Observations from a Hill

  The reason I had to do yesterday's trip to the Black Country on the bounce was that we were booked in at The Royal Oak in Betws Y Coed today for our monthly lunch with the boys and Irene. The return journey from the wake started about as unpromisingly as it could have. The entire trip home should have taken less than three hours from that far north of Birmingham. All I had to do was traverse out from Gornal Wood onto the Stourton road, via Kingswinford, to pick up my old A5 route and thence home to North Wales. It took an hour to travel the less than five miles to Stourton: Wordsley High Street was simply solid with crawling nose-to-tail traffic, pavement to pavement, the traffic not easing until after the Stewponey junction, and I was past Roy Wood's old place, Stourton Hall. It's been a good while since I drove anywhere in the West Midlands, and whilst it was always a busy place, this was absolutely nightmarish, and a damned good advert for any and all traffic contr...

  Diary post today, as I've spent most of the day on the road, going to my cousin Andrew's funeral, and getting back up here on the bounce as we've lunch with the boys and Irene tomorrow. Andrew was just about four years younger than me, my dad's sister Margaret's child. I drove over this morning to Gornal Wood Crematorium, and despite the weird route through Telford that Apple Maps satnav took me, arrived with a good fifteen minutes to spare, my sister and husband arriving by cab a couple of minutes later. We sat and waited, and waited, and waited; and no-one came. So we checked the order of services by the door of the chapel, and discovered we were an hour late. So we repaired to the local pub chosen for the wake and discovered that people were still there. Me and little sis spent just shy of an hour catching up with the few remaining cousins there that we knew: my uncle Sam's kids(!), and of course Andrew's dad, my uncle Brian, briefly, as we left. A long...

  Scored a copy of Chambers Biographical Dictionary today, for two quid. Two quid!. On this edition's publication twenty years ago, it retailed at thirty-five pounds. I've scored similar coups recently, with a nice single volume Oxford Dictionary of English at the same price [original RP nearly forty quid], and a full-fat Roget's for again, two quid. You might ask why I would want all this old-school shelf-real-estate-hogging paperage when we've got the InterWorld™at our fingertips, on desktops, laptops, surfaces and phones: but my contention has always been that without electrons, all of that data and the information derived from it, disappears; as evanescent as morning mist. As long as you keep your books dry and away from flame, they will continue to serve you and your descendants well. The old saying about not putting all one's eggs in one basket springs to mind. There will come a day, when lost [for whatever reason] knowledge will only be recoverable from such ...

  What is the difference between data and information? The difference between price and value? The difference between perception and knowledge? Context and framing is what, and the Masters Of The Universe™ just don't get it. Just don't get it . The very definition of psychopathy itself. Action without empathy or understanding of consequence. A fundamental inability to place oneself within the world of society alongside others, mindful of their and others' own humanity. Data are the atomic, numery fragments that, given context, allow us the information with which to frame the world. Price is the arbitrary, token monetary value ascribed to a good or service, which, divorced from societal context gives no indication of the true value of those goods or services. Perception is the perfunctory operation of sense, purely animal and instinctive; knowledge is perception mediated by memory and experience, filtered by intellect. Yanis Varoufakis' latest polemic: " Technofeuda...

    OK, a couple of things - well, maybe three - tonight: I've been moving my Dad's frankly insane collection of Model Engineer magazines down to the studio for collation and storage over the past couple of days. I should sell them, but I still can't bear to let this little bit of my history go yet, and there's so much good information stored within the thousands of pages, spanning several decades, from the Forties through to the Eighties. The issue pictured on the left is older than me, by over a year. Its cover photograph of youths being taught metalworking evokes fond memories of my early schooling in such skills over a decade later; the sole difference being that my school's workshops were much more modern than the one in the picture. However, the activities shown were just the same at my school, back in 1960s Birmingham as in the featured 1953 school in Barking: we were fortunate enough, however, to have a pukka forge to learn hot metal bashing from Mr. Betts, ...

  How much more of this weak, self-interested and frankly pathetic government can we put up with? Considering one of their favourite jibes at the opposition is that 'they don't have a plan...™', it's glaringly self-evident that they don't have a shred of a clue, let alone any 'plan'. The Tories' default position is, and always has been reactive. Wait for shit to happen, flap about a bit, legislate some unnecessary crap, and recant and reverse at the next wind of change: often within days, recently. Stuff they touted as 'policy', which shows itself to be, surprise, surprise, unworkable nonsense, becomes, magically, the fault of everyone else but them, and they U-turn as fast as a YouTuber demonstrating J-turns in a modded hot hatch. We're now expected to stomach reversals on renter's rights, school meals, inheritance tax and the most politically charged bit of the already woeful HS2 debacle, which would leave the two biggest UK cities conn...

  Further to last night's post, as promised: the taste test. These are indeed mildly lethal, although I can name several people to whom it would seem a tad mild; but these individuals are physiologically opposed to any normal human being of one's acquaintance. I personally also don't think it in quite the same heat-league as the original, so maybe I rank among those so disordered. But as I've made a pukka sauce-base and held back on the spice pastes this time around, it at least has some subtlety beneath the fire. I seem also to remember the original was a very thick reduction; almost dry: clinging to the fungi, rather than a wet sauce such as this. So, tonight, whilst cooking the Sunday Roast, I'm also reducing the mushroom sauce as far as I dare - I want to freeze it for a rainy day - which will probably increase the thing to at least Defcon Two, if not the whole nine yards. Keep you posted...

I decided to finally try and recreate my accidental culinary masterpiece of some thirty years ago. A last-minute, frankly drunken attempt to use up some mushrooms to add to an afternoon's spit-roast-lamb festivities at our then home in Brynbella, Bethesda, in the early-ish mid-nineties. The exact modus operandi/recipe is lost to memory, but the three principal components were mushrooms - natch - Patak's Vindaloo paste and their estimable Kashmiri Masala paste, which I can't recommend highly enough. I think the original dish(?) was just a quick stir-fry bung of those ingredients, but I really can't remember.  Tonight, I've slow - almost confit-style - cooked an onion as described before [blog posts passim], until golden and sweet: about three-quarters of an hour in a lot of veg oil, over a low heat. I then drained the onions and cooked them for a further five minutes over a medium heat, and added two heaped teaspoons of each paste. I cooked that out for a few minutes...

  Brooding sky, this evening, as darkness falls ever earlier, post-equinox. It always takes me by surprise how quickly things change. Clocks back soon. Just been looking at a little of the history of where we live, although there is much more depth to be dug than I currently have the spade for. Our end of what we now call Rachub [Yr Achub], is actually, as I've no doubt mentioned before, Caellwyngrydd, so named on the original documents to our house. The one piece of our plot's history that I would love to establish is the old Sunday school that stood where my studio now does, and which was in the living memory of someone we knew - now deceased - who attended the place as a young girl: Olwen, who was still striding up and down the [now] High Street [read Caellwyngrydd] at the age of ninety-two. I ran from Rachub Square to our house once, at the age of fifty, and I can still walk it briskly at sixty-nine; but I bow humbly to Olwen, as I fear that - even if I do make it to my nin...

  Pork, Part Two: the leftovers of last night's indifferent roast have now been sliced and marinated in light and dark soy sauces, shaoxing rice wine, chilli flakes and sliced fresh red and green chillis. Above, the start of the stir-fry: vegetable oil, sliced ginger and garlic, fried until browning, the meat and marinade added. Once everything smells good and seems right, a large bag of stir-fry mushrooms, bean sprouts and other veg are added, along with more dark soy sauce, the pan covered for a while to steam the veg. Ready to serve, chopped spring onions are added to the pan, stirred through, and there you go. The pork was again, largely tough and indifferent - I didn't expect otherwise: the fat, however, was good. As always, the stars of a stir-fry are the bloody bean sprouts, mushrooms in this case, and, well, the veg. For a leftovers job, though, the thing wasn't too shabby...

  Pictured, tonight's repast of roast pork belly, roast Maris Piper potatoes, with tenderstem broccoli and green beans, served with one of my usual highly reduced sauces; of shallots, white wine, beef stock, and vegetable water from the spuds and greens. The meat was from M&S, and was meant to be slow roasted, but I rolled it, so I could cook it at the same rate as the roasties - otherwise we'd have been eating around our bedtime - but it was pretty disappointing: meat is definitely best bought from a butcher, as I should (and do) know. Expediency seldom produces good results; merely compromise. On the upside, the spuds were textbook - if a tad under-salted for my taste [not sure if I was at all on form this evening] - and the greens were done to my taste: just on point and not bloody crunchy. I hate the modern over-emphasis on al dente veg: crudités are best served cold as an appetizer with suitable dips, but definitely not with a roast dinner.

  Here you go: for the price of a house, you can be the proud owner of a numberplate. Sorry, of course, it's a BOGOF, silly me: you get to use two of them. Over a quarter of a million quid for two letters and a single digit, times two. And you have to buy the plates yourself, although I guess the extra twenty quid or so wouldn't really trouble anyone actually buying this thing for such stupid money. Selling registration numbers has been around for as long as I can remember: Exchange & Mart, anyone? But really? When the majority of our population are struggling to put food on the table? This is where we are at the moment. This is the apotheosis of free-market idiocy. Honestly, we really do need to recalibrate our value system when this kind of excess is actually viewed as somehow 'normal'...

  Further to last night's post, I'm watching the rather sparsely-attended debate on the Tata deal in the Commons, this afternoon. As usual, the critical question goes unasked. The nature of this deal, taken on 'behalf' of its investors - the UK taxpayers - in camera and presented as a fait accompli done deal without consultation with the principles directly affected by it, i.e. the UK taxpayers, the population of Wales, and the industry's workers and their unions, is spun & presented to all as a 'job preservation' and greening exercise, without any mention of a return on our investment in the future. The question therefore - as yet unspoken - is precisely what shareholding we should expect to hold as a country, as we are stumping up approximately one third of the cost of the project: where's our return on our investment? The nature of any normal business deal is that the stakeholders invested in a venture own that shareholding and rightly expect ...

The Financial Times this weekend, in the very first paragraph of its front page headline article, 'Hunt rules out US-style subsidies', offers in one short sentence the absolute exemplification of where this archipelago's government's head is at. I quote: 'Jeremy Hunt has insisted Britain will not adopt Joe Biden's "subsidy bowl" approach to economic policy, on the day he signed off a £500mn subsidy package for Tata to modernize the UK's steel industry.' There it is. In a bloody nutshell. Ratan N Tata, chairman of Tata's holding company, alone has a personal wealth of $1bn. Oh, and by the way, the deal could result in the loss of as many as 3000 jobs, overall. And yet our public buildings are crumbling through lack of care and more crucially, government investment; our public health service is in ruins; our social care system is crippled, and we have a significant majority of working people of all classes and social backgrounds who simply ca...

  Well, we've arrived back from our Shropshire jaunt, greeted by a parting of the mists as we rounded into Nant Ffrancon and drove down toward Bethesda, and at home by the splendid show of fruit, pictured, on the Firethorn by the arch to the side garden. September has definitely set in! Anyway, I'm knackered after all the car-packing and driving today, so I'm just settling down with a couple of beers to watch Wales vs. Portugal in the Rugby World Cup at five. Catch you later...

  Vis-à-vis last night's curry riffing, it all went to [the non-] plan, and considering I made enough for six, we pretty much monstered it: I was still full from the fry-up at The White Horse at lunchtime, so my portion was sensibly small. However, the general concensus was that it worked out OK. I like improvisation: especially when I don't hit a bum note...

  Pictured, my latest bit of jazz cookery in progress. As we're on the penultimate day of our fortnight here in Shropshire, and need to make some space in the car for all the bits and bobs we've acquired from book and charity shops various, I decided to use up the bulk of the veg left in the larder. For once, I haven't brought my spice-box and knives, so I've just riffed on what was around. On the left of the piccie are some new potatoes, carrots and red onion; on the right, the curry sauce base of stupidly-slowly-cooked brown onion, spice and tomatoes. Basically, I par-boiled the carrot and spud, and then fried them slowly with the red onion and set them aside. The sauce base is two large brown onions, sautéed verrry slowly in loads of vegetable oil, first covered on very low heat, then browned with the lid off. I added a very finely chopped large, mild, red chilli, and cooked that out until the onion mix was good and brown and sweet. I'd previously made a wet masa...

Jane & I went on a bit of a jaunt today - as I hinted we would last night - aiming to visit the site of an old lead mine near here at the splendidly if rather, apparently, anachronistically named Snailbeach. Considering how far away from the sea we are here, I figured it had to be derived from an archaic form such as Old English; and so it transpired on digging into it. The 'beach' bit of the name is a Shropshire dialect form of OE 'baece' or stream-valley, so forming 'Snail Valley'. As to whether the place has or ever had an inordinately large number of resident said gastropods, I can't say, but I'd hazard a guess that 'snail' is also an archaicism of some sort.  We eventually found the place, and very interesting it turned out to be, too: it's having produced the largest quantity of lead per acre in Europe during its lifespan; and with the site now made safe and open to visitors - including occasional guided underground tours - through...

It's been decidedly Autumnal in feel today, with the temperature well less than half what it was three days ago. Fourteen Celsius, sayeth the thermometrical device, and it feels it. However, the fall started falsely, as last year, much earlier, due to heat stress on the trees. So we're faced with still-green trees around, and crisp, dessicated leaves on the ground, and chill, damp air that has replaced the stifling thirty-degree humidity of the last week or so. However, there is, predicted by the meteorologicals, a further heatwave towards the end of the month. Earlier on today, we were treated to the spectacle of a wayward flock of rather large and robust sheep filling the garden here, accompanied by a busy sheepdog and a rather pissed-off looking young farmer. I couldn't bring myself to stand there photographing the poor bugger and his pooch trying to corral the beasts and usher them back out onto the farm track and up to the farmyard, hence my image of the ground they ha...

We went over to Ludlow for the Monday market this morning, and had a general mooch around. A coffee at The Assembly Rooms, and a sausage roll from the bakery across the square sufficed for a light lunch, and we went our separate ways: the boys back to Lower Down to walk the dog, and Jane & me in search of a pint somewhere. Our first thought was The Sun Inn at Leintwardine, but on arrival there, what we should have anticipated proved true: they were closed as it is Monday today. Many places around here take Monday as their rest day, and whilst The Three Tuns [blog posts, passim] in Bishop's Castle would have been open, I'm now boycotting their ale as the current owners couldn't keep a decent pint of real ale if they tried : and they don't . The Three Tuns brewery on site (the oldest licensed brewery in Britain, and now a separate company from the pub) has declined to supply all but one of their otherwise estimable brews to its former public house, due to their insis...

  Pictured, a book I picked up this afternoon at Yarborough House in Bishop's Castle, a bookshop we've been frequenting for the past twenty-eight years or so, and will continue so to do for as long as both we and it are around. I noticed it on the shelf there the other day, and decided, on reflection, that I might not stumble on another copy for a while as it's forty-odd years old now. I first encountered it back in about 1981, when the friend from whom we bought our first house, John, was studying for a degree in Archaeology. He was conducting a detailed survey of Plas Penmynydd on Anglesey, built in 1576, the estate originally the home of Owain Tudur, who married the widow of Henry V, Queen Katherine, and whose grandson eventually became Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. A friend or acquaintance of John's had recently acquired Plas Penmynydd in a fairly parlous state, and was forensically peeling back the layers of centuries of development and decay and John was rec...

Jane & I went into Clun this morning, for a pre-lunch perambulation of this tiny, quiet - well, apart from the procession of classic rally cars, burbling and belching their way through the place for an hour or so: not complaining, as there were some tasty pieces of kit on show: full rally-spec Mk.1 Escort Twin Cam, anyone? - and ancient township, which is so small, that it can be circumnavigated pretty much inside an hour. Lunch was to be a fry-up and a pint at the estimable White Horse [blog posts passim], when it opened at midday. We skirted the castle remains, wandered down past the memorial hall, and stopped for twenty minutes at one of our favourite spots: Trinity Hospital Almshouses and Chapel, pictured. We've long stopped off here for a quiet few minutes in the small but lovely garden, which today, despite the heat, was still looking in decent shape, all things considered. I had a quiet ten minutes in the lovely old chapel in the corner of the quadrangle, which like the...

  Pictured, the darkening skies that portend later thunderstorms, after a sweltering day of humid, high twenties heat, spent lounging, airlessly, in the shade of the copious tree-cover here at Lower Down; reading and snoozing over beers that went from fridge-cold to warm in seconds in the heat, as the leaves dropped steadily from the trees in the false fall of heat-shock. Still, I'm not complaining: it was a very bucolic and pleasant way to spend an afternoon indeed. All fed and watered now, our party complete again, with Leo and Lady the pooch having returned from North Wales for the second week of our Shropshire break. No more tonight: I'm pooped...

  How long, how long; how-bloody-long do we have to put up with the current crop of laissez-faire, lazy and destructive bastards who 'run' this world - this archipelago particularly? Everywhere you look, on every page of any decent newspaper turned, in every news item on any decent news medium, there is failure writ large. Failure of governance, failure of state, failure of business itself. Our current party of government might be Conservative in name, but its founders would not recognize it in its present form. Conserve they do not. Govern they do not. Shoulder responsibility for their actions they do not. They are the very antithesis of their own founding principles, whether you agree with those or not. Rotting, cut-price concrete is an apt metaphor for the way things are generally 'done' these days. Capitalism and its apologists are rapidly eating away at its very foundations, with the pursuit of money both for its own sake, and as a foundational philosophy of its be...

  Not all change is good, not all change is bad. When Big Nev moved on from The Six Bells a decade or so ago, it looked like the end of an era, as the place as it stood was pretty much his and his wife's own creation. A few years on, and while the brewery at the back of the pub is now dormant, The Bells is still a pukka pub, serving locals and tourists alike to good Shropshire ales and basic but good nosh on selected days of the week. Today was a Fish'n'Chip day, so we opted to eat there, earlier this evening, and very good it was too. A pint of very fine pale blonde ale - which seems to be the local favourite - from I think the Ludlow Brewery, sat very well with the meal. It was just nice to get back to the real pub experience, as there are so few left out there in the wild. We have only The Bull Inn left in Bethesda as an example of the species, and to be honest, they're also getting thin on the ground around Shropshire, too, one other notable exception to this being ...

Well, as planned, we drove down to Fromes Hill today, to see what was left of my childhood stomping ground. Whilst the main drag over the hill is now so busy with heavy traffic as to render it pretty unpleasant, I did revisit Fairview, The Manse and the old chapel [blog posts passim] along it, and spoke to the residents of the chapel and The Manse - mainly to explain why I was poking around their properties: they were actually OK with it, thankfully: but I guess grey hair and wrinkles do alleviate stranger-threat, somewhat. However, the event that really made the drive down worthwhile, was when we decided to head down to Halmonds Frome. We'd already visited the graveyard at St. Matthews, and found the stone under which my uncle Mike's ashes had been laid in 2015. He lived just down the lane towards Halmonds Frome, so we parked up at the entrance to the place and I tentatively picked my way down the short track - having assumed the place had long since been sold on - and saw a g...

  Pictured: getting in a field of barley just below Bury Ditches hill fort, this afternoon. I went out for a stroll after we got back from a trip to Church Stretton, where I scored a good book and a couple of maps at the antiques place. However, the best bargain of all was a 14"x12" Wacom graphics tablet from a charity shop for twenty-five quid. When we got back, I downloaded an open-source graphics/painting app and the driver for the tablet, and Bob's your whatsit. I think this fortuitous combo could be a) useful, and b) a good deal of fun. I might even be inspired to knock out some of your actual artwork with it: we'll see. Anyhow, the above pic of harvest kind of sums up this extraordinary day. A coolish but very bright, blue-skied start to the day gradually matured into Mediterranean heat and light by mid-afternoon, with the mercury reading twenty-seven Celsius: a welcome respite from the dismal July and August just passed. It was good to slog it up the hill in th...

  Had a bit of a scramble getting lunch out today: the first two places we tried, in Bishop's Castle, were either rammed or fully booked out and about to be rammed, so we bailed to The White Horse Inn at Clun. As mentioned in previous posts, I have family connections with the place, so it's always good to visit, anyway. Which we do. A lot. The picture above is of The Sun Inn, Clun: more famous perhaps, but less frequented by us, these days. I took this picture earlier in the year on our last visit. Just thought it a decent picture, is all... So, Leo's headed back to Ynys Môn with Lady the Lab, this evening, due to work commitments, and will be back at the weekend. This just leaves the three of us for the next few days, which means we can go off-piste a bit easier without the dog, and explore. Tuesday, we're heading into Herefordshire, to revisit some of my childhood stamping ground around Fromes Hill [blog posts passim] and Bishop's Frome. It will be interesting to ...

  First day of hols today, in our usual place in South Shropshire: the second time this year, but this time for a fortnight instead of the usual week. I hit the ground running - well sort of - early this morning, to pack the car and get away early enough to make lunch at the Three Tuns, Bishop's Castle, before checking in at the cottage this afternoon, so I'm frankly I'm a bit knackered this evening. Tomorrow we'll have a family lunch out somewhere. This week we'll be doing a bit of exploration, both around here and in Herefordshire, into my family's origins. My niece has shared her independently-researched family tree with me, and thankfully, the crucial bits all tally. However, she's managed to flesh out a lot more sideways detail that I will have to include in my version. I think we might be getting somewhere. Keep you posted...

  Grant Shapps is now in charge of Defence, one of the most serious roles in Government, and one whose decision-making is critical in ensuring the country's safety - really? - the guy who, posing as one, fictitious, Michael Green, ran an internet snake-oil scheme whilst a serving MP; the guy that, as Transport Secretary, continued the 'work' of Chris Grayling - who contracted Seaborne Freight to handle post-Brexit shipping for £14m, despite the firm not actually having any actual ships - offering contracts to four ferry companies for a total of £77.6m. Seriously? Ya gotta worry about this shit. Anyway, it's holiday time for me, so I'll draw a line, and get back to the moaning after my break: diary posts for the next fortnight it will be. Pictured is the second shelving unit for the studio, constructed this afternoon. I might add that the second one when together much more rapidly than the first, as I developed a modus operandi to cope with the inherent inadequacies ...