Observations from a Hill

An Oath of Allegiance on Coronation Day? Dear God, what are they trying to say? Words fail... while the world crumbles before them, the Royal Family Lite™, rather than accepting their naturally curtailed rôle as a much-depleted and maybe a more constitutional and functional unit; appear intent on clawing back some of their 'heritage' and status, and revisiting their former 'glory'. A bit sad, really, and a bit of an own goal, too: if they want to avoid a Republic, they would do well to avoid assumed fealty to a divine monarch as a concept: not a good twenty-first-century fit...

  So, another one of the great planks of the Tory Brexit 'plan' is to go by the wayside, to be dumped in favour of expediency, too difficult to implement. The EU retained laws dump is effectively being scrapped, leaving most of those EU laws in place, with only a relatively small number being removed from statute at any time soon. Of course, tellingly, those they are determined to bin involve product safety and emissions trade-offs: two areas that big business would naturally view as impediments to trade. What a coincidence: where there's a will, there's a way, eh? Typical. I'm going back to the snooker, wake me up when the government actually does anything other than posture and make cheap jibes about the opposition...

  Snooker's a funny old game: play it well enough these days, and you will make a fair bit of dosh out of it: and fair play - chwarae teg, as we say round here - at least such rewards are commensurate with the level of raw talent required to get to the top of the game's earning pile. Not quite so with the absurd remunerations demanded by the CEOs of this world, a breed of ridiculously self-entitled individuals such as we've never seen to date. Remember, these people are not the arse-out entrepreneurs of old, staking their entire lives and fortunes on some speculative and risky venture in order to build their fortunes, but rather the golden-parachuted-in-three-year-tenure temporary holders of entirely fictive job posts, looking to cash out with as much dough as possible for the least possible effort and move on to the next gravy train offered by the idiots who run this world. Give me snooker every time...

  A trip to Betws Y Coed today, with sandwiches and a pint in The Royal Oak Hotel for lunch. There's a comfortable, if bourgeois, atmosphere to the place, but it's a well-run and not expensive place to grab some well-prepared, if basic, food and while away a couple of hours over the papers in the lounge bar. We've taken to occasionally having Saturday lunch there with friends, in the restaurant, which is a pleasant, but I think reasonably well-earned, extravagance. We drove back through the mountains via a fairly circuitous route to give the family a grand tour of scenery that they had not seen, despite having been coming here for forty years on visits. A fine enough day for a Thursday. A fine enough day indeed.

Llanllechid, this afternoon: your humble author, wife Jane, and sister-in-law, Carol; in a hot tub with the Glyders and Chwarel Penrhyn in the background, as the setting sun toasted our faces, after a day out on Anglesey. Not our tub, but belonging to the holiday let that Carol, Kevin and Ma are renting this week. When we moved here, forty-three-years ago, any event such as this would have been utterly and fantastically inconceivable, on any number of fronts. The pubs were even closed on the Sabbath in those days, and large numbers of the parish's populace still regularly attended chapel three times on Sundays: what the chapel elders would have made of this is anyone's guess, but that would be their problem, and theirs alone: life moves on here in God's own parish...

Interesting counterplay between the two opponents, and I don't mean Ronnie O'Sullivan & Luca Brecel in the quarters of the World Snooker. I refer of course to the PM and the leader of the Opposition and their respective administrations. On the one hand, Sunak's government's Illegal Migration Bill including the power to detain under-18's - children in British law - travelling alone or with family; and the Labour Party removing the whip from Diane Abbott for some somewhat ill-conceived remarks on the nature of racism. On the one hand, the Tories continue to deploy their long-standing, vote-garnering [they hope] old standby, law'n'order: Draconian legislation to counter largely overstated or even non-existent threats. On the other, we see the Labour Party engaged in a non-too-subtle purge of the Left within the party, attempting to placate the centrists and to an extent out-manoeuvre the right-wing press. Both are understandable and simultaneously lazy thin...

  Just a diary post tonight, as we've had family down from Lancashire for supper with the boys, pooch and us; and I had my second migraine in two days earlier on: I definitely think I've picked up some virus which is messin' wit' me nervous system and encouraging it into minor anarchy. Still, Jane provided us with victuals of a high order, and all departed recently in good spirits, until the morrow. Pictured: the stove lit, fresh flowers on the rescued pedestal table [blog posts passim], and a living room left to the two of us, ready to watch the last episode of the rather compulsive version of Little Dorrit on UKTV Play...

  Tonight the pollen kicked in big-time - not sure which one this is - it all amounts to the same anyway: sneezing and early-morning hacking being the two main results, along with the usual accompaniments. I don't really mind too much, though, at least it reminds me I'm still alive. Also picked up some minor virus that doesn't seem to want to do much aside from make me feel vaguely uneasy and mess around with my thermostat occasionally. If it hasn't given up the ghost in a couple of days, I'll get checked over just to make sure it's nowt else. Randomly, whilst writing this, I'm listening to 'Machine Gun' by Jimi Hendrix, live at the Fillmore East, 1970; which featured on the album 'Band of Gypsies' that year. The finest and most affecting piece of guitar art I ever heard: noise sculpture, rather than music; it reflected on war, fundamentally and viscerally, through improvised rock guitar: despite the principle structure of the piece being ...

  Well, the book pictured finally turned up today - "HyperTalk 2.0: The Book". I first bought a copy of this back when it came out in 1990, and like a lot of tech text books, it got lost along the way as HyperCard became less and less used until it more or less faded away, except in the annals and stockrooms of the vintage geek fraternity, who, thank God, preserve just about anything and everything that no longer has currency in the tech world. As I've mentioned before [blog posts passim], I inherited an old 9" B&W Mac Classic after JC died five years ago, which has a version of HyperCard installed on its tiny hard drive - tiny in capacity, that is, the thing's a full-size SCSI [Google it] old-skool jobby. I've been pondering creating a Zettelkasten [cf. blog post passim] on the thing, for some time, in HyperCard, as it would seem structurally to render itself suitable to the task. That idea bubbled back to the surface the other week, so I decided to try ...

So Raab's gone, albeit pleading the Shaggy amendment to our non-existent constitution: "...it wasn't me..." . The mark of a sociopath is, of course, a lack of remorse or even awareness of one's impact on others' lives through misstep or misdeed, either voluntary or involuntary. The inability to ask the question "Was I acting that badly?" is an indicator of extreme low self-awareness: a characteristic that seems to be seen as favourable to many on the right - contentious, I grant you, but my sixty-eight years on the planet has given me plenty of data to form such an opinion - and in [big] business. One of the avowed tenets of 'a gentleman' - my definition of such a person differs somewhat! - is that he [invariably he] will man up and fall upon his sword if guilty of moral or legal transgression [if so called out]. Tosh, of course, as the rules by which these types operate are as fluid, elastic and flexible as they so deem: making it up as you ...

  "A person may appear a fool and yet not be one. He may only be guarding his wisdom carefully.": Zengetsu , T'ang dynasty Zen master. In reality, the converse is also excruciatingly, and unfortunately, true: there are many powerful fools wielding faint intellects in their own service, cloaked by the false erudition of a 'classical education'. I leave you with this thought, as our PM wrangles with the issue of his deputy, Dominic Raab's future. I foresee useful fools, protected by fools who really don't see that they are fools. Such a pity we let them get away with it, time after bloody time...

Pictured, my latest take on saag aloo: spud & spinach curry. A complete invention on the fly - jazz cookery (!) - loosely based on the usual sound principles garnered from some great cooks via many books, over the decades, along with experience acquired over a similar time. This one, however, incorporates the roasting of the spuds, European-style. I just like the texture and taste of a roaster, and where better to showcase it than in a pot of spinach and tomato based curry? OK: the spuds were par-boiled with crushed garlic, saffron and salt until just softened; then drained and turned into a hot baking dish with oil, and roasted for the time it took to do the rest: about an hour. Whilst they were basking in the sunshine, I prepared a paste of grated fresh ginger; coriander, turmeric, cumin and chilli powders and water with the mortar and pestle. After flavouring hot oil in a pan with black mustard seeds and asafoetida, I very slowly sautéed off a finely diced brown onion in the oi...

 OK - the current retrospective of Lucie Rie's work at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge has been flagged and reviewed by news organs various from the FT to The New Statesman. Rie's work as a ceramicist is an oeuvre in itself: a unique artist that that one might imagine that the term 'potter' would be doing a disservice to. But I beg to differ: pottery is foundational to the history of our species: the need for functional containers for our foodstuffs and drink is only a very small part of the history of ceramics. The very fact that 'non-functional' decoration of such vessels was routine, parallels the other, early and also, superficially 'non-functional' practices of cave decoration: the "I am here!" statements made by our ancestors: the need and desire to impose our individuality on the world has always been a motivating imperative. Pottery is not simply artisan craft: in the right hands, it is transcendental. I was going to make a more profoun...

  The mists descendeth this post-noon, in a kind of Dartmoor-ish, Sherlockian vibe. But, indoors, in the comparative comfort of the studio, progress is being made on The Bench . I've got the basic structure bolted together and have started laying out roughly how I'm going to use it. This will of course change repeatedly, as is my usual wont; but I have discovered that the weak point, stability-wise, is not the bench itself, which weighs a creditable number of kilos: rather it's the studio structure itself. It really is just a ginormous, glorified garden shed in construction. So I've got some serious bracing to do to stop the gable wall flexing every time I give something welly on the bench. More weight, more coach screws, and more triangulation are required. No problem. Keep you posted...

First major project of the year: the bench. Just laying out the main timbers and realizing the workshop floor has a bit of slope to it, front to back; but not a problem, as it ain't by much. The timber is from an old house on the Menai Strait, which I got whilst gardening there, over twenty years ago: they were in the process of [very expensively] renovating the Victorian place, and the ballroom floor got the chop in favour of some obscenely pricey new hardwood replacement. The existing pitch-pine boards - twenty-one-foot long! - ended up as the living room floor in the house we lived in before our current place, and a couple of the joists ended up in storage. When JC & I built our potting-shed back in 2003, some of that joist timber ended up supporting - still does - the structure's base, and the remainder wound up as my bench therein. However, the shed never became the little workshop I imagined it might, and so the bench remained as a repository for general clutter until...

I almost chucked my old cordless drill in the electrical waste skip at the Council Recycling Depot yesterday, as the original NiCad batteries have long since bitten the dust and are non-standard anyway, so I can't replace them. I bought the drill as part of a set of portable tools from B&Q some twenty years ago, and until the demise of the cells they all did good service for about fifteen years. The batteries and the charger did end up being put in the recycling, but a thought struck me regarding the tools themselves: they've all got decent low voltage DC motors and electronic speed controllers, that still function. Dismantling the drill this afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it has a metal gearbox: something normally associated with much more expensive kit than generic store-branded stuff like this. It's no wonder it's all lasted so well, despite the amount of use it's had over the years. I think this will form the basis of some little pro...

  One of the things I most love about our place is the once car-park-worthy tarmac of the patio having been colonized by nature. When we moved here, there was just this weird, anomalous strand of the black stuff out front of the conservatory/wintergarten thing, which wasn't even level for God's sake. Just several tons of road covering dumped on top of the rubble of demolished out-buildings and slate waste. We chipped away at parts of it and created a couple of rockery islands, even a few years ago constructing a level pergola/eating area - long since gone - but the bulk of the reclamation work has and is being done by nature. What is particularly pleasing is the colonization of the place by mosses. A plant revered by the Japanese and myself in equal measure, it speaks of time and spirituality, outside the influence of our species, the essence of Zen itself.

It looks like Spring might soon be upon us, and although the twelve degrees Celsius on the garden thermometer feels like a falsehood given how chilly it feels, the sunshine and birdsong both seem to be pointing in the right direction. We've missed the worst of the storms of the last few days, although the day before yesterday was a bit biblical, rainfall-wise, to be honest. Even the tulips are trying to open, which is always a good sign; although the stunted, infant Clematis we planted for the side-garden arch a couple of years ago is a tad tardy in coming into flower. That could just mean that this year we might see some blooms on it for more than ten milliseconds: since we planted it, the weather has conspired to strip it clean as soon as the poor thing came into flower. Methinks it's the wrong place for it, but let's see, eh? At least the pots by the front door are well in the vanguard and herald warmer days to come...

  Jane mentioned in passing tonight of some consumer piece on TV about a ruling by the ombudsman, regarding British Gas installed smart meters. It seems that the regulatory body deems that the consumer/customer is not owed, nor should expect, any accurate feedback from their 'smart meter' devices regarding the monitoring of their actual consumption of energy. If this is the case, it calls into question the purpose of the kit in the first place, the motives of the energy retailers in pushing the tech onto its customers, and frankly, the raison d'être of the regulatory system itself. Anyone who knows us is aware of the long and painfully tedious battle that we fought with our previous energy retailer over a non-functioning smart meter, lack of billing and woefully inaccurate estimated readings. We won our case, but it took several years of our time, a 125-page dossier compiled by Jane, copious snotty and deliberately officious letters from me; and to be frank a rather lame ...

  Is Infinity boundless? Well, by definition it is. The frankly inconceivable concept of endlessness is a thing. But is it one thing? Therein lies the rub. And a lot of mathematicians, logicians and philosophers. Two things - as per usual - I've read in the last couple of days: one regarding infinity as considered by mathematicians, logicians and maybe philosophers; and a piece on the resurgence of analog [sic] computing as the way out of the log-jam of large-scale digital modelling and its ridiculous environmental impact. Taking the second first, super-large-scale data modelling involves, obviously, very, very large data sets, that have to reside in their discretely packaged bits and bytes within digital memory chips - lots and lots of them - that require constant power to maintain and access that data. At the highest levels of this kind of enterprise, this involves eye-watering amounts of electricity, with a significant impact on our planet. These mega data sets, are typically...

Tonight's dinner alongside last night's post: the lamb was probably tastier and more tender tonight than it was yesterday. The only freshly-cooked item on tonight's menu was the ponch [family term, probably originating in North-East Wales. Around here in the North-West, it's called stwnsh rwdan]; basically a swede & potato mash with white pepper, butter and cream. Jane's been making this since we first moved in together over forty-five years ago, and it sits alongside all the little linguistic clues as to her Welsh origins that were always present from our first meeting, fifty years ago. BTW, the lamb was slow-braised in wine/water with a whole head of garlic and bay leaves. It was an investment of half a day - and perhaps too much electricity - but rather worth it...

  Quick post tonight: I'm just re-watching the film 'A Good Year' for the umpteenth time. If you've not seen it, check it out; I won't divulge or even précis the plot, but it serves as one of those perfect allegories of lives apparently, wilfully lost and then regained: the realization that real life is out there in front of you, and not masquerading as some abstract concept of 'success' to be attained at some, putative point in the future. The awakening that comes from realizing that you are where you need and want to be, rather than where you think you ought to be. An Easter table shared with family and a friend this afternoon is sufficient to convince me that I am where I want and need to be.

  Interesting to note the comments of Victor Fabusola in an article on Hackernoon, that popped into one of my feeds today. In discussing the impending advent of Web 3.0, he references the negatives of the current - Web 2.0 - incarnation of, well, the web. Two things stand out from this: the first and most obvious is his conflating 'the internet' per se, with the web: simply wrong, but an understandable category error, given his obvious youth [compared to me anyway]. The other is his characterization of the motives behind Web 2.0 as being simply pecuniary and essentially one-sided; with user data being siphoned off and centralized by corporations for commercial exploitation. Yes, those things have been the end result of the implementation of Web 2.0, but its origins and the motives of its innovators, couldn't be further away from this uncomfortable truth. The fact is that Web 1.0 was essentially built for shuffling and sharing documents: a kind of bring-your-own library tha...

Jane pointed out an article in today's i , under the ' Society ' byline, by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown; outlining the increasingly corrosive influence of populism on today's politics and society. She references Turkey and India, as well as, obviously, the US and more locally, the UK. There seems to have been a sudden hinge-ing toward this notion that a political/philosophical free-for-all is somehow the right and democratic way to go, which has only really taken root in the last decade. The misuse and abuse of the internet, social media, and now AI have become the tools and enablers of the frankly un hinged: the useful idiots of the neoliberal libertines espousing capitalist realism and the end of histories. The problem is that this insidious malaise is now completely embedded in the heart of the populous' consciousness at an almost cellular level: when your algorithmically-tuned feeds to your life-support system of a phone are tailored to echo and amplify whatever you - ...

  Revisiting last year's Easter post, a familiar theme of variable weather is noted, then as now. It's Good Friday tomorrow, and we've bought in the victuals for Sunday's festive meal: lamb, potatoes and veg; the traditional Easter fare, and why the heck not? Of course, we'll be one short in our number this year, as Alan is no longer physically with us; however, we'll raise a glass to him and the many other absent friends on the day. Easter is a time for reflection, whether you cleave to Christianity or not, but as Alan always maintained, you can't simply deny the cultural milieu of your upbringing: you are a product of your religious context, like it or not. However, the symbolism of Easter is not just confined to Christianity: it's a good deal more fundamental than that, and pre-dates 'modern' religions by millennia.

  I just want to reflect on the workhouse thing again, as so many questions about class, nationality and status hang in the political air at the moment. But first, I'd like to re-iterate the thoughts and observations of someone interviewed on Radio Four the other day about the newly proposed legislation regarding enforcing the reporting of instances of child abuse, under threat of legal penalty for not so-doing. The interviewee was a qualified and active person working within the childcare system. Their stance was simple, heartfelt and correct in its simplicity. I paraphrase: "We don't need more legislation, as we already operate under a strict code of conduct that is understood and agreed upon by all of us. What we need is more of us. Therein lies the problem." Passing laws is cheap. Acting to actually sort out real-world problems ain't. But, we've continued to re-elect a governing party so hands-off that they might as well not be there: we would be no better...

  So, Brexit has nothing whatsoever to do with the current shit-show that obtains for all the poor sods trying to get over to France - an EU country, let's not forget - via Euro tunnel or ferry this week. No, of course not. To paraphrase the sage Ann Widdecombe, it's all the Frogs' fault: blame it on the old enemy, then. Dear God, when will the Tories face reality and stop believing in their own twisted fictions? Given that joining the Common Market, as it was then, was a Tory idea in the first place, motivated by - guess what? - ease of commerce with a large, local marketplace, and resisted by Labour and the unions at the time. I have to admit that I was amongst the anti-euro throng in the '70s, at the time of the first referendum, simply following my party's line that it was just a right-wing stitch-up; which of course it would have been, if the Tories had actually achieved their intended goal. Fortunately for the rest of us, they hadn't bargained for the re...

How long will it be before some twenty-first-century incarnation of the workhouse will emerge? With housing now pretty much unaffordable to most via ownership, and the rental market exhibiting definite signs of collapse, with the eviction of long-term tenants - aided and abetted by this outrageous government - who are being forced into effective homelessness because 'market forces' have been allowed to distort what were normal transactional arrangements between buyer and seller, renter and rentier, to a point where no-one outside the monied elite will benefit, either side of the transactional equation. We are not talking about a peasant class or lumpen proletariat here, we are talking middle-class people, in otherwise solid occupations, being forced to the margins of society through the abstract machinations of 'the markets'. Heaven forfend we upset that particular deity. When I hear that the PCS (Civil Service union) have engaged the Passport Office in strike action ov...

  I was talking to a couple who are staying at our cottage for a couple of nights, about climbing, which is one of their principal reasons for visiting the area. I went off on one as usual, recounting the tale when Bryan - my climbing partner and erstwhile employer, back in the mid-eighties - went out for a late afternoon's climbing on the Dervish slab of the Vivian Quarry in Llanberis. We decided on a route called Wendy Doll, then given the grade E2 5b, which starts with a low, upward-trending traverse from the centre of the slab, rightwards, on shallow scoops for footholds, towards the right edge of the slab. Anyway, some two-thirds or so up the thing - I was seconding - I moved right, off route, and ended up standing on a ledge in a fifteen-foot-high corner left behind after a pretty large wedge of slate had obviously departed some years before. The only holds available were the thin finger crack at the back of the corner: ordinarily very do-able, except that I had several stitc...

  Just a quick follow-up on yesterday's post about time and memory. Weird, but I randomly picked up a review that I tore out of the FT early in February, of a book by Janet Malcolm, "Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory", which I'm going to add to the library as a matter of course. And now, Jane, having returned from a brief sojourn oop North , decides tonight to watch Bladerunner: a story that is as much about time, perception and memory, as any other narrative you could find. As an inquiry into the nature of personal existence, this dystopian sci-fi drama, based on Philip K Dick's story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", comes closer than most philosophical discourse ever could. Strange how things interconnect, innit?