Observations from a Hill

  I'm not sure about hyperspace, not necessarily because I just can't comprehend the Mathematics that is necessary to describe, let alone understand it, but because I'm actually unsure that I don't exist/not exist on multiple planes of multidimensional reality/non-reality already. Let's face it, we live in a world that should make sense - it used to, when I was a kid - but simply, now, doesn't. Our current slice of 'reality' reminds me of the incessant anxiety dreams that I still get: mostly relating to a work environment that I retired from two and a half years ago. Considering I only worked for the outfit for a mere sixteen years, I resent the psychological impact that it's had on me since. I've done and achieved so much more with the rest of my life, and I'm a bit hacked off with my brain for being so hung up on that one period of my it, but whatever, I move on, as always. I wish, however, we could move on, similarly, in the world of polit...

So, what exactly does hands-off, low-tax small state government look like? Aside from the stupid rich people falling over themselves to get arrested for financial fraud of one sort or another, whilst drawing the kind of (publicly-funded) salaries that most of us can only dream about; what exactly is the essential characteristic of government, as currently defined by the Tory Party? Aside from the increasing industrial unrest occasioned by stagnant wages and shit working conditions, understaffing and underinvestment? Aside from a cost of living and energy crisis of practically biblical proportions, where huge numbers of people are being rescued from freezing homes by an already terminally over-stretched NHS, because they simply can't afford to heat their homes? I'll tell you what it looks like. It looks like people running and hiding from the responsibilities they undertook when they took on the job of government. It looks like people who took on a vanity project for the kudos...

I've simply lost track of the body-count of senior government ministers, let alone Prime Ministers: either those eventually defenestrated or the ones who've elected to commit political seppuku in order to glean the merest scrap of dignity out of their ignominy: AKA attempting to salvage their future political careers. However many the tally currently stands at, I don't imagine it's yet plateaued out: this shower seems doomed to repeat their mistakes, missteps and misdeeds ad infinitum, or at least until the electoral process finally kicks in, and we can then, God willing, consign the whole sorry lot into the skip of failed political parties, hopefully in perpetuity. How all this looks to those outside looking in, you can only guess at; but I suspect our former European friends and colleagues are howling peels of laughter in sheer disbelief at the circus we now present ourselves as: how can an archipelago of countries, once so admired and respected - obviously, your vi...

  Just a quick diary post tonight, as we've had family around for supper and I haven't engaged with the outside world at all today. Pictured, the suite of principal ingredients in said meal, prior to cooking. A slow-cooked chicken stew with chorizo, black olives, black beans, and the usual trinity of onion, tomatoes and garlic. By the way, we all recommend the chorizo - top tackle: I put one of the sausages into the stew, chopped, and the other two were gobbled up by us as a starter. Delicious...

  Whatever faith, philosophy, belief system, or not, that you espouse, or don't; today is again Holocaust Memorial Day. Perhaps now, more than ever in the history of the human race, we need to fix the events of that time in the memories of those with no personal memory of that time, either direct or at close third hand. These are the generations who are growing ever more distant in proximity from those unimaginable horrors, inflicted by humans on other humans, simply on the grounds of abstractions of race-hate philosophies born of similarly disconnected memories and histories. History. Memory. Both are the necessary recording of past experience, outwith one's present; without which we flail, context-less in a sea of unknowing, drowning in our own ignorance, and failing to understand ourselves, let alone our neighbours: our fellow travellers on the short journey from birth to death. However, we still, unfortunately, seem incapable of coming together as a species, let alone as a ...

  A curious little email round tonight with The Lads - those of us remaining, that is - which I guess centred around mortality. I feel no less apprehension than the next person over the inevitable, even given my Zen principles: there are times when the shudder of disconnection from existence itself crosses my mind in the most profound way possible. It has always been thus. Oblivion, in its purest sense, is not an inviting concept when viewed through the lens of one's ego: why would it be otherwise? But the only thing connecting us all to the fabric of spacetime, in any tangible sense, is our individual, indivisible, consciousness. To the religious, this equates to our 'soul', which, all things being equal, according to our faith, will transcend the corporeal to a better place as envisioned by the tenets of that faith. To those without faith, however, the notion of ceasing to be is either a matter of extreme unease and fear, or, more rationally, of a willing acceptance of ...

  Scoring cheap political points in rebuttal of truthful argument against one's evident and proven failings really shouldn't wash in public debate generally, let alone in the Mother of Parliaments during PMQs. PM Sunak simply couldn't resist bringing Jeremy Corbyn into the debate - even though he lost the Labour whip in October 2020, some two-and-a-half years ago - to somehow, in his mind, deflect the argument away from the litany of Tory sleaze and shystery that has persisted now for well over a decade. And he still talks blithely about integrity and due process! Never mind the incontrovertible fact that Corbyn never actually did anything wrong, period. He's not an anti-Semite, and neither am I. He's just a similarly left wing thinker characterized, typically, by the right wing media, as a Trotskyist; which does him and the rest of us on the left, a righteous disservice in its infantilized portrayal. To drag up the anti-Semitism row yet again - not just Corbyn, pe...

  The world has a problem, actually more problem(s) than you can shake an infinite number of sticks at. But boiled down to its essence, one problem . Us. The human race. Pretty much all other species fit into a natural equilibrium of checks and balances that guarantee stasis and continuum for the collective. Despite our status as the apex predator, by dint of intellect, we have signally failed to assume any concomitant responsibility for our collective actions. We are the [metaphorical] unruly teenagers of black & white films from the fifties and sixties; trashing cinemas and beaches, in our quest for ego independence: squabbling and scrabbling to find the rungs of the [again, metaphorical] ladder that we feel needs to be climbed. That ladder of power, which equals money and influence; although there are enough twisted individuals and institutions out there that believe that power only comes via force, which inevitably also involves money and influence, natch. Larded onto all ...

  Curiosity: there's a thing, and I don't mean in the sense of an enquiring mind. Curiosity in the sense of a paradoxical, baffling, or just plain off-the-wall-weird thing. It turns out that our apparently boringly average - in astrophysical terms - universe, may just be the way that it is because it's baby bear's porridge - ish; I think. Using clocks counting time in imaginary numb ers , those that apparently know such stuff show how strange but simultaneously normal, and yet essentially intangible time is: non-linear, jumping about from time to place, and occasionally disappearing up its own fundament, just to reappear somewhere/time/place else -  a point without size or duration, completely different from its present/past place/time/size. Space and time, as we think we might/should know, are inextricably linked in a conundrum of physics and philosophy that few completely - or should that be incompletely? - understand in anything less than the most abstruse of mathema...

  For some reason, my YouTube browsing seems to elicit numerous ads for what seems to be a prevailing trope: passive income. The way all thing's internet work, this is probably due to my curiosity about just what snake oil is being peddled, and lingering long enough for my profile to be tagged as interested in this shit. Whatever. I'm old, cynical and Bolshie enough to have developed an immunity to the siren calls of the Ponzi merchants and sundry other cyber muggers that dwell, wraith-like, in the ether of the web. Passive income, of course, is the dream of everyone that has ever scraped a living in a crap job, or has by dint of social and economic marginalization, poverty or disability, had to similarly scrape by on benefits or charity. To find a way of earning cash that transcends the grind of either is pretty much the holy grail of the less well off: hence the golden lotto ticket dream, the Willie Wonka fantasy. A fortune gained for a couple of quid. Of course, most of us r...

  Levelling up? We all know it's a bollocks sales pitch from the bunch of half-wits that we choose to call our government; however, it was good to hear another like-minded old geezer - sorry, person of mature years - on BBC's 'Any Answers' this afternoon, espousing a concept that I've rattled on about for years, and which harbours an absolutely essential grain of truth: levelling down. The simplicity of the idea! The average per capita income of the UK is circa £35K: that's all of us, individually, of working age. Not only does this put the vast inequities extant here - and elsewhere - into context, but it offers the only solution to the privations of the majority in support of the very small minority that control the cash. Further on in the discussion was the question of how to drive this redistribution of wealth through the political process and into legislative reality. Ideas such as this are difficult to sell in aspirational times of plenty, but in such stra...

Beautiful, if somewhat chilly conditions here at Fairview Heights today, but it looks like a thaw might be on its way over the weekend, and not before time, as keeping the house even moderately habitable at the moment is ruinously expensive: and that's being ultra-careful and prudent. I'll leave tonight's post at that, save to say that millions of people in similar straits will - in short order, if there's no positive input from what passes as government - start to rebel, big style, by whatever means available to them. I abhor violence, and advocate hurting those who seek to hurt us, in their pockets: the best way to still a rich man's heart is to take his money. Economic sanctions are not just the preserve of governments; we are the unsung and most important part of the economy. Organize and collectivize to marginalize the wealthy and their claims on your wealth, created by you . It will be a rough ride, but it's do-able. It's been done before, just rememb...

  That towering giant of product & interface design, Dieter Rams, whose tenure at Braun yielded so many seminal pieces of industrial design, espoused what he called his 'Ten Principles of "Good Design"': Good Design Is Innovative Good Design Makes a Product Useful Good Design is Aesthetic Good Design Makes a Product Understandable Good Design is Unobtrusive Good Design is Honest Good Design is Long-lasting Good Design is Thorough Down to the Last Detail Good Design is Environmentally Friendly Good Design is as Little Design as Possible Oh, that our politics was as wisely guided as this...

  A few hours ago, John Redwood tweeted: "The failure of British Volt to win investment and orders for a new battery factory shows there is still a long way to go to an all electric UK car industry. The government should drop its plan for an early ban on making and selling new diesel and petrol cars here." Really? This apparently off-the-cuff statement highlights all that stinks about the Tory Party and its government. A government that fast-tracked and invested shitloads of dosh in a company [PPE Medpro] that didn't actually exist at the time, on the say-so of an interested party and which company signally failed to deliver anything whatsoever of use to the country at a moment of crisis; has stood back from assisting a company that might just have been a useful addition to this country's economy and the future of greening our benighted world, and which, according to Redwood, signals a generalized failure in the sector and therefore offers a green light to the aut...

Back to wintery scenes here in North Wales Land, although it looks like we've escaped lightly thus far. Just a diary post tonight, as I'm suffering from anger and frustration fatigue over the continuing politicobollox situation. I really don't have the energy to expend on shouting into the ether tonight, so curry, red wine and Jimi Hendrix it is...

  The chaos continues: a teachers' strike, further nursing strikes, the Met - yet again - in the spotlight for reasons they almost certainly would rather brush aside if they could; magistrates shooing through applications for invasive action to install pre-payment meters on the hardest pressed of our society crushed under unsustainable energy bills. One authority, Portsmouth, has their magistrate's court issuing up to 13,000 warrants a month, allowing debt collection agencies to enter premises and install, with legal duress, pre-payment meters, serving higher tariff energy on the already distressed, with no legal or even practical comeback. 'Comforting' debt and energy management advice from the comfortably off but well-meaning won't cut it if you are a teaching assistant, living on your own, earning £13,000 [really!] a year. In the light of falling gas and oil prices - the latter already reflected on the filling station forecourt - we now have economists predictin...

  Current economic thinking is, basically, just shagged. A philosophical dead-end of right wing, neoliberal, capitalist realism, that considers there to be no other alternative to the hands-off, laissez-faire, it's-the-natural-way-of-things thinking, promoted, pushed and promulgated by the über-wealthy and their coterie of aspiring acolytes, hoping to join the club. I've said it before, but it's worth repeating, ad nauseam if necessary; economies are two-way deals. You earn, you buy. If you produce, you sell; but on condition that someone buys: if no-one can afford to buy, you're buggered. End of. The unsavoury thinking oozing from government at the moment [ source: Financial Times ] is that the ill and over-fifties should be coerced into filling the job vacancies that are currently unfillable due to a combination of Brexit and shit wages. How on earth is that going to work? Disturbing images of mid-twentieth-century history spring to mind, especially after that Tory ba...

Well, things do seem to be boiling up, good and proper. Steve Barclay - the Health & Social Care Secretary, whom one would assume has the remit and responsibility for health & social care, after all - appears to be lobbying the unions to put pressure on his own Treasury, to support the claims of the striking NHS staff [ source: The Observer ]: a whoa! moment, if ever I saw one. WTF? This is the self-same Steve Barclay, who has been trotting out the party line and doing the 'Union Barons' shtick since he took office? He now seems to be taking sides against his own PM and Chancellor, who refuse to budge, saying 'there's no more money'. What does this all mean? That his office is essentially powerless against the central cabal, so much so that he has to go cap in hand to his apparently sworn enemies to convince his erstwhile friends and allies to perform a similar volte-face? I, for one, remain as confused about exactly what it is this (these) serial Tory gover...

OK - diary post; our new woodstove, a Morsø Squirrel, arrived yesterday: a tale in itself, given where we live and the insane difficulties of offloading seriously heavy objects on the hill. However, to get the little porker into the house a modicum of dismantling was in order. Now, the quoted overall weight of the complete outfit is 70kg, however, even stripped of an awful lot of its stuff, this thing took all of my strength to inch it off the ground, albeit one-handed, and I can lift 50kg without killing myself, albeit two-handed; so I'm not totally convinced of the quoted weight, but whatever: it's heavy, suffice to say. With a bit of muscle, judicious use of leverage and some clever little furniture dollies, I got the thing into the living room, reassembled it, and inched it into its final position in the hearth, ready for installation. This next step might take some time, however, as every chimney and stove expert in the UK is currently snowed under, due to the energy and c...

  Well, another legend bites the dust. Pictured - well, it says exactly what it is on the label: my copy of the single from the late sixties, second-hand, ex-jukebox. The keywords being Jeff Beck Group in the context of the demise of the great Jeff Beck in the last few hours. Jeff Beck was one of those musicians that in the 'sixties turned me on to guitar music, specifically in his case, during his time with The Yardbirds, the single 'Shapes of Things': the first record of any kind that I bought in 1966, which, unaccountably, I can't lay my hands on at present. His solo on that oh-so-short single blew me away then, and his playing continued to astonish well over fifty years later. A singular musician, a singular talent. He'll be sorely missed.

    There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves, Or lose our ventures. William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene III   Is there any more apposite Shakespearian quote currently? For so long now, the working classes of this country have been backed into a corner, partly at their own volition: the post-Thatcher aspirationals, the red-wall Tories, and the led-by-the-media lumpen proletariat. All have conspired in some way to keep bringing the Tories back into power, aided and abetted by a system that views the Conservatives as the only natural party of government, despite all evidence to the contrary. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a paid-up member of the chatterati: I am genuinely from a poor background, and get righteously angry when people from backgrounds like min...

    OK, so now we have the default Tory response to the current industrial unrest [an unfortunate blanket term, rooted in the past] in all its ignominious glory: bash the unions and defame the strikers as, I kid you not, Bolsheviks: yes folks, the Tory back benches are really showing their true colours today. Bolsheviks, Lefties, Trots: we've heard all the epithets and more, over the years. It's about time that such terms be proscribed as unparliamentary language. We deserve far better from the government, and from parliamentary procedure: calling out the opposition in such manner is equivalent to the opposition openly characterizing the Tories as Fascists. This partiality of protocol needs stamping on, pronto: the disparities of rhetorical affordance evident between one side of the house and the other are starting to not only annoy [me, and many, many more like me], but look increasingly like deliberate institutional bias. Debate is debate: both sides have to have an equal st...

  OK, NHS in turmoil, strikes across the board, twenty-five percent of adults (source: i ) choose to go to A&E as they can't get GP appointments - a situation predating the strikes by some considerable way - ambulances and patients hung up outside hospitals waiting for space and staff to be available - again predating the strikes also by some considerable way: and what is the government's response? Give the striking staff forty-five minutes out of a scheduled one hour (!) in which to 'negotiate' a possible satisfactory outcome to this wholly justified industrial action: risible and insulting in itself; the substance of the meeting worse still: no negotiation on pay, just a one-off settlement in return for 'productivity' and 'efficiency' improvements. This asked of a dedicated, skilled workforce who have been worked into the ground for years by understaffing, under-resourcing and piss-poor management trying to run a health service like a business at ...

The oft-heard phrase '...x [insert name] is a very skilful politician...' neatly, if inadvertently, sums up what ails politics in the twenty-first century, and sheds light on the poor governance to which we are all subject. Skilful politicking as a virtue is essentially an eighteenth-century concept, born of a time when politics was basically a sport of the aristocracy: when there were the ruling classes, who possessed sole title to the franchise and hence carried the mandate forth practically by default; and the hoi polloi: the peasantry, the dispossessed and the dissolute, with no mandate or real possessions. The use of that phrase now should, but unfortunately, doesn't ring hollow, at least amongst the more right wing elements of society. We should by now be operating a democratic system of equal representation: politicking really should have no place in the governance of a modern, equitable society: government should already have been internalized as simply part of stat...

  Decades ago, I had a summer job for a couple of seasons with National Car Parks, in Birmingham, in between school and Foundation College, and then between Foundation and Art Colleges. I was about nineteen years old, unclubbable and generally quite Bolshie about most things. Most of all, I was broke - a recurring theme throughout my life - and the paltry wages offered by the company in return for a life-threatening workplace environment: think carbon monoxide poisoning as standard fare for the working day/night - were not exactly going to engender loyalty to the company. Basically, everyone supplemented their meagre stipend on the fiddle. You milked the system in whatever ways possible: newbies were inducted from day one in the numerous methods of skimming from the day's take without being noticed. The techniques employed varied according to the type and layout of car park, from the more sedate outdoor, waste-ground parks, mostly looked after by crafty pensioners, to the multi-sto...

  OK - a spoon. But to me, this particular spoon is the gateway to so many memories. As I said the other day, Al's funeral placed a very different spin on things than the fact of his death itself. It is as if the ritual goodbye has also sealed up a large chunk of our collective history, bringing to a close that which was common to so many of us. The fact is, everything changes, subtly, when a person and their personality are taken out of the equation: we are, at the heart of it all, collective in nature. That's not to say we are mentally or emotionally in each other's pockets, but rather mutually supportive in our personal isolation. The spoon. This came into my possession in 1989 or early 1990. We were involved in the great blancmange experiment [blog posts passim] at what eventually became The Electric Mountain in Llanberis. Jane & I decided that we would have a weekend break in Paris: a spur-of-the-moment idea that seemed pretty good at the time. However, by the time...

  I have to say I was pretty impressed by the Labour leader's New Year address this morning. He put forward a strategic plan for the years ahead, confident in taking the helm from this increasingly hapless Tory administration at the soonest possible opportunity. He dealt with press questions - actually answering direct questions - with a measure of élan we've not seen before from him. He seems to be getting the measure of the job at last. The most salient point about the speech - one apparently lost on Damian Grammaticas, a BBC reporter whom I respect - was the underlying structural change to UK politics that Starmer and Labour are proposing. Far from ditching socialism in favour of New Labour's discredited brown-nosing of big business, he proposed in somewhat elliptical terms pretty much the kind of reforms that I personally have espoused and banged on about for years: de-centralising the political machine and creating a balanced, mixed economy where neither state nor bi...

Well, we said our final goodbyes to the man today, those of us left standing, anyway. A good turnout for the bugger, nevertheless. Seventy-four seems to me to be simultaneously both too young and somewhat ancient. From our current viewpoint, seventy-four is near enough where we are, but when we first met Alan & Irene, Al was thirty-four, and we were still in our twenties, all of us with distant horizons, well before us. That we've collectively lived several lives apiece in the interim, cooked hundreds of communal meals, listened to thousands of hours of music and drunk copiously from the fount of Bacchus, is somehow still tempered by the apparent linearity of time, and a sense of an ending. However, I'd rather frame it as the passing of one chapter and the start of another, with whatever that brings, and for however long...

  There's a two-page spread in today's i that has two main pieces on UK politics. In the first, it talks of a return by Boris Johnson if Rishi Sunak continues to underperform in the show-politics department that obviously a significant proportion of the Tory Party seem to hold dear. Johnson was of course the arch proponent of the flash, but empty politics of gesture: exactly that which got him dumped as PM in the first place, by his own sodding party. I do think that the Party of Little Brain/Britain is showing itself for what it is: shallow, lacking in talent, and devoid of scruples. Re-election is their only motivation for being in public office: not a great CV item. The second was an item regarding Labour's apparent current stance on the EU, with Lisa Nandy - whom I admire greatly - arguing that the party will continue to co-operate with the EU while stating that rejoining the union is merely fantasy. Considering the current state of the UK economy, the Northern Ireland...

For some months now, Telford's magnificent bridge across the Menai Strait, the original permanent crossing between Ynys Môn and the mainland, has been closed, due to structural issues involving the hangers on the main span. Only foot traffic is currently permitted, throwing all vehicle traffic at the only other crossing available: the Britannia Bridge further towards Caernarfon. This means not just local traffic to and from the island, but the main trunk between Ireland and Europe via the port of Holyhead: the A55. Unfortunately, when the road crossing was added to the newly rebuilt Britannia about forty-some years ago, the traffic load it was predicted to deal with was a woeful underestimate of today's reality, and its two lanes - at both ends converging from four - are simply unable to cope adequately, particularly at the times of Irish ferry sailings and dockings. Jane, Irene and I went to do a bit of shopping in Bangor this morning, and decided to head for the Anglesey Arms...

I am not, and never have been, one for making New Year's Resolutions. Don't see the point. Changing the course of one's life on the basis of some - usually third-party-influenced - wish-list, just seems wilfully perverse to me. If you weren't doing whatever it was you plan to do already, you'll be pretty unlikely to do it just because the digits in the current year have changed. Aspiration to the unlikely or just plain impossible always leads to disappointment, and the repetition of whatever it was you were trying to alter. Best left alone. This might seem negative, but it sits at the heart of my personal philosophy: self-determination is less about goal and ambition than listening to and working with the now of existence: we only have one point of being in space and time. All else is relative.