Observations from a Hill

  Just revisited a website that is a joy to an old Mac geek such as me: macintoshrepository.org , which is a treasure-trove of long forgotten software jewels, obviously curated by angels. All of this stuff will, of course, only run on old Macs or under simulation via third-party stuff on newer ones, like this MacBook. There are some things I've just downloaded that I can't believe still exist, but which were absolutely groundbreaking software in their time: I'll return to some of this stuff in due course, when I've had a play. In the meantime, I've started work on a new cross-cut fence for my table-saw (pictured, the work in progress). I've always figured that the standard, enclosed cross-cut sled, is by its nature limited. It not only reduces the amount of blade you can use, it also restricts the width of the material you can cut, to the distance between the rear fence and the front part of the frame. So I've decided to make a fence rather than a sled. My m...

Another walk up to the Neolithic Burial Site at Capel Garmon, today: this time with James and Leo - James took the above panorama [click on Read More and the image itself, to see the whole thang!] on his phone - and thence down to Betws Y Coed for a spot of lunch at The Royal Oak; in my case washed down with a nice pint of draught Guinness. Ahh, a pint of plain is your only man...

Look, Haute Horologie it ain't, but you can't argue the value-point of the above: a Chinese smart-ish watch purchased via Amazon UK, via Düsseldorf, Germany. At £19.99; when it does most of what you want from a fitness tracker (don't laugh) with the added functionality - albeit somewhat truncated - of a smartwatch, what's not to like. Also, the fit and finish of the thing are none too shabby, either: not quite Apple, but as this thing comes in at something like forty-something-times less than the real deal can retail for, it does raise some questions; not least about the profit-margins involved. But the main issue would seem to me to be: why does the West appear to diss modern, mixed communist/capitalist economies so much, whilst relying so heavily on their manufacturing and distribution expertise? The Apple Watch™ has pretty much been made in China, with distribution - and soon more of its manufacture - recently shifting to Vietnam. Surely the irony - and hypocrisy, on...

  OK, can't be arsed with current politics: I can get more sense out of Kafka or Alfred Jarry, to be honest; so food again it is. Pictured, tonight's roast chicken with lemon and garlic, and my ubiquitous roast potatoes. However, I return to last night's promise of a recipe for the curry I cooked yesterday. Apologies for my toes in the picture above, by the way. Right: as far as I can recall - when engaged in jazz cookery, I tend to just go with it as it unfurls - a large, brown onion, finely chopped is slowly browned in oil seasoned with a teaspoon of brown mustard seeds, five halved Kashmiri chillis, six green cardamom pods (bruised), and two cinnamon (Indian Bay) leaves, on a medium heat. While this is doing, the diced chicken breast meat is marinating in lovely 10% fat Greek yoghurt mixed with a teaspoon of turmeric. Once the onions are a good golden brown - this always takes much longer than cookbooks suggest: up to half an hour, and I always add a good pinch of sea s...

  I was going to comment further on the disturbing rise of National Conservatism, a wholly self-contradictory hodgepodge of half-witted 'ideas' emanating from the rather nastier circles of the Right: the un-deodourized armpit of world politics; but I won't tonight, as it would probably upset my digestion of the rather spectacular improvised curry that I cooked yesterday: it was good then, but even better tonight. I'd signally failed to get myself something in to eat yesterday, so I trawled the freezer - as you do - for something to form the centre of a hastily improvised meal. I knew I had some frozen roti, so the staples were taken care of; I also had two jars of Patak's spice pastes that I'd bought to try and recreate my infamous 'Dangerous Mushrooms' (still on my to-do list), some butter ghee, and various whole spices, including dried Kashmiri chillies. Oh, and the remnants of a pot of Waitrose's finest Greek Yoghurt (10% Fat!). I found a couple o...

  I was going to post a picture of my latest jazz improv curry, but despite the fact that it was actually pretty much a triumph of mix and match cuisine, the picture still looked like pretty much any of the pot-shots I've posted before. So, my aprés-munching activity of sitting on the ORC beim wintergarten, strangling the Telecaster as the sun sets, is it for the night. I'm off back out there before the light goes completely. Nos da...

  Home again, and a beautiful evening. I always get very twitchy when away from home, no matter how beautiful the place we visit, be it the Lakes, Lancashire, Norfolk, or the Med. The sight of the mountains of Eryri on the horizon, on returning, always pleases me in an almost visceral way. Hiraeth, an untranslatable Welsh word and philosophical concept, in evidence. And I'm knackered, so that's it fer tonight!

  Just the briefest of posts tonight. We went over to Silverdale lunchtime, for pints and chips , sat outside in glorious sunshine. Thence home for a breather, and on to Carol & Kev’s for Chinese takeaway this evening. The curious image above is a yard full of diggers by the local Tesco, taken yesterday, under an amazing sky…

  The east window at St. Mary’s, Kirkby Lonsdale, this afternoon, after lunch and a couple of beers at The Royal. It’s been eleven years since I was last here; a little more gentrified these days, but pleasant nonetheless. Scored a Gap leather jacket, a nice linen suit and a book about the Enigma story, all for the princely sum of forty-four quid…

  Just curtailed diary posts for a couple of days as I’m on the phone with no broadband. Pictured are Carol & Kev’s spectacular Hostas: a plant we’ve never grown without it becoming slug food within microseconds after they come into full leaf. And these are in the ground and not potted. I don’t we’ll bother trying again, somehow…

The first real hint of summer in the air this afternoon, with some genuine warmth to compliment the sunshine, contrasting with the last few week's chill, northerly air, which served to somewhat take the edge off of the otherwise fine weather. Got some gardening done, ready for the next guests on Friday. The sky looks set fair for the immediate duration, anyway; although we're heading north into Lancashire for three days, so I guess we'll find whatever we'll find there, weather-wise. It'll be diary posts for the next three days, as there's no Wi-Fi where we're headed, so I'll be posting from the iPhone as and when I can get a signal. Keep you posted...

  The current internecine squabbles between the two main Tory factions continue. Team Rishi & Team Boris(!) - as characterized by the Conservative Democratic (there's a laugh, Tories and democracy are mutual strangers) Organization, the cut-price 'Take Back Control, the Tory Party is far too socialist' splinter group, are pitted against each other in what can only be described as a completely bloodless and frankly bathetic fury; desiring a coup d'état, but not wanting to further embarrass themselves with yet another leadership change, along with its concomitant electoral damage. On the perhaps more cerebral (I'm sorry...) side of the Team Boris faction, The National Conservatism - a rather more upmarket grouping - bunch seem blithely uncaring, or simply unaware, of the dark linguistic and historical overtones resonant in the self-penned title of their movement, let alone the content of some of their more odious speeches. Whatever path they choose, they're b...

  Mackerel sky tonight, hopefully heralding some good weather for the weekend: the forecast is for a warm spell, so fingers crossed. My car is now fully serviced, my having ignored it for the last nine months - I've never been easy on cars, and don't dote on them, like some people - so, with a bit of luck and a following wind, it will last until the finance is settled next year, and we can trade it in for another vehicle. Whilst I was waiting on the completion of the work on the car, I spent some time in the large second-hand emporium in town: Relics. I managed to pick up three books of interest: 'Perfidious Man' by Will Self and David Gamble, with some stunning photographs by the latter; 'A Place in the Mind' by R. Gerallt Jones, about growing up in Pen Lleyn; and 'Exit West', a novel by Mohsin Hamid. The latter was simply signed on the flyleaf: ' Lesley '. On flipping through the pages, I found a bookmark, which was a greetings' postcard wh...

  A brief addendum to my post of the 14th: my old friend and mucker Steve - whose wildlife knowledge certainly exceeds my own by a good way - pointed out that the dragonfly that my Belgian guests discovered in our garden was in fact a Broad-bodied Chaser, a female example of which is pictured above. Nice to have a name to the face, so to speak, and it might just prompt me to broaden my knowledge of the invertebrate world a bit...

  The Brexit-fetishising, hard-right of the Tory Mess continue their Gadarene rush toward electoral Armageddon, quacking on about 'Socialist Strategies', whilst at the same time admitting that they got caught with their collective drawers around their ankles over their infantile attempt to pervert the course of the local elections via the idiocy of voter ID. Rees-Mogg should have been expelled immediately from the party for that particular treachery/admission of guilt, but, of course, the wealthy are always treated more leniently, no matter their indiscretions; especially High Tories. Unlike him and his ilk, other, more normal people, on the other hand, are striving against the odds, to improve their own lives, and society in general, but yet still have to live with the consequences of their indiscretions; more often than not, disproportionally sanctioned by comparison with the privileged. The thing is, that common society does exist: there is 'a common good' . This sh...

  Well, I say I have to take great heart that it would appear that even that rag, The Sun, is turning against and deserting the rapidly imploding Tory Party [The Opinion Matrix, today's i ]: gotta be a sign that a change for the better - or at least far-less-worse - is in the offing. If the right of the party keep on going further right and continue to disavow increasingly large swathes of party policy, their chances of re-election will become vanishingly small and may even result in the party splitting into rival factions. This can only be good for the majority of hard-pressed and right-thinking UK citizens, already so near breaking point at the ham-fisted hands of these political no-marks. Here's hoping Braverman, Patel and Rees-Mogg continue to undermine Sunak's premiership and conspire successfully enough to finally break up the (un)natural party of government: the next General Election can't come soon enough, or as my spell-checker has just offered me as an altern...

Tonight's meal, awaiting heat: belly pork strips marinated in soy sauce, salt and olive oil, with half a head of whole garlic cloves, a gravy of reduced chicken stock, shallots and white wine, and Jersey Royals boiled with mint from the garden and sea-salt. Should be a recipe for culinary heaven, n'est pas? Unfortunately not so. Whilst the gravy and the spuds did their thing, the meat was rubbery and lacking in flavour, ethically-produced as it was. The reason? For some unknown and unfathomable reason, M&S, like so many other chains, deem it necessary to sell pork belly without the skin, and crucially, concomitantly, the layer of soft fat that lies beneath. Two things, then: the nicest bit - the skin as crackling - and the layer of fat which permeates the meat itself, offering up incredible flavour and tenderizing the otherwise rather dry and over-chewy sub-layers, are both missing from what is otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, a cut of meat far superior to fillet ste...

  Spring is a wonderful time of the year: not just because it marks the passing of Winter in heralding a nascent Summer, but because it speaks so much of possibility and potential; change and fruition, year-on-year. We have guests here from Ghent in Belgium at the moment, and we were looking around the garden and chatting generally when one noticed the above: fixed, mesmerically still, in the border near the edge of the patio. It was stock-still for over two hours; I imagine still emerging as an adult: birth, or more accurately, rebirth, played out in front of our very eyes. Spring has indeed sprung here at Fairview Heights...

  What's my standout for the day, apart from the glorious Spring weather we're currently being graced with, this weekend? It obviously, certainly, isn't anything the government or its PM have said or done in the last few days: same old, same old, but with the added spice of the Boris faction disappearing behind closed doors and conspiring for Sunak's defenestration, one could be forgiven for revelling in a little schadenfreude. The Tory party has never, ever exhibited this level of disunity in its entire history, and if this implosion hastens the eventual demise of this feckless bunch, all I can say is 'bring it on'... It also certainly isn't the former Governor of The Bank of England, Mervyn King's piece in today's FT, effectively confirming that banking is no more sophisticated than bookmaking and chucking good money after bad horses. Neither was it Tim Harford's byline in the FT's magazine, basically confirming my belief that economics and...

Just a brief reflection on the resilience of life on this earth: the severely-pollarded Silver Birch in our garden (it was getting out of control), has started sprouting new growth. Remarkable stuff, and it will be interesting to see how this looks when it's done...

Just a short meta-post tonight. Before the email notifications thing disappeared from Blogger and I signally failed to replace it with a suitable alternative, I regularly had a few hundred hits a day from across the world. I used to get a lot of traffic from Hong Kong and Singapore, which I no longer get. I did get a couple of monster spikes from Israel a couple of years on the trot, but nothing since. This morning, however, I woke up to see a momentary jump in traffic at around six o'clock BST, emanating from Iran, of all places: ironically just while I was listening to a piece on Radio Four about women activists in that country. Whatever causes these spikes in activity would seem to be artificial in nature, but just why a bot would show any interest in my little diary, I really can't fathom, but I hope it's noble rot, not bot rot...

  We ventured forth on a whim this afternoon to try and find some blue lakes amongst the quarries above Rhosgadfan, that we read about in one of our guidebooks. We arrived at the approximate location of the track off the road at Fron, a small hamlet, high up in the hills, and a place I'm only too familiar with, having worked up there on many occasions, mostly in the teeth of winter gales, rain and snow: if you had told me a few short years ago that I would be returning there voluntarily for pleasure, I would have laughed in your face. We found the first pool - pictured: grey, rather than blue due to the threatening skies - despite the sketchy directions in the book and the fact that we had left our OS map at home, but decided that discovering the three upper lakes so ill-equipped might be a tad tricky, so we left it at that, and decided to return suitably equipped in the not-too-distant, and complete the trip. On getting back home, we struggled to find the upper three pools on the ...

Pictured, my pillar drill now firmly ensconced at the end of my now relocated bench - still incomplete, but I'm working on it - with a possible placement for the larger of my two metalworking vices: still trying to work out the ergonomics on that one, although, to be honest, a ten-foot bench should offer plenty of real estate for stuff. I'm working on the premise that the table-saw/bandsaw/planer combo will occupy the other end of the bench in a kind of 'L' shape, but there's an awful lot of shuffling of stuff - not least the table-tennis table - to be done. Now the weather appears to edging toward the benign for a while, I can at least move stuff outside pro tem, whilst I get myself organized inside. I'll keep you posted on progress, anyway...

  It doesn't look like anything resembling reality is going to settle on us any time soon, particularly as England has done what it always does best when facing unrest: chuck in pageantry by the bucket-load and trade on its history and 'tradition', viz, the coronation of one Charles III. And this against a backdrop of low wages, high inflation, soaring food prices and an increasingly marginalized populace - at least those earning below fifty grand a year - whose voice is lost in the Babel of right wing bullshit that pretends to be news coverage. Meanwhile, the strikes and protests continue, blithely dismissed by the government as the problem itself, to be 'solved' by Draconian legislation curbing our rights to free speech and peaceful protest. Chuck into the mix a government so hopelessly out of touch even with itself and its own party, let alone the task at hand - actually governing - face-planting at the English local elections, and yet trying at every turn to spi...

Reflections on one's mortality start at an early age, usually with the death of older relatives, and possibly, pets. As one enters puberty, all manner of morbid thinking enters the mental fray, albeit, largely, in a completely abstract way. However, these feelings of unease never quite escape one's consciousness, however spiritually balanced one would imagine one to be. This applies to those of a religious bent, and probably, I would suppose, to those of an atheist tendency. Even those of us who tread that middle path of [in my case, Zen] Buddhism get the occasional shiver on contemplation of the void. Where there is a human psyche, there is always doubt, always some shred of anxiety. Always worry, however futile and baseless. I was mulling over such stuff - as I do more frequently these days: approaching my Biblical Three-Score And Ten has lent me a tendency to focus more on morbidity and my demise than I would have thought would be the case, even five years ago, given my glas...

  As promised yesterday, we escaped the Coronation coverage - and the crowds - by seeking out the rather well-preserved remains of the Capel Garmon Burial Grounds, near Betws Y Coed. In typical fashion, we nearly didn't find it, despite our guidebook, OS map and iPhones; but, sticking to the compass bearing, knowing our altitude was there or thereabouts, and following the call of the first cuckoo we've heard this year, we crested a ridge, and there it was in all its glory. The promised rain didn't materialize, it was warm, and we had avoided the hoo-ha playing out in London. We weren't the only escapees from the event, either: a party of people rather younger than us appeared from the other direction just as we arrived at the site: it turns out you can drive to within actual sight of the monument, around five minutes walk away, from the Capel Garmon end. Still, that wouldn't have been an adventure at all, would it? I did take a What3Words location in the centre of t...

  Back in 1981, in a fit of irony, I bought my Dad a commemorative bottle of beer from Cwrw Môn - which I thought I still possessed, but may well have lost: the picture is off the web - to celebrate the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer, which coincided with my Dad's birthday: he, of course, being no manner of monarchist whatsoever. The irony of producing such a thing here in North Wales I think might just have been lost on the producers of the ale, but there you go. I do, however, remember studiously avoiding the televised pomp by sitting for the duration in the summer sunshine outside the front of our then house and reading a book. Fast-forward - maybe not that fast, as it's over forty years since - to tomorrow's bread & circuses event: The Coronation of - you get the picture - Charles, etc., etc. As with his first marriage, I will be steadfastly ignoring the event to the very best of my ability: Jane & I are going to visit a neolithic burial site, ...

  Took a random decision yesterday to learn another programming language, just for the hell of it. At 68, I certainly don't need the skill and even more certainly I'm not looking toward, heaven forfend, to some new career path. It's just that a challenge is a challenge, and new knowledge is always welcome, however evanescent its presence in an ageing cortex such as mine. What happens to all the stuff that gets stuffed into one's grey matter? Who knows. But whatever the fate of the particular energies generated in the course of a lifetime's thought and action, we can be almost certain of their conservation, if the laws of physics are indeed true; and therefore as eternal as the universe, if that indeed be itself truly eternal. If it's not, well, whatever...

One of the saddest litanies, constantly trotted out at PMQs by the Prime Minister, is that Labour left office last time, having bankrupted the country. That was thirteen years ago, and no, Labour didn't leave the country bankrupt. Gordon Brown sold off the Gold Reserve back in the early years of the century - and made a bloody good profit on the trade - probably foreseeing the way the world economy was headed: away from coffers of bounty as the basis of trade and currency, and towards something rather less tangible, but no less useful in trade. Consider the state of the economy in the years since under Tory misrule. This government's idea of 'rescuing' the Health Service, and public services in general, is to employ bloody consultancy firms at massive expense to the public purse, rather than employ direct labour and expertise at sensible and guaranteed salary and pension levels: to whit, Deloitte, et al.'s little gravy train of three-grand-a-day [and the rest] indi...

Yet another diary post tonight, as I'm flagging, energy-wise. I have picked up on some interesting confluences of thought, encompassing nannies, Heidegger, Freud and the Neo-Cons I mentioned earlier, however, and I intend to expand on it all at some point soon. Suffice it to say, the weather appears to be on the up, with a warmer hint to the air and a mackerel sky this evening, that maybe, just maybe, be the herald of Spring proper, with all that that promises. I'll bid you Nos Da! in advance of, well, the night!

Tonight, I am mostly preoccupied with the snooker final, so a diary post it is. We went over to Menai Bridge for a snacky lunch at the Anglesey Arms, followed by a bit of food shopping and back home for the match. There's plenty of interesting stuff, newly published, regarding the Johnson creature and his [thankfully] brief tenure in Number Ten: also the emergence of a loose-ish grouping of right-wing Christian Conservatives who seem intent on creating some manner of weird Little Britain in their own strange image. More later: back to the snooker...