepper, sliced into narrow strips 6 whole green finger chillies [mine are Kenyan and quite hot], pricked/sliced but not opened completely 10-12 dried Kashmiri chillies, halved and soaked in boiling water A thumb-sized piece of fresh ginger, grated 1/2 tsp cumin powder 1/2 tsp turmeric powder - with a little more for dusting the chicken 1 tsp each of chilli, coriander and garam masala powders 1/4 tsp fenugreek seeds 1 tsp brown mustard seeds 1/8 tsp asafoetida powder oil of choice lemon juice salt to taste chaat masala to garnish when serving Mode d'emploi: First off, sauté the sliced onions as per the slow method I've mentioned in blogs past - a pinch of sea salt helps - meanwhile, prepare the basic spice paste from the ginger, powdered spices and the Kashmiri chillies, some s

  OK, pictured is tonight's culinary experiment - more jazz - containing some familiar melodic themes, but with a harmonic twist or two. From the left, the mortar contains the freshly-ground spice paste, with below, the green chilli and pepper combo, with the chopped toms to the side. In the pot are the onions, slowly cooking out, and to the right of that, the cubed chicken browning in oil and whole spices. I won't post the recipe until I know how it turns out, but I'll keep you posted. So, in the interim, I'll expand on last night's chips/fries inflation theme. Thinking back to that pre-inflationary decimalisation era made me reflect on the relative costs of an evening out for an average working-class teenager, then and now. I well know that the social habits of this demographic have altered radically since I was a member of it, but indulge me in a like-for-[approximately]-like comparison. Starting with the parameters: booze, cigarettes [I know] and, of course fish

  I was considering a stroll down the pier today with a poke of chips [fries to the heathen], but the weather was simply not conducive to the idea, being wet, windy and frankly shite. I contented myself with an hour in Relics - I have to be careful not to stand still too long, lest I be considered one of the eponymous objects for sale. I bought four books at the princely sum of 50p apiece: they're winding down the stock prior to moving to new premises across the road. A good time to be buying books, from there at least. As to the chips/fries, it made me mull over the price difference between now and the last meaningful reference point in history, which for me is just before decimalisation effectively doubled the price of a bag of chips/fries over night. So 1970 is my benchmark year. In that year, the average wage [stupid way of looking at this as always, but nevertheless a benchmark] was £1200/year. This year - 2023 - the average salary stands at £35k, or about 29 times the 1970 fi

Poet, writer, actor, and proper Brummie. You'll be sadly missed by so many people. Nuff said...

The view out to the bay at daybreak this morning, from the bathroom window in the back. About four degrees of frost until the sun finally came round. A glorious day's sunshine and a walk along the canal side as the sun was setting: very pleasant but very cold. I'm heading back to North Wales tomorrow, but Jane is staying on with her mother for a few days. The transfer from hospital to home went smoothly and on time, and the care system started to kick in seamlessly. A slight hiccup remains, however, but we hope to resolve that over the next few hours. Overall, the experience has highlighted just how brilliant the NHS and its staff is and works, despite the egregious under-funding by successive - you've got to say it - Tory governments, and mostly under the tenure of this particularly socially-disengaged incarnation of free-market twonks. We are of an age that have lived our entire lives under the safety-net of the social contract and free health and social care. We are of

  Pictured, The Lancaster Canal at Lancaster itself. We had a pint in the The Water Witch pub on the towpath about a hundred yards further on from here, whilst waiting for visiting time at Lancaster General to start, so we could visit Jane's mom, en route to open up her place for her when she gets out, hopefully, this week sometime. I'm here for a couple of days before heading home to Yr Achub before the weekend, but Jane will be staying on for a while to look after her mother. Updates as and when...

Politics, domestic and foreign, is now in such a collective state of discombobulation it beggars comprehension. Domestically we are in thrall to the biggest collection of near-far-right clowns that this archipelago has ever seen in power. That they are haemorrhaging voter support by the bucket-load is but scant comfort in the face of the damage they have already done to our economy and public services, let alone whatever further carnage they can wreak in the dying months of their tenure. The Labour Party will be left to clean up the biggest toxic waste dump imaginable after the demise of this pitiful excuse for an administration: a task I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. It's going to be a rough ride, especially given the current ethos of a populace so reactionary - in real-time - that negative opinion and cant rule the roost on social(? - really?) media, with the default stance being 'kill everyone but whomever I happen to follow this millisecond'. Internationally, we

I've mostly just been doing domestics today, so I've not been down the studio, apart from to pick up some gash wood for kindling. The weather's been slightly warmer today, and the overall sense is one of damp, rather than the bone-gnawing cold of the last couple of days. The difference is only a matter of three or four degrees, but the shift away from the Northerly airflow is quite marked: no longer painful and potentially dangerous, just dismal. I took the above while I was waiting for Jane to finish work: looking towards the University Top College hill, with the bus station to the left. I just like the colours, and that weird sense of scale that a mobile phone's camera gives...

  I managed to avoid frostbite whilst finishing the bench-well bed and its backboard this morning, but only just. My feet were definitely cold by the time I got back to the house. I really do need to think seriously of an affordable way to heat at least part of this ridiculous volume of air. I guess it would logically be at the point where I throw on the front-wall cladding and roof covering. I've got an idea for some sort of old-school wood or multi fuel stove, but experiments need to be done first! Anyhow, I've left the ends of the well open so I can sweep it out easily. It's currently full to the brim with tools and stuff, but that will all change when I've put up an intended shelf above it, over the next day or so. Keep you posted...

It's been a gloriously sunny day today, but, shall we say, crisp. Basically brass monkeys out there: so I really didn't venture out too far until after a lunch of cheesy crumpets [delicious and decidedly unhealthy - allegedly - rounds of stodge, topped with grilled cheddar], when I decided the morning's inactivity was unsustainable and frankly boring, and decided to do something outside. Off the bat I reckoned chainsawing up some of the old, felled Leylandii that is still lurking around the garden would be a good idea, to supplement our dwindling wood supply, should we need it (our friend who supplies our wood has an issue with his truck at the moment, so we're on hold for the next couple of tons of supplies). After whizzing up a trug-full of firewood, I decided that there was another job that would at least keep me warm in the process: making a start on the well of my bench, at last. I'd already found some good lengths of shitty laminated chipboard in the old shed,

I'm of an age that I can remember when heaters in cars were an optional extra and not standard fitments. As were radios - cassette-players were only just appearing, and at some considerable expense [again optional, mostly third-party add-ons] - and as for sat-nav, well, let's say that geo-stationary orbital arrays were quite a way off into the future distance back in the sixties. The kind of stuff we take for granted these days, even as relatively recently back then at the height of the post-war boom years, with its 'white heat of technology', would have been as but science fiction to us. But back then, we hadn't committed our entire economy and existence to essentially one strand of technology: electronics and computing were merely adjuncts to the existing engines of commerce and industry; and bureaucracy was run pretty much by pen and typewriter on paper and card. Fast forward to now, and nothing - nothing [essential to our lives in the so-called 'First World

I suppose everyone has memories of school custard: I do, and thankfully I only faced it for one meal. The experience of that single thing put me off school food to such a degree that I henceforth took sandwiches for lunch, right up until the freedom of the sixth form allowed us to eat outside the school premises: in my case, usually at the cafe at the Bearwood bus station on Hagley Road, which served one of those rather dubious foodstuffs of one's past that one absolutely craves in later life: its absence and temporal distance making the memory sweeter still. In the case of the bus-drivers' shack, it was the burgers. Not your Mackie-D or BK Whopper, still less than the affected "prime burger" with its damnable brioche buns and skyscraper height, or the ridiculousness of Wagyu-burger pricing insanity. No, this was quintessential, burger heaven: tinned pork-burgers cooked to within an inch of their existence: thin, wide and caramelised in all the right places, in a prop

OK, I promised an update/tasting report on the curry I cooked yesterday [pictured, on completion, this evening]. Normally, I would post the recipe, but on this occasion I'm hesitant to do so; not because this was so good I want to keep it a secret, or conversely that it was an abject failure having zero culinary merit. It is a case of neither or both, sort of. It actually ate very well: the spicing a lot milder than the list of spices comprised in its construction would have suggested, but rounded and I might say interestingly different in flavour. The only reason I won't put this one out there is the garlic. Now, I'm one of the world's great lovers of this particular allium, but I feel I failed to properly cook it out - a whole head, admittedly, of the stuff - which left, even after considerable simmering, a rather pungent, almost raw taste of said bulb. Like I say, I'm not overly fussed, but I think the overall subtlety of the rest of the spicing deserves a little

  Improv's got a bit out of hand today, on both the workshop and food fronts. Pictured is the latest beta of the bypass cross-cut sled-thing - actually a 90-degree mitre-fence-sled-something-or-other with no angular adjustment. The initial idea of using the track and slider-bar actually works pretty well, but the pressed-steel of the side table is now throwing up some issues which I need to deal with: mainly, the fact that it's actually got a bow in it, which is deforming the track and causing the slider to bind. Bummer. I think I have a fix for that which will involve - guess what? - angle-iron: I should be able to pull the thing flat enough by bolting a piece to the underside of the deformed table. I can see now why cast iron is the material of choice for pukka - read very expensive - machine tool platforms. On the food front, however, I found we had a lone frozen chicken breast left after the freezer cull of the last couple of days, so I thought I'd go a bit Ornette Cole

  I've finally got round to starting to organise my books and writing space again: it's been a very long time since I've had all my books around me and organised, and this is but a first step. I used to have, many years ago and back in Gerlan, a room which was a tiny haven: my two thousand or so books formed a double-sided entrance corridor, leading into a space with two big armchairs in front of a lovely open fire in a Victorian cast-iron hearth and surround, with between them my chess table. Behind those were my drawing table and easel, upon which I painted the self-portrait lurking in the picture above. I'd like to think I could emulate a space so perfect again, but I'm not too sure it's going to happen any time soon: but who knows? Just getting some of my stuff actually organised and useable is a good step forward, anyway. So, as usual, I'll keep you posted...

Pictured, the view back towards back towards Bangor Pier from the old ferry jetty at The Gazelle, Menai Bridge. The light was just failing as we were heading home after a long lunch there this afternoon. And very nice too, so it was. If you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods, give it a go. And the view towards Eryri is simply one of the best vistas anywhere. Hwyl am y tro!   

Like any commentator, I just reflect what I see, hear and read about the various shenanigans going on around me: yesterday I reflected negatively on the Chancellor's autumn statement, and quite rightly, given what I understood to be the economic and fiscal actualities arising from it. Tonight, I happened upon a YouTube of Politics Joe interviewing Torsten Bell - a not uncommon occurrence - both of whom I have a good deal of time for, as they are both on the side of the angels: actually, not just in my estimation. But as always, my suspicion of economics and economists: the former a pseudo-science and the latter a profession [?] consisting largely of passive - if highly informed - commentators on the vicissitudes of the chaotic behaviour of economies, obtains. Torsten Bell understands as well as the next economist, the statistically likely effects of the various proddings to the blancmange feedback system that is a real-world economy, which is one of the most woefully undamped feedb