Observations from a Hill

Sitrep, Fairview stove install, 28-02-23. Pictured, me and Colin, rear elevation of our house, this afternoon. The chimney's now in place, along with the flexible flue-liner: shortly after the pic was taken, Colin made good the roof while I started bricking up the register plate at the base of the chimney, inside the loft. Another layer of stones tomorrow and some holes to be filled up there, then the two of us will finish the inside work on Friday; terminating the liner to the stove-pipe in the living room, followed by the smoke/draw testing. With a bit of luck, we should be lighting the stove for the first time on Saturday!

  Who'da thought it? For some years now, I've been trying to work out just what had happened to my old slide-rule (pictured), which I knew to be somewhere in the house, as I've taken that, alongside my tee-square, with me, wherever I've moved. The tee-square, which I think I've mentioned before, was given to me by my mother's employer when I passed my eleven-plus and was due to go to technical school at age eleven. The slide rule was bought for me by my parents while there. Both are kind of talismanic for me, I guess. Anyway, in preparation for tomorrow's blitz on the wood stove installation, I've been clearing the loft of rubbish and ossified rat-shit; a not entirely pleasant task, but there you go: some stuff just needs to get done. Having rescued a couple of lovely old valve radios that my dad gave me, our old dart-board (late of the Bull Inn, Bethesda), and sundry other bits and pieces, such as my first ever mobile phone (NEC P3 - a bit of a walkie-t...

  Jane remarked tonight that Rishi Sunak's guarded approach to the EU negotiations over Northern Ireland was both intelligent and, from the standpoint of most of us in the real world, potentially dangerous. Already, the EU has flagged that they are happier to deal with the current PM than any of his immediate predecessors; which, although damning with faint praise, would tend to indicate that some sort of deal is in the offing. If he pulls this thing off to the satisfaction of all interested parties, his political standing would potentially go up by a number of notches, and possibly haul his party back from the electoral abyss they currently face in the eyes of the electorate. Two things. One, in doing any deal over NI/EU customs issues, whilst potentially giving him political kudos, would in reality simply be [and only partially] righting the wrongs that his own party of government, under previous leaderships, had effected. Secondly, UK society, the country and its economy will st...

  I can't - won't - comment on our result in the rugby today. Suffice it to say that Italy made a far better fist of it today against Ireland than we did against England. We now find ourselves firmly in the wooden spoon position in the tables... We went over to Beaumaris - Biwmaris, yn Gymraeg - for lunch at the Bull today: a fine hotel and pub/bistro with its history stretching back before the Civil War, Cromwell having used the place, and where we have eaten well in the past. In recent years, the only food to be had was in the bistro itself, something we kind of lamented, as thirty years ago, we used to have plates of sandwiches delivered to the snug to consume over pints of Bass ale. Recently, there has been a change of ownership and, in what we initially felt was a positive move, they re-introduced bar-food to the place. It turns out that this was a classic case of be careful what you wish for, as 'twould seem that the kitchen brigade is still the same size as before, a...

  Interesting piece in my Wired feed today, by Steven Levy, about AI and chatbots, which contained the following sub-paragraph: 'Last year, [ Blake Lemoine] was fired from Google, essentially for his insistence that its   LaMDA chatbot was sentient . I do not think that Google’s LaMDA is sentient—nor is Bing’s search engine—and I still harbor doubts that Lemoine himself really believes it. (For the record, he insists he does.) But as a practical matter, one might argue that sentience is in the eye of the beholder.' The final sentence contains the clincher: the mere perception or interpretation of sentience in an AI is sufficient to render it as such to the observer/consumer. No matter that any particular AI is based solely on the ultra-rapid statistical analysis of huge language data-sets culled from the internet . I've referred before to Chomsky's now largely defunct, but laudable concept of deep linguistic/proto-linguistic-structures; which was intended to form the ...

It would seem - if you follow certain news media - that the UK is in the throes of a major national shortage of fresh produce and that major supermarkets are rationing goods such as tomatoes due to the extreme shortage of supply of such. The 'reason' given for this dearth, is the extreme weather in Europe over the last year or so, which has apparently completely crippled production of fresh fruit and veg. The problem with this scenario is that not all UK supermarkets have any supply problem whatsoever - we shopped at Lidl in Bangor, yesterday, and the shelves were stuffed with the kind of produce supposedly in such short supply (M&S this afternoon, similarly). I also noted a post on Twitter this morning, from an ex-pat living in Spain, who showed a video of a short wander through his town, which evidenced similarly burgeoning shelves of stuff in practically every outlet he visited. The subtext of these UK news reports is somehow that foreign weather has prevented the supply...

I was just reflecting on the vacuum of continuity that's left behind when someone dies: that sudden sense of disjoint, of fracture, in one's personal history that takes one completely by surprise at the oddest moments. These pinch-points in memory can often yield some surprising revelations of fact about periods in one's past. One such occurred to me tonight, tending my rather lazy meal of pizza in its journey from shrink-wrap to mouth via the oven. Al's recent demise still catches me out from time to time: the space he left bounded by forty plus years of friendship. But the thing that struck me tonight was just how much change was happening on a personal and social level in the very early years of our acquaintance. Between moving here from Birmingham in September 1980 and our buying our first proper house eighteen months later, all manner of things occurred that would chart the course of our lives to the present day. At around the time of our meeting Alan & Irene [...

  Made a tentative start on the stove installation today. I've done a lot of sketching and visualizing over the weeks, rehearsing the moves in my head, a bit like climbing or dancing, I guess; but at the end of the day, one has to get stuck in to some actual, physical investigation, and dare I say it, work. So, with the aid of a borrowed roof-ladder and my collection of slating tools, I set off up the roof to find out exactly where the living-room flue issues forth beneath the slates. Except that it doesn't in any convenient sense: the chimney stack must have straddled next door's cottage originally, and so I will have to go in from the side (in the tiny loft space) to open up the flue enough to feed the chimney liner in, and terminate to the register plate where the insulated flue - with a suitable offset to exit the roof - will be sited. I think the outside work should be trivial, if hard - at my age at least - work, but the inside stuff will be a pain, I think quite lit...

The disparity between grand plans & their promotion; and their actualization in the real world is often a gulf, verging on the abyssal, of ambition and hubris let loose by the forces of media and money. The triumph of front over substance, feeding back on itself until the inevitable line is crossed into instability and chaos, leaving naught but noise in its wake. The current government is but the tip of this very dangerous iceberg. I was minded of this sad fact of life by a conversation I had this lunchtime with an old workmate I bumped into outside the local Tesco Express. I'd kind of naively imagined that in the two-and-a-half years since my retirement, things might have moved on and [BT/Openreach] would finally have made some great strides in putting into place some of their grand plans and operational improvements at last. But no, I hear from my mate that, far from the grand 'switch-off' of dial tone that would herald the coming Jerusalem of fibre and data everywher...

Pictured, the remnants of our light repast this evening, of lamb and potatoes, roasted with garlic, bay and rosemary: one of our staple dishes over the years, and one that I can cook ad hoc, without much thought or stress, no matter the number catered for. It makes me reflect, however, on the sad fact that so many people that we've entertained - and enjoyed the company of - for food and wine over the past forty-odd years, are now, inevitably, but regrettably, gone from us.

It's now a fact of life. We have reached an impasse between all the very many problems that need - no, are screaming out - to be solved and getting our government to address anything with either sense of urgency, or indeed any degree of success when action is finally taken, whatsoever. As Jane said this evening, it would be nice if they could just focus on seeing even one thing through to conclusion; rather than proposing this, forecasting that, and predicting the other. That is not the substance of governance. The Second Coming of the Messiah came and went, only to be postponed to some future, amended date: predictions and projections in politics and the economy are the stuff of election campaigns or religious dogma, not government. This shower has held an unassailable majority and stranglehold on power since that shock-haired lunatic Old-Etonian got his landslide, building on an already well-established period of Tory government. And in thirteen years, what exactly have they - pa...

  Sozan, a Chinese Zen master, was asked by a student: 'What is the most valuable thing in the world?' The master replied: 'The head of a dead cat.' 'Why is the head of a dead cat the most valuable thing in the world?' inquired the student. Sozan replied: 'Because no-one can name its price.' [Source: Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, by Paul Reps] . Consider this deeply before you dismiss it as a simplistic or, worse, trite observation. The concept of value is fundamental to who we are and where we would seem to be and see ourselves in the world. Understand true value and worth, and you begin, slowly, to understand yourself. Clue: to seek is not necessarily to find...

  Just laying out some old six-inch quarry tiles we've had lying about since we moved here twenty years ago; to extend the hearth beyond the reclaimed slate slab, so that we can bring out the new wood stove further into the room. I've glued a temporary batten to the floor, so that I can work to that to allow for the marked differences in dimensions and thicknesses that the eclectic mix of tiles - some mid-twentieth century, some nineteenth - exhibit. Also, there's the need to level them up to the slate, which will require a decent depth of mortar, so the fixed guide will be helpful. As I've said before; the hideous, if remarkably resilient, carpet, is going, and I'll be laying a wooden floor as its replacement. Oh, and I've still the installation of the stove's flue and roof termination to sort out. Keep you posted...

  Pictured: the box of bits is now a box intact, and of some utility for its intended purpose, to house the somewhat antique, but nevertheless entirely functional and eminently desirable artefact sitting atop. All I need to do now is to line the case with appropriately cut closed-cell foam and give the outside a little polish, and it will be ready to sell. I wish I had a legitimate use for this little beauty, but frankly, I don't. This microphone deserves to be in regular service in a pukka studio environment; let's face it, this thing will almost never reach the end of its working life: so perfect and simple a design that it is, so perfect its audio performance, so robust its construction; that it is likely, given due care and [so simple] maintenance, to soldier on for generations to come, in the service of music and the arts: a kind of Galápagos Tortoise of the audio world. Long may it live... I'll keep you posted on the completion of the case.

Although the rather enticing news of a ministerial defection from the government, not just to the back benches, but to the Labour Party(!) would normally be cause to pontificate at length and in a florid manner, I'll leave that for another day. Rather, I'll just offer a little domestic/maker/diary post tonight. Pictured are the basic bits for a case to house a rather fine microphone - STC 4038, to be precise - so that I can offer this venerable beast up for sale. The mic is one of the earliest of this BBC design and has a very low serial number - it dates to the 1950s or early sixties - to match its very low impedance [30 Ohm]. It is a slightly road-worn example, but still a very fine microphone that hopefully will find a good home in a studio somewhere and be used for many decades to come. I'll keep you posted on the case, and on the eventual fate of the microphone itself...

Jane pointed me at a good ' Comment & Analysis ' piece in yesterday's Observer, by Will Hutton, which serves to emphasize the sheer wanton stupidity of the Brexit process - no it hasn't been 'done'; not by a very long chalk, thus far - and it's inevitably very unfortunate consequences continue to affect all of us; except that is for the tiny minority of its most rabid, and wealthy adherents. The final bonfire of your and my liberties looms large on the horizon, heralded by the Fourth Horseman of the Brexit Apocalypse: [The] Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill currently in the pipes, championed by that exemplar of modernity [I couldn't help myself] and cheerleader of free speech and market freedoms, Jacob Rees-Mogg. A man so out of touch with the real world that who, in any normally-functioning society, would be treated as delusional and quietly locked away for the public good, instead of being allowed, like his equally deranged colleagues, t...

  Well, there we are, then. The great and the good yet again anointing themselves as arbiters of truth and sensibility. I refer, of course, to the 'secret' [ 'tweren't very well secreted, methinks... ] cross-party meeting at Ditchley Park about how best to salvage the wreckage of the Brexit shit show. A good idea, you might say, and in principle I would agree: someone, somewhere has to address the economic, political and legal black hole that our stupidly hasty exit from the EU has left us to deal with. However, the make-up of the attendees of the meeting does beg a few questions; not least, as Jane pointedly and very pertinently outlined this afternoon: where is the representation of small business in this hastily-assembled claque of market followers and capitalist apologists? Given the oft-trotted out fact, [by your humble narrator, to name but one of a cast of thousands] that the vast majority of business-people active in the UK [95%-ish by number at any one time], g...

Well, the second Six Nations weekend sees my national team routed once again at the hands of another Celtic nation; the margin of defeat similar in both games. Scotland seem to be rebuilding their game as fast as we are losing ours, and elsewhere the two best teams in the world reinforce their existing respective positions, with top-rated Ireland as current favourites, despite Scotland still being up for the Grand Slam this year thus far. However, their defeat of the current Slam holders, France, today, was by a very much smaller margin than the final scoreline suggests and still keeps the championship tantalisingly open, although, if I were a betting man (and I'm not), I would take the odds on Ireland for the outright win at the moment. Having said that, there's plenty of time left, and I won't write off Les Bleus just yet...

  Two things have sprung into conversation today: the demise of the pub as a national institution, and the death of the tobacco shop as any-thing at all. Talking in one of the few remaining 'proper' pubs around here this afternoon, we had to agree that the days of drinking houses - public houses: the clue is in the name - are largely numbered, due to economic and demographic forces that the industry simply finds it difficult to address. The Bull Inn in Bethesda, is the only place I know left around here, where the sole reason for attendance is to drink and talk, the only distraction being the ever-present TV; but that's been a thing since well before the slow decline of the pub started. At least you can get a game of pool, darts or cards - dominoes isn't a big thing any more - if you want; and thankfully you're not constantly dodging people serving food: there ain't any. Similarly, tobacconist's shops have dwindled in number in the years since government fin...

  Further to last night's post about tastes past, I'd like to chuck out there another memory, Proustian in its epicurean poignancy. One of the great ironies of the past few years has been the elevation of essentially working-class grub into the orbit of the chattering classes. Quite how the qualities of some of the greatest staples - delicacies, indeed - of this archipelago had hitherto escaped their notice is less a matter of speculation than proven historical prejudice; but there you go. Many years ago, I was on a climbing trip to Derbyshire with some friends, one of whom was a Derbyshire lad, Bryan, whom I worked for at the time, and who was my climbing partner. A number of us stayed at Bryan's parents' house one night, including a particularly middle-class bloke, and me. Now, Bryan's parents lived in an almost carbon-copy of the terraced house that I grew up in, in Birmingham: two-up, two-down; eleven feet wide, the rooms a similar length. Not much bigger than a...

  One of life's simple pleasures: hot, well-buttered toast with Gentleman's Relish. I was first introduced to this delight at breakfast, in Edinburgh, some forty-two years ago. The rather salty, fishy, anchovy paste, Patum Peperium, was invented in 1828, by one John Osborn, an Englishman. To this day, the recipe is still only entrusted to one employee of its manufacturer, Elsenham. This is by no means the only example of covert comestible constituents of the commercial kind, and one other, very particular and very special example, springs to mind. I have no idea whether or not it still exists in the form I remember, or if it does, is of the same very particular quality; and judging by the latter involvement of Punch Taverns, I suspect not. But, up until the death of Doris Pardoe in the early mid-eighties, the secret recipe of her legendary home-brewed ale was hers alone: The White Swan in Netherton in the Black Country being both brewery and principal outlet for one of the jewe...

  Given the appallingly intense world - and domestic - news over the last forty-eight hours, I'm going to have to retreat into a diary post tonight, as my brain is frankly fried by it all. Suffice it to say, I'll be making some comment on some or all of it, at some point in the not-too-distant. However, we took delivery today of the rest of the stuff we need to install our currently offline and inert multifuel stove, and I'm now rehearsing in my head the steps necessary to effect its installation. Pictured, some of the bits in a corner of the studio. Like most jobs of its kind - given my rather catholic experience of, well, just about most things practical - it shouldn't be much of a job. The only limiting factor at the moment is predicting the vagaries of the weather to come: not always easy in North Wales, in the winter. Still, I remember some fairly hairy winter jobs when I was in the building trade, and I don't foresee this one being particularly problematic. Al...

... running on fumes and coughing to a standstill. Not my car, but our inglorious bastard of a government, and the party behind it. Empty. Of ideas, direction, or of any practical purpose to their electorate. And like all empty vessels, they make the most noise. And noise is what they are: interference, like short-wave static on the airwaves, a random and annoying background clamour of utter irrelevance. Even Tory insiders are predicting The End: the end of the 'Conservative brand', according to a Tory activist, Matt Stephens [ i Weekend]. His phraseology just about sums up the UK politics of the last quarter of a century or so: politics as marketing: image and 'brand' trumping substance and purpose. And now we observe the disturbing and rather distasteful spectacle of two former prime ministers - both defenestrated by their party, and neither having had the good grace to stand down, honourably, from politics as a result - apparently returning to the fray, with the sup...

Never let it be said that retirement is simply an issue of steady decline into dotage, senility and, well, death: at least it doesn't have to be, anyway. As I said to my drinking buddies the other day, I feel more intellectually aware and alive now than ever before; now that I have the freedom to do, read, listen to and watch whatever the fuck I choose at whatever pace I choose, than ever was the case when I was working, or even when a student, at the point when the process of learning about teaching oneself stuff was only in its formative stages. I realize that, although not well off in the crass, conventional sense of the phrase, I am nevertheless blessed to be able to be who I want, pretty much when I want [caveats exist], and I realize full well that this is not the case for a very large slice of humanity. What I am trying to do may well be in the long-term existentially futile: the quest for knowledge for its own sake is, ultimately, limited by one's own existence, unless ...

I won't comment on our start to the Six Nations against Ireland this afternoon: I think the first half said it all, let alone the final scoreline. I also won't stray into the surreal world of Westminster today, either, where the return of The Truss into the fray has raised disbelieving eyebrows to a new height. Plenty to come on that front, I'm sure. However, we did venture out for a short, local trip to the ancient settlement of Llanddeiniolen, around five or six miles from here, on the way out towards Caernarfon. In the churchyard of Eglwys Deiniol Sant - the church of Saint Deiniol - [d. 584], are three Yews of considerable age. Two are classed as Ancient at around eight or nine hundred years old, and one as Exceptional, meaning that it could be anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred-plus years old, although the dating of Yews is extremely difficult and the subject is of much debate. The church itself is a nineteenth century replacement for a much older one, itself ...

  So, the government finally steps in over the forced imposition of pre-payment energy meters on the most vulnerable of consumers, and not before time; although I suspect that without the media outrage, it might simply have let things be, hoping that their usual three wise monkeys approach would carry them through. The old truism that 'an Englishman's home is his castle' unfortunately has never applied to the hoi polloi, but only to the privileged, and I still find the concept of a warrant of entry, applied in the absence of the householder, offensive and extremely troubling: much like being robbed, it violates and debases one's personal space: home. You can't see that happening to your average Duke, can you? Welcome as this grudging shift in governmental attitude is, it still ignores the fundamental issue here: that under our current, 'deregulated' fantasy-island system of energy supply, the raw fact is that the energy 'providers' who have hitherto ...

  Colorless (sic) green ideas sleep furiously. Chomsky's famous example of a syntactically correct sentence that is simply nonsense semantically, and therefore - this is the fag-packet version - refutes the prevailing language models at the time he coined the example in his 1957 book "Syntactic Structures". In the intervening years between then and my going to Bangor Uni in 1980, to study linguistics, the seams of his grammatical theories were starting to bulge, due to the increasing bulk of rules, filters and other logical detritus, necessary to keep - mixed metaphor warning - the ship afloat. In short, his example fell as short of usable, as did his theory in general, which star started to fade from the eighties on. The reason I mention this, is to do with theories and technologies that we think we know, but really don't, despite our having created them. Hannah Fry's piece in today's i 's 'My View' byline, about ChatGPT, posited that, despite the...

It looks like the scales are finally falling from the eyes of the many beguiled and deceived by the siren song of Tory fantasy: their promised land looking further away now than at almost any time in their history. I'll be brief, as it's late, and I need me bed, folks. From the fisherfolk of Devon waking up to the reality of post-Brexit, well, fishing and actually selling their catch; to the supposed benefactors of "levelling up™" in "The North", there is a growing unease that something may well, actually, be truly rotten in this state of Denmark: apologies to the Danes for dragging them into this mess for the sake of literary allusion. Whilst half the country appears to be on strike out of sheer desperation, Rishi Sunak feels it appropriate to simply trot out the usual Tory crap about the unions and their supposed intimacy with the Labour opposition, whilst Dominic Raab is caught on camera in the House (the lip readers among us being in no doubt) shouting ...