Observations from a Hill

I'm of an age that I can remember when heaters in cars were an optional extra and not standard fitments. As were radios - cassette-players were only just appearing, and at some considerable expense [again optional, mostly third-party add-ons] - and as for sat-nav, well, let's say that geo-stationary orbital arrays were quite a way off into the future distance back in the sixties. The kind of stuff we take for granted these days, even as relatively recently back then at the height of the post-war boom years, with its 'white heat of technology', would have been as but science fiction to us. But back then, we hadn't committed our entire economy and existence to essentially one strand of technology: electronics and computing were merely adjuncts to the existing engines of commerce and industry; and bureaucracy was run pretty much by pen and typewriter on paper and card. Fast forward to now, and nothing - nothing [essential to our lives in the so-called 'First World...

I suppose everyone has memories of school custard: I do, and thankfully I only faced it for one meal. The experience of that single thing put me off school food to such a degree that I henceforth took sandwiches for lunch, right up until the freedom of the sixth form allowed us to eat outside the school premises: in my case, usually at the cafe at the Bearwood bus station on Hagley Road, which served one of those rather dubious foodstuffs of one's past that one absolutely craves in later life: its absence and temporal distance making the memory sweeter still. In the case of the bus-drivers' shack, it was the burgers. Not your Mackie-D or BK Whopper, still less than the affected "prime burger" with its damnable brioche buns and skyscraper height, or the ridiculousness of Wagyu-burger pricing insanity. No, this was quintessential, burger heaven: tinned pork-burgers cooked to within an inch of their existence: thin, wide and caramelised in all the right places, in a prop...

OK, I promised an update/tasting report on the curry I cooked yesterday [pictured, on completion, this evening]. Normally, I would post the recipe, but on this occasion I'm hesitant to do so; not because this was so good I want to keep it a secret, or conversely that it was an abject failure having zero culinary merit. It is a case of neither or both, sort of. It actually ate very well: the spicing a lot milder than the list of spices comprised in its construction would have suggested, but rounded and I might say interestingly different in flavour. The only reason I won't put this one out there is the garlic. Now, I'm one of the world's great lovers of this particular allium, but I feel I failed to properly cook it out - a whole head, admittedly, of the stuff - which left, even after considerable simmering, a rather pungent, almost raw taste of said bulb. Like I say, I'm not overly fussed, but I think the overall subtlety of the rest of the spicing deserves a little...

  Improv's got a bit out of hand today, on both the workshop and food fronts. Pictured is the latest beta of the bypass cross-cut sled-thing - actually a 90-degree mitre-fence-sled-something-or-other with no angular adjustment. The initial idea of using the track and slider-bar actually works pretty well, but the pressed-steel of the side table is now throwing up some issues which I need to deal with: mainly, the fact that it's actually got a bow in it, which is deforming the track and causing the slider to bind. Bummer. I think I have a fix for that which will involve - guess what? - angle-iron: I should be able to pull the thing flat enough by bolting a piece to the underside of the deformed table. I can see now why cast iron is the material of choice for pukka - read very expensive - machine tool platforms. On the food front, however, I found we had a lone frozen chicken breast left after the freezer cull of the last couple of days, so I thought I'd go a bit Ornette Cole...

  I've finally got round to starting to organise my books and writing space again: it's been a very long time since I've had all my books around me and organised, and this is but a first step. I used to have, many years ago and back in Gerlan, a room which was a tiny haven: my two thousand or so books formed a double-sided entrance corridor, leading into a space with two big armchairs in front of a lovely open fire in a Victorian cast-iron hearth and surround, with between them my chess table. Behind those were my drawing table and easel, upon which I painted the self-portrait lurking in the picture above. I'd like to think I could emulate a space so perfect again, but I'm not too sure it's going to happen any time soon: but who knows? Just getting some of my stuff actually organised and useable is a good step forward, anyway. So, as usual, I'll keep you posted...

Pictured, the view back towards back towards Bangor Pier from the old ferry jetty at The Gazelle, Menai Bridge. The light was just failing as we were heading home after a long lunch there this afternoon. And very nice too, so it was. If you ever find yourself in that neck of the woods, give it a go. And the view towards Eryri is simply one of the best vistas anywhere. Hwyl am y tro!   

Like any commentator, I just reflect what I see, hear and read about the various shenanigans going on around me: yesterday I reflected negatively on the Chancellor's autumn statement, and quite rightly, given what I understood to be the economic and fiscal actualities arising from it. Tonight, I happened upon a YouTube of Politics Joe interviewing Torsten Bell - a not uncommon occurrence - both of whom I have a good deal of time for, as they are both on the side of the angels: actually, not just in my estimation. But as always, my suspicion of economics and economists: the former a pseudo-science and the latter a profession [?] consisting largely of passive - if highly informed - commentators on the vicissitudes of the chaotic behaviour of economies, obtains. Torsten Bell understands as well as the next economist, the statistically likely effects of the various proddings to the blancmange feedback system that is a real-world economy, which is one of the most woefully undamped feedb...

I guess it should be no surprise to me, or anyone of my age and background, that for the most part, governments across the world are frog-marching humanity towards climatic and economic armageddon in double time. Everywhere you look or listen, the voices of honest and sensible dissent are there to lend the lie to the outright dishonesty and blatant duplicitousness of our ruling elites. Take the half-truths of our Autumn Statement this week, for example. In the service of their desperate struggle to cling onto power at all costs, the Tories - as usual characterising the Labour Party as the party of tax, borrow & spend, whilst simultaneously being in thrall to the cabal of 'Union Bosses' that they [the Tories] see as actually being in charge of Labour Party thinking and policy - are tarting around with so-called 'tax cuts' that, in real terms are anything but. But of course, if you read The Daily Telegraph, The Sun or The Daily Mail, you've been presented today wi...

  I decided on reflection to take the executive decision to actually trim the side track to the depth of the table, as I realised I often stand at that corner or to that side of the table for safety's sake on certain types of cut: being impaled by a kicked-back piece of timber travelling at 120mph is not my idea of fun. Also, the slider  has zero horizontal rotational slop, even when a third of it is backed out of the slot, so the extra track achieves not a lot, anyhow. In the middle of the table is the sandwich of melamine-faced particle board, glued up ready for trimming and lightening, which will be the body of the sled. As is usual, I'm upcycling old kitchen furniture and fittings where I can, rather than buying new stuff. It costs me nowt, is better for the environment, and anyway the fun is in working out how to repurpose otherwise junk material into something useful for future use. I'll keep you posted on further progress...

  Pictured, the current state of play with my latest mini-project - bear in mind this one is but one element of a causal chain of mini-projects all heading towards actually getting stuff made; not least of which is the speaker test mule. But first things first, and I've added a length of angle-iron - I do love a bit of angle-iron, especially when it's free, up-cycle-able junk - to the tee-track runner, to take what I intend to be a multi-function, completely adjustable, combination crosscut sled and mitre thing. I'll be using the same principle as the table-saw fence I built a couple of years ago: triangulation.  It means that, yes, there's another length of tee-track hanging off the table, potentially to cause injury to innocent passersby or indeed to your humble narrator himself. Not to fret on that front, as the whole kit and kaboodle will be moved to another location, where the errant lump of alloy will be adjacent to a wall. I'm going to soften up this HSE nigh...

  OK - pictured is my latest - it won't be the last - modification to my table-saw. But first, I must comment on the curry I've just eaten. It was the frozen remainder of one I made and posted about back in May. We've been clearing one of the freezers out, and it turned out to be lurking at the bottom of a pile of stuff, frozen in a bag. The only reason it stood out was because I'd marked it up with the date of freezing, and the appellation "Bostin' Chicken Curry". Looking back through this year's posts, I see that I'd dedicated the recipe to my late, great friend, Johnny Kyte, God rest him, a curry aficionado if ever there was one. I'd like to think he would have approved. However, the table-saw thingy is something I've been chewing over for ages, since I bought the track slider - the thing in the track shown - from Rutlands, earlier in the year. I had no particular idea for its use at the time, other than vague notions of projects it coul...

Just a diary post tonight, as the weather's been foul for most of the day, and I didn't venture forth until at least 13:30 this afternoon, when I decided to do the upgrade to our conservatory-based intermediate woodpile. Experience has shown that, as Autumn descends and the general level of damp goes through the roof, so to speak - often literally in the case of our conservatory - the logs at the bottom of this final staging pile in direct contact with the tiled floor get, well, damp.  I've had some old Ikea shelves lying around the studio for a while, minus the original uprights and bracing, so I pressed a couple of these into service as a ventilated base to hold the small woodpile that stores the wood that will be used next in the rotation between the main cord-store, wood shed and house. Project Pew [blog posts passim] can be seen acting as the main support for the thick end of the pile, and the modified end of one of the shelves on the right acting as a stop for the tai...

Orthodox refers to the prevailing, dominant political, philosophical or religious value-system accepted as the norm within a given context. Heterodox is the inverse of orthodox, referring to views, opinions and values that run counter to the prevailing, dominant value-system accepted as the norm within any given context. A paradox is a statement, viewpoint or logical construct which appears, sometimes superficially, to be internally logically inconsistent; a thing of confusion, a puzzle or an enigma. Our current government, or at least the party running it, is indeed a paradox. Traditionally standing for the views and traditions of 'British' orthodoxy: ethically, fiscally and culturally conservative by nature; not upsetting the equilibrium of middle England's shires, hundreds and parishes; its 'natural' hierarchies and squirearchies; God, King and Country. But the problem with this government, and a large swathe of the Tory Party, is that they are anything but ortho...

  Further to my post last night, I've made some progress on my Welsh line of descendance, today. I have a tree of the Staffordshire, male line going back to the early seventeenth century - a bit sketchy admittedly, but a foundation to build upon, nevertheless - but I've always hit the buffers with my Great-Great-Great-Grandmother's antecedents. She was one Sarah Parry of Ruabon in Denbighshire, as I've mentioned before [blog posts passim]. Until today I knew nothing of her parents: then I stumbled upon the above document: her record of baptism from 1784. It lists her parents as John Parry and Elizabeth Jane Young. I've found my Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandparents on the Welsh line at last. Only another mystery or twenty to tilt at next! Keep you posted...

I travelled up to Junction 10 of the M56 today, to meet and pick up Jane, who has been up in Lancashire, visiting her mother for the last week. It's a convenient pull-off from the motorway, which just happens to house The Stretton Fox, a very decent hostelry serving food and good ale to the weary traveller. Rather than retrace the boring steps back home via the M56/A55, we took a detour to Ruabon in Denbighshire, the origin of my Welsh ancestors [cf. blog posts passim]. We had a look at St. Mary's church, as I hoped to find the grave of a relative of mine who died in infancy - a couple of weeks old - who is reported to be buried there, according to the family tree. There appears now to be no graveyard within the Llan of Eglwys Santes Fair, but rather an associated place of rest just up the road, where all the gravestones are laid around the perimeter walls of half an acre or so of land. Now, Harriet Rudge, was born and died in 1825, the age of around the oldest stones we found ...

  After a rather indifferent spell in the workshop/studio on the question of the palm-router dust-collection issue [still pending], I decided I fancied some chips for lunch, so I headed into Bangor, having decided, finally, to test the output product from the recently refurbished and re-opened Tafarn Y Garth [finally the place has its original name back, from the frankly naff 'Tap & Spile' appellation it's been known by for far too long. Now, I've resisted trying their new business for a good while, as the concept of a pub/fish'n'chip shop kind of grates, to be honest. But I could see that just maybe this might not be a bad idea from a business point of view, given that Bangor Pier is adjacent to the place; and what more natural accompaniment to a stroll down the pier at lunch or tea-time could there be than a poke of fish & chips, whilst taking the sea air? Could be a very shrewd move, given that the nearest proper fish & chip shop is now on the Hig...

  OK, back to the present day: pictured is the test cut I made in preparation for routing the rebate on the speaker baffle mule thing [blog posts passim]. After a few false starts - this cheap router keeps throwing curve balls at me - I eventually managed to cut a rebate to a consistent depth, so I've got a leg-up on machining the actual baffle. One sub-project that ensues from all of this is organising adequate dust collection, so I've pressed into service an old but decent upright vacuum cleaner: all I need to do now is make a suitable manifold to the collect the dust straight from the base of the router. Shouldn't be difficult, but I'll keep you posted...

Further to last night's post, regarding my great-uncle Tom Rudge; it would seem from the records I can find, that he was part of the British Expeditionary Force deployed at the very outset of The First World War, and fought in the First Battle of Mons in August of 1914, followed by action in the First Battle of Ypres at Gheluvelt, in October and November of 1914; where his battalion was all but wiped out. Following reinforcement, in December, they were engaged in the defence of  Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée, where, as far as I can tell, my great-uncle was killed, just a few days after his twenty-first birthday. He was still officially missing in action from the 21st of December 1914, as reported in one of his local newspapers, The Staffordshire Advertiser, on March the 20th, 1915. As I mentioned yesterday, his official death is now recorded as the 22nd of December, which ties in with the rest of the details I've found so far. Apparently he was a bright lad with a guaranteed future in...

It's been a quiet day today, and probably rightly so. I rose later than usual, and after tea and toast for breakfast, turned on the coverage of the Remembrance Day Parade, and just thought about stuff. After the silence, and shopping in the village, I noted that there was a handful of freshly-laid wreaths at the small Bethesda War Memorial; rather fewer now than in years past, as the number of celebrants inevitably dwindles with time. But it goes on. And this afternoon, having watched Spielberg's 'The War Horse' for the first time ever, and having been reminded of the often pointless savagery of the First World War and of the powerlessness of the tiny cogs that enabled the war machine on its blind progress,  I recalled the name and fate of a great-uncle of mine. Born in 1893 in Staffordshire to Walter & Annie Rudge, he's listed on our family tree as simply having been killed in France in 1914. No other details. So I decided to try and find him online, as it seem...

I'd like to be able to report to you some progress on my various little workshop projects, such as the router table and the speaker baffle mule, but I really can't: it's been one of those days when brain and hands don't really engage properly, so I've given up 'til tomorrow. Sometimes one needs to sleep on stuff and back-burner the mental processing for a bit. At least the rumour mill surrounding our awful Home Secretary seems positive for the more right-minded of us out here: I think the revolving door of Tory ministers is about to hit overdrive. Sunak has to engage the damage-limitation gear: however, his and his party's survival are by no means guaranteed should he do so. If he doesn't, then they're collectively buggered anyway, but if he does, as I'm sure he will, he's just entering yet another reputation [ha!] damaging U-turn in policy and allegiances. Not a great look, given the last thirteen years of Tory-led debacle. It's a shamb...

  The rather grubby-looking bits of toot in front of my router thing are the alluded-to rescued bits of cordless drill: to the left, the motor, and to the right, the gearbox. With a bit of luck and some more jazz, I might end up with a workable solution. Who knows. I'm knackered and watching an old B&W movie - The Small Back Room - so I'll leave it at that for tonight. Keep you posted...

  Progress on the router thing today. I received the machine screws I ordered last night, and proceeded to drill and tap the existing holes out for them. It rapidly became obvious that there was nowhere enough meat in the thin casting of the router baseplate to take a decent thread, never mind the fact that I only have twist drills in half-mil increments, and so can't get close enough to the correct size for the tap anyway. [note to self: buy some more drill bits...] However, I decided to drill the holes out to clearance, and use nuts to secure the pins. Then I hit on the second issue: the baseplate has all manner of excrescences for various historical structural reasons, preventing me from doing so. Three of the securing nuts would have no flat surface to bear onto and would thus be about as useful as [insert proverbial of choice - 'coc oen' will do: look it up]; so I had to make and install a couple of keeper plates to get around it [lower two images]. There's a coupl...

  OK, so the OMR [see last night's post] is now affixed to the new router plate: I modified the base of the OMR rather than the plate: drilling and tapping some M4 threads to accept the screws that used to hold the router to the old lash-up table on which it's shown resting. A couple of things. I've ordered some M6 hex-headed machine screws, with which I'm going to replace the rather sketchy little M4s, which should supply a bit more security to the construction: the heads of the things will fit the countersinks on the plate better, too. The next issue will be the lift mechanism itself, which will entail modifying the plate. As I said yesterday, I've got a few vague ideas of how to implement it, but now having the router and plate as a unit, I can now better visualise things as I go forward. Keep you posted...

  Despite my previous pronouncements on going the whole hog on making my router lift from scratch, I thought, sod it[!] and bought the above: a cheap, but reasonably-well-engineered router plate, which came complete with a fence and mitre sled, and all for the princely sum of £33.99, delivered today, after I'd decided to capitulate on the issue last evening. I just figured that, as I'm in a chicken & egg situation with the routing necessary for the speaker baffle mule thing, I might as well get a leg-up on this one: I ain't getting any younger and life's too short to peel a grape. I still have to re-engineer the thing to fit the old man's router [henceforth, OMR] however, and I've yet to come up with a design for the lift mechanism itself, but I've got some ideas and the bits to achieve them; and I've already started modifying the OMR's baseplate accordingly. Like all good projects, you make some choices, they turn out to be stupid, you make some...

  I wrote in 2020 about my recollections of evenings at Fairview in Fromes Hill as a child, with my grandmother reading fairy tales to us - me, my sister, and Yvonne, our friend from next door at The Manse - in the low glimmer of paraffin lamps and the flickering of the firelight. A lot of the tales were from the Brothers Grimm, read from the exact book pictured, still in my possession, and which was rescued from dereliction by my sister, Karen, when she worked in the bindery at Birmingham University in the 1970s: rebinding it and ensuring that it will last for another hundred years hence; for that is exactly how old this book is. I treasure it as a fond memory of childhood, and I will ensure that it's passed on accordingly when I shuffle off this mortal coil [that's yer actual Shakespeare, y'know]. However, our favourite story above all, and which always terrified us, was The Tinder Box, by Hans Christian Andersen, read from a similar volume to the above, the whereabouts o...

OK, let's get our appalling Home Secretary out of the way before I'm legally deemed unpatriotic and seditious by this bunch of idiots calling themselves a government, and incarcerated in The Tower; or whatever it is we do with those so deemed, these days. Suella Braverman has outdone herself over the last week or so: branding legitimate peaceful protests about the Israel-Gaza situation as 'hate marches', and branding the homeless as exercising 'lifestyle choices' by living on the streets. As I've said before, I totally fail to understand how she can claim to be an adherent of the Buddhist faith and hold such views. It is beyond me, and to be frank, it is an insult to Buddhists of every school that she should continue to identify as such: her world-view runs contrary to every Buddhist precept I can think of. Shameful. Buddhism, more than any other religion, is, or at least should be, fundamentally egalitarian, non-materialistic, and compassionate. She evince...

  Lunch in Beaumaris today, which can only mean the snug at The Bull, one of the oldest pubs you'll find anywhere , dating back to the 1400s. As usual, of course, the star turn for me is the Bass Ale [featured]: an amber glory that surpasseth all understanding and which is transcendently magnificent in flavour [you can tell I'm a fan]. Once, this beautiful product of the brewers' art was widely available around here in a large number of free-houses and hotels, and at least half a dozen pubs in Bangor alone once served it; and where, now, there are fewer than a dozen working pubs left there at all, and definitely no Bass to be seen between them. There were once over a hundred pubs in Bangor.  As far as I can tell from my bibulous peregrinations, The Bull is sadly the last venue in the area to sell, and most importantly keep well, the beer with the three-pointed trademark - the oldest trademark in the UK, if not the world - which is a sad reflection of the parlous state of th...

Pictured, the locking-mitre router bit I bought online and received yesterday or the day before, sat on top of my memo to self that the plan to use the scissor-jack - at least alone - as my router lift, is not the best idea ever, as using the above bit requires a good measure of very fine adjustment to make it useful. And as this particular bit will be instrumental in making the boxes for the speaker-testing project that spawned this convoluted thread of construction - I feel like the unfortunate centipede in the Sufi proverb, considering how to run when asked the question 'which leg comes before which?' - I need to rethink my plan: it's a good job I didn't get far with drawing the thing out. I feel that a bit of jazz jiggery-pokery is needed first off the bat, and as hinted in the memo, a somewhat finer method of height adjustment needs to be looked into. I've got a couple of ideas at the minute, so I'll be tinkering around with bits of threaded bar and angle i...

Today, in the service of my router lift project, I decided to dust off my dad's old drawing board, which I've had, alongside his lathe and sundry other tools, since he died. Pictured is the thing atop my table-saw/general-purpose support surface, along with the tee-square gifted me by Mrs. Abrahams when I was about to start Technical School at the age of eleven [mentioned blog post passim]. It's astounding that the colour of the old man's board exactly matches the venerable old ruling instrument - which by now must be a good seventy years or more old - as neither of them have ever been used together until today. More, and I might say welcome, synchronicity. One might ask, why use drawing instruments from a bygone era to map out an intended physical build, when CAD tools are readily available for the various computing/mobile devices in my possession? I guess two things. I have never really got on with CAD software: none of the stuff ever seemed particularly intuitive to ...

It's amazing how time flies. Back in 2015, when nobody expected much else but more of the same and a global pandemic was still something that happened before our grandparents were out of school, or at least were still youths [talking from the perspective of a boomer, here], Jane and I were on holiday in Corfu and watching the news from our little apartment in Boukaris on our phones. I ventured a prediction at the time that we would soon see Donald Trump in the White House and Boris Johnson in Number Ten, and that all hell would break loose as a result. Ask anyone who knows me: it's true. I only wish I had been wrong. The Covid enquiry has shown unequivocally that Boris Johnson had and has scant concern for anyone but himself, but still makes millions off the back of his extraordinarily sleazy and corrupt conduct as a 'face' and a 'character'. The arch gas-lighter prevails. As for Trump, the frankly bonkers US political system will apparently allow the deranged t...