Observations from a Hill

  Is it just me, or are we at a very strange pass in UK politics, right now? We have a Tory government refusing to cut taxes, and a Labour government-in-waiting refusing to raise taxes: what on earth is going on here? On both sides it would seem to be a question of image and a desperate need to appeal to some notion of 'the mainstream' of public opinion, in order to placate as broad a church of voters as possible, whilst not poking the establishment, corporate bear of the markets into hostile action against them. Where this leaves the rest of us remains to be seen: but both tacks could be interpreted as laissez-faire in approach and essentially comparable, and begs the question: what are governments for, if they aren't proactive economically? The situation that currently obtains is substantially that faced by Marx in the 19th Century: a point made succinctly in this week's New Statesman by Harry Lambert: the UK tax system is still heavily skewed to favouring capital ove...

  Well, I've made a start on the reorganization of the black hole that is The Studio. It don't seem much progress for an entire afternoon's work, but it's a logistical nightmare along the lines of the Tower of Hanoi: shuffle this to there, and that over here; hopefully, eventually, ending up with some sense of order to it all. Back to it tomorrow. I have a plan... After downing tools, however, we watched the excellent "The Trick", originally shown on BBC a couple of years ago, dramatizing the case of the 'Climategate' scandal, involving The University of East Anglia in 2009, that aimed to scupper the good works of their Climate Research Unit, and threatened to validate the alt-right populist climate-change-denial movement's arrant bollocks; probably, although not yet proven, unfortunately, orchestrated by governments and big oil & coal interests across the globe. The research was entirely vindicated in the several enquiries that followed, but t...

  Pictured, the current chaos in the main workshop in the studio: stuff just waiting to be stored; the storage inadequate and poorly organized. At the bottom of the picture, the collection of shiny stuff is the makings of two more shelving units awaiting construction. Before they are assembled, however, I need to rearrange the current shelving units, which I'm going to set up, library stacks fashion, end-on to the outside of the metalwork shop, where the stuff currently on the right of the picture is bolted back to the wall. This should give me a much more compact and concentrated storage regime, without reducing the floor real estate in front of my bench too much. This will all involve a lot of shuffling, swearing and moving, but it has to be done, as the place is pretty much largely unusable as is. I'll keep you posted on progress: tomorrow is day one of Project Get-Your-Act-Together...

 Evening! Pictured, the repair I started to make on our old Flymo this afternoon, after I realized that its declining ability to move forward occasionally was due to the front skirt of the thing having split, and leaking air. This thing owes us nowt, to say the least, having been bought some thirty years ago from a bloke in the village, second-hand for around a tenner. I've rectified cut mains cords, bent blades and switch issues over the years, and still it keeps going; and keep it going I will. It's not that we can't afford to replace it, but why on earth consign something to the skip that can easily be fixed? Just doesn't make any sense: this is the bloke, after all, who kept a washing machine going at least ten years past its design life, with nothing more than simple hand tools and abrasive cloth, even skimming a scored motor commutator with said cloth, by hand: adding another five years use for no expense. We waste far too much stuff because people generally don...

  Just a diary post tonight as I'm rather lethargic after Number One Son's thirty-second-birthday lunch at the Catch 22 Brasserie in Valley on Anglesey; having eaten rather too copiously, and far more than is my usual custom. But nevertheless, a fine repast at what is now my favourite eating house in the area. As I said in the mini-review I wrote in March this year, 'A Good Catch' , I indeed tried the Black Sea Bream this time around, for my main. I opted for a squid starter yet again, but this time it was a Korean style, breaded and fried, and with oodles of flavours and a welcome punch of chilli heat that sharpened the palate nicely.  The bream was cooked just behind the point, its cooking finishing on the plate - as it should - with the heat of the crab (? - my memory's hazy in the afterglow :-) cake and the base of an Nduja cream sauce, which slotted into the other flavours of the dish in a way which took me completely by surprise. A last morsel of bream had to ...

  Just an update on the rabbit hole that is genealogy: I've confirmed, by cross-checking, much head-scratching and a good deal of swearing, that, I think, maybe possibly, I might just be getting somewhere. But it ain't easy: in fact it's like swimming upstream in porridge with a headwind. Just when you think you've got a real grip on things, new names crawl out of the woodwork and familiar names seem to quantum leap about the parish at will. But the one thing that is at the centre of it all, is a very small hamlet, that even today is home to only around 350 people. My family comprised a fair tranche of what would probably have been an even smaller number 150 years ago, and while the name Southall is not particularly rare or unusual, not that many show up in the parish at that time, and all are within shouting distance of each other. Add to this the fact that when I stopped in Fromes Hill on my way back from a business trip to London about thirty years ago, and had a jan...

  I've been plummeting down the rabbit hole of the family tree today, having been prompted by ancestry.co.uk that they have some interesting stuff for me. I will follow up their line of enquiry in due course, but it reminded me that I have a lot of catching up to do on the Southall line. Oh, and I remembered that I hadn't solidified the Clun connection through my great-great aunt Lizzie properly yet. That is throwing up some conundrums, mostly centring on the peculiar moral codes of practice prevalent in those days. As I wrote before [blog post(s) passim], my dad's aunt turned out to be his sister, and it looks like a similar thing obtained on the other side of the clan, in this particular case. In the 1861 Census, Elizabeth Southall is listed at my great-great-grandparent's then home on Snails Bank, in the parish of Bishop's Frome, Herefordshire, as their four-year-old daughter, along with her then siblings. By the 1871 census, there's no mention of her in the ...

  I caught the clip of Rishi Sunak getting chippy and defensive about his use of private jet flights again this morning, which highlights just how out of touch he is with either the current political/ecological ethos or indeed 99.995% of his electorate [category error: he was anointed to the post by his party], and how thin is his veneer of understanding of, and concern for, the climate crisis into which we have thrown ourselves head first. "...the most efficient use of my time..." is the most gloriously inane and hubristic phrase that 'high-flyers' like him trot out routinely, to justify insane levels of expenditure in just doing their job. As rich as the bloke is in his outside-politics world of personal wealth and business, he is nevertheless is doing a public service job, paid for out of our pockets, during the day. As I've said before - broken record time - politicians of independent means are disconnected from the job of governance, both financially and more...

  Pictured is a bowl of that leftover lamb curry I made last night. I promised the recipe, so here's the first draft: Ingredients 1 large onion, finely chopped Initial Dry Masala: 1/3 teaspoon asafoetida 1 teaspoon black/brown mustard seeds 2 Indian bay leaves ( Indian bay - ordinary bay is definitely not a substitute, leave it out if you can't get it) Second Dry Masala: 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin 1 teaspoon hot chilli powder Wet Masala: 1 teaspoon coriander seed 1/2 teaspoon cumin seed 4 green cardamoms 1/2 dozen dried Kashmiri chillis (essential - they are quite mildly spiced, but give colour and fragrance like nowt else) 1/2 teaspoon fenugreek seeds Toast all the above dry ingredients in a dry frying pan and grind to a fine powder (be careful not to overdo the toasting, as the spices - particularly the fenugreek - will turn bitter) and place into a mortar ready to grind in the wet ingredients below: a glug of rapeseed oil to loosen the mixture 1 mild green chilli (those...

Pictured: tonight's bit of jazz cookery in progress. I think I might just have gained an insight into the cooking down of a small onion base for a curry sauce, this afternoon. Instead of just carefully frying down the onions in an open pan, as usual, I decided to try covering the onions as they cooked, reasoning that the usual restaurant method is to boil said alliums before sautéing them down to the needed soft, lightly-browned state that makes the base of the curry sauce. I have to say it worked perfectly, both frying and steaming the onions simultaneously until perfectly cooked. The meat for this was leftover roast from Sunday [blog post passim] - a tad fierce in the garlic department, as it was roasted French-style - but good meat, nonetheless, although I think in this context, cooking the lamb from raw would be better. Top right is the driver of the curry, the wet masala, and below, its bit-part cousin, the dry masala. I'll put together a recipe tomorrow from the sketch-no...

  OK - alternate reality time. Simulation theory/fantasy. Religion - name your poison/fantasy. Creationism versus whatever theoretical physical model you care to choose. I got rabbit-holed this evening - there's a phrase for ya! - by a YouTube channel called The Why Files, and a 'piece' entitled: "The evidence we are living in a Simulation is everywhere. All you have to do is look." I'll leave the cut and paste shouty, as that is the usual styling of this kind of stuff: say it loud enough, often enough, and your message will be taken by someone as gospel... As is also usual, all manner of 'facts' are trotted out in support of 'the truth'. Given that the entire video lasts just twenty-two minutes, fifteen seconds, I think the guy sets the bar a tad high to encompass and encapsulate the entirety of human evolution, history and philosophy in a narrative space shorter than an episode of the original series of 'The Bill' [for those too young...

Tonight's repast: roast lamb with the usual garlic, rosemary and anchovy assistance, pictured; ready for carving. To be served with my usual roast Maris Piper potatoes, cooked in olive oil after par-boiling until just soft. Tonight's gravy is a cheat, being M&S's own ready-made stuff: decent gravy it is, and it's had the roasting juices added just to make it our own. A modicum of boiled broccoli as a nod to the vegetable world, and there you go! Bon Appétit and Nos wydd dda, maties!

    There's a lot of cross-linking of ideas before me today: the fate of cash being discussed on Any Questions/Answers on Radio Four, my mate Jeff posting a piece from last weekend's Observer newspaper on why we should take more seriously the frankly parlous state of the UK's economy, and another article in this month's Wired magazine: 'The Defector' by Malcolm Harris. All of this stuff points toward one pretty unassailable truth: the people in whom we vest our trust to manage our world economy are, at best, incompetent, and at worst, self-interested snake-oil salesmen. Capitalism is, and always will be, in crisis, if the economy is left in the charge of capitalists; and the stupid irony is that the capitalists themselves not only don't want to see the damage they do to the world and the rest of humanity in the service of profit, but they also completely fail to see the harm they're doing to capitalism itself: that they are effectively cooking the gold...

  I took delivery of this month's Wired magazine this morning, and although I'm still at the skimming stage - I don't do cover-to-cover, unlike my son, who will consume the Guardian newspaper, in its entirety, front to back - one article has already spiked my interest: 'The Great Divide', by Paul Ford. This piece uses a data-processing metaphor to explain category differences between types of human behaviour and interaction: batch processing versus event-driven processing. Batch processing harks back to the days of punched-card driven computing, where a program would be fed into a computer as a batch of physically punched cards, to deliver the end results of the said computation in a similarly crude 'old-school' manner: a bit like any physical processing activity, such as machining a billet of metal into something useful - on a lathe or milling machine, for instance. Even modern CNC (computer-numerically-controlled) engineering essentially uses batch-process...

  I've just revisited an album I bought on its release in 2010, but haven't listened to for a good while, as our CD collection is about as orderly as the very definition of chaos itself, and when the collection is hundreds, maybe more, strong, finding anything specific is pretty much a matter of luck as anything else: a kind of physical incarnation of iPod - remember those? - shuffle. The album in question is "Praise & Blame" by Tom Jones, and is a work of raw genius, with Jones revisiting his Welsh chapel roots via the blues and gospel: the introspection of age and ageing tempered by the anger and vigour of a soul still railing at the world. A great album: check it out. It's good for the soul, trust me...

As our current guests were checking out this morning, and we had nothing else planned, or indeed that we needed to do, we decided to drive over to Betws-Y-Coed this morning and revisit a place we last looked at some years ago: the old lead mines in the Gwydyr Forest, in particular Hafna, the remains of the ore processing and smelting works of which, are pictured above. Although working a pretty unproductive seam itself, the mine was unique among the half-dozen working mines in the area - out of an original total of twenty-one, the cutting starting in the early 17th Century - in that it had its own smelter on site, which was situated on the lowest level shown, with the toxic flue gases being channelled to the area above the top 'floor' of the plant, right at the top of the hill rising behind the place; the chimney stack still intact, although now rather hemmed in by trees. The best seam of ore, however, was principally mined by the Parc, Cyffty and Llanrwst mines: the poor perf...

    Looking through my conservatory window, I can see some rather industrious bees at work on the lavender growing there. Life goes on - at least for now - and the cycle continues. With all the appalling shit going on out there in the world, generally, I'm having a couple of days decompression time and will return to full rant mode when I feel the time is right. Probably tomorrow. But you never can tell... OK - I'm listening to Satie, thumbing through an Aperture imprint of Eikoe Hosoe's photographic works [blog posts passim], and have my copy of "Pilgrim Bell" - poems by Kaveh Akbar [likewise referenced] - in front of me, and somehow three things coalesce into a single gestalt: Gymnopédies, Barakei #19, 1961 (above), and Pilgrim Bell (3) (below). What it all means, I can't say, but there you go... PILGRIM BELL   I demand. To be forgiven.   I demand. A sturdier soul.   Every person I've ever met. Has been small enough.   To fit. In my eye.

  I wrote on June 27th of our brief visit to Saint Maelrhys church, near Porth Ysgo, and the building's connection with R.S Thomas; poet and priest. Yesterday, Jane bought me a copy of a collection of his late works, which was much welcome. In my continued high-mental-filtering state - see last night's scrawl - I commend a short poem by Thomas, which encapsulates in two, short stanzas, much of human attitude to life and the world of which we are the temporary - and not particularly good - custodians. For a Christian, he wrote good Zen. I pass this on in memory of my cousin, Andrew, who died this morning.   And You? Davies thought life was long; there was a sameness in the song. Pugh thought it all too brief, the fruit ripe before the leaf   turned. How is it with you who have neither the greed of Pugh nor Davies' lack of zest for the red meat on the breast?

In the absence of any real inspiration this evening - I won't go down the road of trying to analyse the twisted psychology of the myriad conspiracy theorists that shout at me from various corners of the inter/social/web-ollox as my brain is in ultra-filter mode tonight - so I offer a nice piccie I took recently at the Caernarfon Air Museum, featuring front and centre that astonishing piece of aviation technology, the Harrier 'jump jet' VTOL strike aircraft. I won't even try to identify its marque or manufacturer, as I forgot to read the information board and my aircraft identification skills end sometime in the early 1960s era: however, my mate and his wife run the museum, so just go and visit the place, and you'll get chapter and verse at the asking; it's a great venue to spend some downtime, or in my case, just - time...

  Being down that way yesterday [last night's post], I was pondering the Trawsfynydd nuclear power station; defunct but not completely decommissioned. A few stats: work started on the plant in 1959, and it started feeding power to the National Grid in 1965, being fully opened in 1968. It ceased production of electricity in 1991, entering total shutdown in 1993: a twenty-six-year working life. The cost of construction at the time was £103,000,000, equivalent to approximately £2.8bn today, or approx £106m per year of its operational existence. According to the government's Strategic Environment Assessment, published September 2014, Trawsfynydd's decommissioning process will be completed to the site's final clearance by 2083, some ninety years after its actual closure. Throughout, it produced electricity at only 31.5% efficiency. This was due to its initial design brief: that being to produce plutonium for atomic weapons; with electricity generation a serendipitous by-p...

  Pictured: Afon Mawddach at Ganllwyd, off the A470 just North of Dolgellau, this lunchtime. We were on our way to Brithdir to meet John and Sandra for what is becoming an annual lunch at The Cross Foxes Inn. This year we were joined by Donald and Shona from Edinburgh, whom we last saw thirty-five years ago and who are staying with John and Sandra at their home just outside Aberystwyth. It was good to meet up, drink and eat for a couple of hours, in the pleasant, if sometimes lively, surroundings of The Foxes: a popular roadhouse that has a long history as a wayfarers' inn on the main North-South road through Wales. With hugs and fair-thee-wells, we took leave of our company and headed back North via Beddgelert, Capel Curig and Nant Ffrancon; to arrive, delivered from the mounting mountain gloom, to a Bethesda and our Rachub home bathed in sunshine: a good end to a good day...

Pictured: lichens on the slates of a field boundary just below Bryn Hall, Llanllechid, yesterday, on our walk. The slate itself probably quarried from the Bryn Hafod-Y-Wern quarry a short distance away, over a hundred and fifty years or more ago. The quarry was leased and worked by the Pennants of Penrhyn until the 1820s; the very same Pennants later to lock out their workforce at Penrhyn quarry in Bethesda, in Y Streic Fawr - The Great Strike - of 1900-1903, an industrial dispute over pay and conditions infamous throughout Britain at the time. The tactics of the quarry owner, the second Baron Penrhyn, were instrumental in dividing the populations of Bethesda and Tregarth [blog posts passim] over strike-breaking by workers from the latter village, already too impoverished to continue their actions against Penrhyn. That bitter community divide persisted well into the 1980s, when we first moved to the area, and many of those who lived through the strike were still alive to remember first...

  Tonight's post was going to be "Yet Another Brick...", as The Crooked House at Himley [blog posts passim] is totally no more, having been razed to the ground, without council permission, forty-eight hours after the fire that gutted the pub took place. However, this - on prima facie evidence alone - obvious case of arson, is now thankfully under investigation as such, by the police and authorities. I would like to add that I would like to punch the miscreant who caused the demise of The Crooked House - although I suspect that there are more than one involved - square in the(ir) vile gob(s). And that from a lifelong pacifist... So, to avoid risking further hypertension over this cultural atrocity, I knuckled down to some project carpentry today, as you do. Pictured is the upcycled kitchen table, donated by a neighbour, which I turned into the long-overdue potting table today, in situ in what is now becoming our third-stage wood store: the old shed. Not a big job, but it...

  Continuing on the theme of my disappearing - inevitable, I know - youth; or at least the landmarks that still fix that period in my mind, I refer you to the potential destruction of one of my favourite haunts, and a beautiful piece of 1930s architecture to boot: Thimblemill Baths in what is today Warley, West Midlands. I used to swim a heck of a lot when I was a youth, as well as cycling daily. I had a round of baths through the week: Saturday was Harborne, where my uncle Godfrey and I would just power through length after length for an hour or hour and-a-half; Sunday was the lovely Rolfe Street baths in Smethwick for a more leisurely pootle about in the warm waters of the small pool - I could do two lengths underwater there, and it was the place I learned to swim - although I did once try the big pool there which was bloody freezing!  On Mondays, when I was still at school, at least, it was back to Harborne; but Thursday evenings were spent at Thimblemill, the biggest pool ...

  Well, that's it for The Crooked House and another brick in the wall that hems me in from my youth. The place has been gutted by fire, after surviving everything that mining subsidence could throw at it hitherto. The landmark pub was always the go-to place to take unsuspecting visitors and show off the particular peculiarities of what must have been the UK's oddest hostelry: from the wonky door and window frames to the long-case clock apparently defying gravity, ticking away happily whilst standing at a considerable angle to the floor and walls. The walk to the bar from where we used to sit was uphill, making the return journey with a couple of pints in each hand a tad treacherous for the uninitiated. Marbles could be made to roll 'uphill' around the top of the bench seating, coming to rest at the highest rather than the lowest point. All in all, a sad day for The Black Country. I just hope some wealthy individual with a soul will come to its rescue, although I won...

  I've been desperately casting around this evening for something to write about, as I'm feeling a tad lazy today and short of ideas, or indeed, motivation. Pleased to find and read a piece in today's Observer, therefore, about building with stone getting a bit of a renaissance; and not before time, I might say. Having lived in stone-built buildings for most of the last forty-odd years, I can only attest to their unique qualities: two or three-foot-thick stone walls, suitably maintained to repel the ingress of too much moisture, and likewise allowed to breathe on the inside of the building; lend a certain stability to the climate of a house. In hot weather, provided you control the ingress of outside air and the solar gain afforded by windows, a steady level of much lower and liveable temperature inside can be maintained: last year this place saw 35 Celsius outside, and yet we were able to maintain a steady 20 inside the house with sound practice and zero tech. Conversely, ...

  Diary post as I'm watching something on the box for once [you'll have to Google the colloquialism if you're too young: I ain't spoon-feeding ya]. Pictured, tonight's repast of leek, potato and smoked bacon soup - courtesy of Jane; served with an olive-oil pan-fried crouton (slice of bread) topped with grilled cheddar, courtesy moi. Apologies for the indifferent food photography, but there you go: I needed to eat it before it got cold...

  We don't yet understand what underpins the fundamental force that glues the Universe together and stops us from frankly not having existed at all: gravity. Yes, folks it's been around since the dawn of the Universe, and we still don't know what it actually is. We have a pretty fair understanding of its effects and influences, though. I'm prompted to mention this by a comment that Joe made in a text early this morning, regarding a piece he'd read from Scientific American about gravity waves and stars. I think the early morning rant centred around what our old nemesis Mike [name withheld] would have characterized as a category error - he was very fond of highlighting those - regarding the difference between gravity waves and gravitational waves and their relationship with gravity itself. Gravity waves are basically fluid-mechanical phenomena, occurring either at the interface between two fluid media or within the body of a fluid itself; where gravity or buoyancy att...

  A Prime Minister's mansion is draped - peacefully and without malicious damage - in black cloth, representing oil, the very lucrative pie that his family's business interests have fingers in. He and his family are currently on holiday in the US, and so missed out on all the fun, at least directly. This is the bloke who offered the 'solutions' to a radio phone-in caller experiencing severe financial stress regarding his ballooning mortgage repayments/fuel bills/overheads generally - despite being gainfully employed in decently-paying work but unable to cope - with the airheaded ideas of mortgage extension (the caller was already on a thirty-five-year repayment as it was) or, far worse still, converting his loan to an interest-only mortgage. This advice from someone with a bank balance of over three-quarters of a billion pounds, who also happens to hold the reins of this country's government. An interest-only mortgage. The least responsible, riskiest form of borro...

  I caught a discussion this morning: "Rethink Work" on BBC Radio Four; a three-parter, apparently, looking at the world of work, post-Covid. Except that, at least today, I didn't really hear any signs of 're-thinking' going on. Three words/phrases; 'career', 'ambition', and 'work-ethic', stuck out for me, as well as a kind of general reluctance by most of the panel to accept the further reduction of the working week as a credible 'thing' for all manner of socio-economic and psychological reasons. Here's the thing: most people don't have or even want a 'career'. Working for a living is mostly an expedient measure to garner sufficient funds to live, and hopefully, lead a decent life outside of work. I grant you that many people still do define themselves by whatever it is that they do during the working week, but that is certainly not how I see or have ever seen myself, to be frank. As to ambition, anyone that knows...

I wrote on March 10th this year about the imminent demise of The Crooked House pub, Himley, in Staffordshire. Well it's happened, and guess what? It's been sold, and will be repurposed for 'alternative' use by its new owners, unlikely to re-open as a pub. The optimist in me says that maybe a sympathetic and creative individual will gently upgrade the pub into a venue of some kind, but still retain its social function. However, I fear that it will become someone's degenerate idea of a 'Grand Designs' refurb, heaven forfend. Working class culture and history gets yet another finger in the eye from the wall-eyed moneyed, methinks. I do hope I'm wrong...