Observations from a Hill

Our guests from San Francisco have moved on to the next destination on their month long tour itinerary, staying tonight with another old friend of ours in Cheshire. I was saying to Anne earlier on about choosing the Desert Island Discs selection thing [blog post passim] and that I'd compiled a loose list of cameras I own or have owned in the same vein. Which are the best eight cameras I've owned/used over the years, and which would be the one to save, push come to shove, from the waves at the end of the programme? It's an interesting exercise, and I'll admit somewhat easier to solve than the music one, which, as I've said before, is an impossible task which can only elicit a snapshot of one's current take on one's history, certain landmark memories aside: one disc I would always include would be The Kinks' "You Really Got Me", as that was a firm game-changer in my musical awakening, back in the mid-sixties. From there, though, it gets a bit fra...

  The four of us; Jane and myself, Anne and Colin, drove over to visit James and Leo on Anglesey this morning and stopped for a couple of hours chat, tea & snacks. On our return journey we decided to get an early meal somewhere around Menai Bridge, and quickly realised that most places were already booked solid and rammed with just-finished-work-for-Christmas revellers; which we really should have guessed would be the case. However, we noticed that the Jade Village Chinese Restaurant had just opened its doors, and so we opted for that. A wise decision, as we had a choice of all the tables in the house to choose from. We went for a sharing approach, with suggesting a main, then added rice and spring rolls. And very nice it turned out to be, too, washed down with excellent locally brew ale. Our timing was impeccable, and we left as an enormous party of pre-holiday office party types rolled in and commenced quaffing at the bar. So, back home to write this and open a bottle of wine...

Just a food post tonight as we've visitors over from San Francisco this evening: they're doing a kind of mini grand tour, and have decided to call in and stay the night on their way. So I decided to cook my twist on a traditional roast dinner, with slow-roast Welsh lamb, Greek-style lemon & garlic potatoes - I really can't get enough of them since I discovered the recipe: they're superb - some fancy carrots roasted in the air-fryer, purple-sprouting broccoli and a sauce of white wine & chicken stock reduction and whatever I can deglaze out of the lamb tray after it's done. I'll get a picture before we demolish it, so's you can see. That's all for now as I've lots to do and I'm flying solo this afternoon as Jane's in work. Addendum: a lovely evening with the four of us around the table, despite my over-cooking the potatoes and the broccoli a tad: but never mind, it all tasted OK, and it was the company that mattered most...

Just been talking about the Christmas playlists we've all agreed to concoct for the day's festivities and lunch: the fairly obvious one of it's gotta be Christmas songs or anything starting with the initial 'C'. Which made us think of our own personal Desert Island Discs eight selections and ultimately - literally - our choices of music for our funerals [a bit morbid, that one]. On the choice of music for one's own send-off - which frankly seems pointless as one won't actually be around to hear any of it - I might opt for one of three things. Barber's "Adagio for Strings, Op. 11", to at least elicit genuine tears over something [the music] at the marking of my exit; anything by Einstürzende Neubauten to frankly scare the bejeezus out of any who would bother to to turn up to the event; or John Cage's 4'33": the diametrically opposed negation of the latter. As to one's Desert Island Discs distillation, where to start? And when yo...

What is the point of an education? A simple question, but is there a straightforward answer to it? Alas, the answer is no: there's no simple definition of the worth of an education, and whichever explanatory route one travels is inevitably coloured by context, and to a certain extent by politics. The context here of course is framed by class, which is in itself informed by politics, history and the prevailing power structure that governs us as a society. From my perspective, growing up in a working-class environment, but blessed of a good genetic stock of highly intelligent parents and forebears whose only misfortune was the accidental circumstance of their lack of birthright, education was a means to better understand myself in the wider context of the world; not as some arbitrary tool to self-enhancement on some notional 'career path' to a speculatively 'better' future. Not a bit of it. First off, and most fundamentally, a good general education is required to g...

Went over to Biwmares today for lunch: Bass & chips for me, of course: not in the same receptacle as that would be slightly gross and a less than pleasant experience. Initial pint a tad hazy, but tasted OK anyway: I wish they'd teach their bar staff to waste a couple of pints to ullage at the start of a session to clear the lines, let alone get them all to adhere to the legal requirement of a full imperial pint serving of ale to the rim of the glass [not all are guilty in this respect, to be fair]. Whatever, bitch over; the chips were particularly good, even though cutlery failed to materialise; sometimes, modern hospitality seems to follow the model laid down by Fawlty Towers all those years ago: the 1970s with a twenty-first century veneer - and prices - applied. Frankly not at all convincing on the customer service front, but wryly endearing in a masochistic, self-denying kind of way. This seems to be pretty much the default for most standard food-pub/hotel-based establishm...

  Tonight's meat, resting: pork belly, bone in, but alas no skin. What is it about supermarkets that they feel it necessary to remove one of the best parts of any bit of pig? The bloody skin! We're fast running out of proper butchers where you can actually buy this stuff in its entirety: there's not one left in Bangor - although the Halal supermarket at the bottom of town does great lamb and chicken. When we first moved here in 1980, we had an actual pork butcher on the High Street, alongside a proper grocer that sold game, let alone the estimable and now gone general butchers, Johnny Six. Things have changed, but not for the good, I fear. Along with closure of most of the pubs in Bangor, we have a much depleted source of local, basic, food and drink supply. I remember that we had three bakeries along Bethesda High Street, as well as at least two butchers; never mind the plethora of boozers to choose from. It's just plain sad, I'm afraid...

Just a brief observation on the ongoing Jaguar rebrand. They're going all-electric: positive. They're going for a slice of the premium executive market, lower priced and less desirable than the likes of Ferrari and Bentley/Rolls Royce, but still up around the hundred grand sterling level: advisable? I'm not so sure. Jaguar's absolute heyday was the 1950s and '60s, exploiting a strong and successful connection with motorsport to sell itself as a brand. They added in an element of luxury and focussed on the sports/grand tourer sector with great success: none more so than when they launched the Jaguar E-Type in 1961. Routinely regarded as the most beautiful car of its type - in my eyes of all time - it remains the only British motor car to have a place in the New York Museum of Modern Art. When it went on sale it was half the price of its direct competitors from the likes of Aston Martin and Ferrari, competing easily in terms of performance and fit and finish. Neither ...

I was thinking, earlier on today, of trying to expand on last evening's meditations; but to be frank, I've left it too late: my capacity for cogent thought now diminished by food, and inevitably, alcohol. Whilst pondering my lack of immediate inspiration - common enough on most days - I was listening to a couple of interviews with Joe Bonamassa. To the uninitiated, Bonamassa is a [relatively: I can only frame it from the perspective of a seventy-year-old] young blues/rock guitarist from upstate New York, who has a great affiliation with the UK, and in particular, the music of the British Invasion of the US of the sixties, where the blues was weirdly exported back to its original home by a bunch of largely middle-class enthusiast musicians from Blighty. What struck me from a personal point of view was the fact that - and this refers back to last night's scribble - all of this musical traffic was a continuous, two-way, learning process: discovery followed by innovation and pr...

The intersection between philosophy, physics and the wider cosmos would appear to lie in mathematics. Not just any old mathematics, though, but the reductive mathematics of Boolean Algebra and the Calculus of G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form. In his book "Analog", Robert Hassan reiterates the notion that mankind '... evolved with technology to become Homo Sapiens . We did not discover it.' Therein lies a singular truth. We are born 'unfinished' in his words, and I don't think there's much arguing that the newborn, left to its own devices, will die unfinished. It is a tabula rasa whose surface can only be filled by experience and with the nurturing of its parents and society. This much is a given. We are not born replete with all the tools we require; not just those needed for survival beyond infancy, but also those that will allow us to flee the nest and become active members of wider society as we mature. This includes the human proclivity for inv...

So, Michael Gove's 'nimby clause' on new build planning [viz. his blocking a 165 home development in Tunbridge Wells - no surprises there] when he was housing secretary, is to be reversed under the new government's revamped National Planning Policy Framework. Too damn' right. We need to build houses in quantity and at speed; we need to make them affordable, and we need to build social housing. Oh, and the stuff we build needs to be energy efficient - preferably energy-passive - housing. Tall order? I don't think so: proven technology, design and materials are already out there in the wild: it is possible to construct modestly-sized structures - up to four bedrooms - for less than £75,000 that would qualify. What's needed today is a coordinated plan of procurement by government along the lines of the postwar Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act of 1944, which over the following few years gave us the 'prefab': relatively cheap housing mostly designed...

I can't bear to write anything about current events today as there is so little cheer to any of it: even the positives are caveated, as in the case of the fall of Assad. What comes next in Syria could be equally horrendous or worse still, given the overthrowing rebel's origins. Even the bleedin' [high] Christian church presents itself as an utterly dysfunctional, self-serving institution [no surprises, I know] at the very time of the year when they as Christians are celebrating the season of goodwill to all men [sic], and the birth of the prophet Jesus [just being even-handed]. I suggest that neither the institution of Christmas nor its capitalistic counterpart and its nihilistic consumption ethic are really what this tiresomely gloomy time of the year should be about. It's a time of change and the turn of the year towards Spring and renewal for another cycle. I am always grateful for the passing of the shortest day and looking forward to what the next year will bring....

I did the Guinea Fowl trial run tonight , and it worked out fine, although there'll be some fine-tuning for the Christmas lunch edition; however, I'd just like to share with you my latest eBay find and purchase: a black Parker Duofold Maxima, pictured here, uncapped and un-posted alongside my burgundy Junior Duofold [blog posts passim]. As you can see, it's a rather chunkier affair than it's roseate cousin and sports one of the largest nibs they ever made: I think it dates from around 1959, but whatever, it's in remarkable condition - although not quite as pristine as the Junior from the same era - and writes beautifully. It's nib is a little finer pointed than the Junior's medium to broad, which is my ideal [it is gorgeous to use], but with a bit of acclimatisation I think I'm going to grow to like the new one very much, such are its qualities and quality of manufacture, like all Parkers of that era. I've charged it with the same ink as the Junior:...

As it's Sunday, any regular visitor to these pages might well expect The Sunday Night Cooking Post . Well, not this week, as Jane for once wasn't working and we instead went out for lunch to the Bull in Biwmares. Opting to order slightly - only slightly, I might add - more than the usual snack to eat, we decided that tonight's roast will instead be cooked tomorrow evening. This will be a kind of trial run of our intended Christmas lunch: Guinea Fowl, with  lots of my signature roasters, air-fried "Sweet Kingdom" carrots [already tested these - they work a treat], and a selection of other bits of vegetable matter, all lubricated with one of my usual meat sauces. However, that brings me to the title of this scribble, "What's the smell of parsley?" which of course is a quote from Dylan Thomas' "Under Milk Wood". The question was posed in Captain Cat's dream to him by one of his drowned shipmates - FIRST DROWNED, in the text - to which ...

Well, it looks like we've missed the worst of the storm up here in our corner of Yr Achub - Caellwyngrydd to be precise - by dint of the prevailing wind direction and the shelter of the mountains on whose foothills we live. It was still pretty fierce but it's had nowhere near the impact here as elsewhere. I'll have to do a final inventory of whatever damage has been wrought tomorrow, when things have quietened down a bit, but thus far the only obvious stuff involves the little potting/wood shed, which is knackered anyway: looks like a roll of roofing felt [tar paper] will be required, which I need for running repairs to the studio workshop roof anyway. A second tarp for that roof looks inevitable this winter, to keep things reasonably dry until I can start putting a proper roof covering on it, but I think my pre-emptive fixings yesterday might have done the trick in spreading some of the shear loads affecting the [rear] leading edge of the currently-employed tarpaulin. As ...

Another day, another storm. I spent two or three hours today battening down the hatches on the studio workshop, that tired old big shed that stands full-square in the teeth of most of the severe weather we get here in autumn and winter. A little patch here, a little patch there; tarpaulins, ropes, bits of corrugated iron: it goes on. I need to find the resources to tackle all this shit head-on and sort the place out once and for all. I don't think crowd-funding is an option here, so it's just a case of trying to sort out some funds: I've got a lot of stock that I can convert into cash, so I think I should get on with selling some of my vast accumulation of 'things', now that eBay is free to vend on. We both received the government ' ALERT!!! ' text earlier on, which sounded like armageddon was about to kick off at any second. I'm not sure whether being warned so fervently at this late hour can make much of a difference to whatever outcome might ensue fro...

Transience, impermanence and imperfection. Nothing stays unchanged. Nothing can last for eternity. Nothing is ever perfect. Once you've got your head around these three simple truths, you've opened your mind to the infinite possibilities that remain, yet to be discovered; and in accepting these simple truths, you can find acceptance of change, peace in loss and celebration in the flaws of life. So far, so Buddhist. So far, so me. That last phrase in itself is human existence distilled to its purest spirit. Between the womb and the grave; so far, so me . Either side of those bounds is unknown to all of us. But outside of the so far, so me , lingers memory; past, present and future: we live on, as do those before us, as will those ahead of us; in the minds and records of the so far, so me , and the so far, so me to come, as indivisible from the past as the sea is from the shore. But like sea and shore, so far, so me and the world beyond one's inner, orphaned ego, there lies...

James and I were talking this lunchtime about the insane power and capabilities of my new iPhone 16 Pro's camera system and the soft/firmware that enables it to function as it does. Technically it's a masterpiece, offering not only a proper optical zoom with a decent range, but a selection of prime focal lengths with which to work. It has 'styling' features in abundance, equivalent to choosing one's film stock, and a very clever real-time 'aperture' control that allows one to adjust the apparent depth of field, from deep, stopped-down territory for maximum detail to pretty shallow, allowing the isolation of a plane of the image for emphasis. James pointed out that are filters now commonly available on numerous platforms and softwares that 'replicate' the differential focus of a wide open lens to give a 'classic' portrait view; but as he pointed out, anyone that has any real experience of 'proper' photography can quickly spot the softw...

I often have cascaded, lucid dreams; usually after my first, deep sleep and when I return to dreamtime in the early hours. Last night I had a pair of dreams that kind of confirmed some suspicions/notions I've held about the dream world we inhabit as we sleep, for some considerable time now. However, the difference last night was that the analysis of the first, key dream and the insights it gave me, was done by me in the second dream, which followed the first after returning to sleep. On finally waking properly in the morning, the form and structure of the first dream kind of made sense in the light of the second, and shed a good deal of light on the many recurring themes and structures of my dreamtime over my entire life, some of which have been very weird, but utterly, magnificently, cinematic in nature, particularly when I was very young. In last night's first dream, I was sea-kayaking [at least the vessel was a sea-kayak, anyway] on some very still, very shallow, waters in s...

  Pictured is a book I thought lost until this afternoon. Purchased in 1988, The Complete Chess Addict is a wonderfully entertaining miscellany of chess lore and trivia, and one of those great dipping books that you keep coming back to for more random facts, figures and anecdotes. It turns out that it had randomly been deposited in a storage box in the spare room with a lot of unrelated [non]bookish] stuff: the last place I would have thought of looking. Anyhow, thumbing through the thing, I came to the last section, entitled The End? which surveys the then state of computer chess play and what it might portend for the future of the game. The roots of computer chess began truly in earnest with a program created for the IBM 704 mainframe back in 1957, which although taking several minutes per move, was capable of playing a full game of chess, unlike previous engines. By 1988, standalone chess engines were being marketed that could give all but the strongest players a good game, wi...

  So, here we are again with another Sunday evening post of food at Fairview. I've been dog-sitting for the boys: my son and his husband, who were off up Ogwen and beyond, filming today. Jane was at work and so it was just me and Lady [Lady Day to me and Jane, privately, as jazz fans], for the day, so to speak. Lady is a lovely Lab/Collie cross, with the temperament - and appetite - of a Labrador, and with the intelligence and speed of a Collie, a great mix, if a little difficult to keep up with at my age. Still, we've got a decent-enough-sized garden for her to charge around like a loon when she needs to stretch her legs, in between bribes of buttered toast to get her back into the house and into her bed whilst I get on with stuff. All good. She's a good dog and great company. As to the nosh pictured, it's one of my staple go-to's these days, as I've written about quite a few [probably too many] times thus far: roasted belly pork strips and Greek-style lemon an...

I wrote a short piece on May 11th 2020 about the Birmingham Workhouse in Winson Green and its infamous Arch of Tears as it was locally known, where my Great-Great Grandfather, Godfrey Rudge died, a pauper, having moved from his birthplace in Rhiwabon [Ruabon] in Denbighshire to the Midlands to find work in the late 19th century. I've latterly found the Workhouse record of his stay there, and interestingly he is listed, alongside all the other non-English inmates, as 'Irish'. Godfrey spoke only Welsh and so I guess they just lumped him in with all the others as a matter of convenience. I bought the book pictured a while back to try and shed some light on the conditions the poor could expect to experience in the various lodgings in which they might find themselves forced to inhabit.  Mary Higgs was writing about her researches - including using incognito voluntary stays in various types of lodgings to garner objective observations - about vagrancy and the effects of The Poor ...

Teaching isn't just about facts. To take a rather hackneyed and frankly strained analogy of building a house; the finished edifice is something approximating to a body of knowledge, the bricks are the 'facts' that are bound together to form that edifice. However, the real knowledge that has to be gained through being taught lies in the understanding of how those bricks are made and the process by which they are bound together to form the whole. Without that background understanding we have no edifice at all. We can't build if we don't know how to make bricks [substitute your construction materials of choice: I prefer bricks; see blog posts passim on this topic], and even if there is a Desert Island Discs Luxury endless supply of magic bricks, if you don't understand mortar, how to make it and how to apply it; you still haven't got knowledge: you merely have facts. Teaching is about showing both the gaps between, and the relationships between, facts. Teaching...

I just want to briefly revisit some ideas I posted about in 2020. At the centre of my admittedly nebulous thoughts on the the matter is the question of the authenticity of the photographic record. As I've mentioned before, I wrote my degree dissertation on this very topic, asserting a counter argument to Roland Barthe's essay, "The Rhetoric of The Image", where he argued for the notion that a photograph has an innate, non-symbolic truth, due to its direct one-to-one analogue relationship to the subject photographed. My thesis was that there were already ample historical examples of 'tampering' with or enhancing images that stretched way back into the history of the practice. He alludes in his essay to the cultural connotations - he was using advertising imagery as his example - afforded by the various elements assembled in the advert he featured: the signification of colour, language, assemblage, etc., arguing that the photographic element within the advert so...

We really have moved solidly into an era of the politics of petulance and impatience. Here in the UK we used to at least give a government the chance of serving the four-year term out [barring wars or some other major factor] before deciding which way to vote the next time. Now it seems that waiting that long is just too much for the playground politicking that now prevails in this fragile archipelago's febrile atmosphere. Being invited to join political petitions these days is as routine as opening one's emails or making the morning tea. Most are unremarkable and for the most part worthy of at least some attention. But being asked to lobby for a general election just four months into the new government is surely political short-termism of the basest kind and which stretches the credibility of this [rapidly becoming populist] democratic service to its very limits. But here we are. There's one out there and it's caught fire. The fact that as I write this, some 2.8 milli...

OK - I was in my usual quandary about what to write about tonight, up until about forty seconds ago, when I put some more chicken - cf. last night's post - into the air-fryer. The thing I want to pass on, for what it's worth, is that I started this faintly odd exercise four-and-a-bit years ago for no reason in particular; but in retrospect might have been as a result of the pandemic's reality kicking in, and my subconscious telling me that I had almost never recorded anything that I had ever thought or done. To that date, I had only succeeded in keeping a diary for a few months, when I first fell in love, aged sixteen. Prior and subsequently to that period I tried, and failed, on numerous occasions to record my life and experience in written form. I guess that part of this failure was due to that singular characteristic of youth; particularly of our generation: invulnerability. We none of us felt at that stage in our lives that anything would ever alter; that we would alway...

  Been over to pick Jane up from the Stretton Fox at Warrington, just off the M56, this afternoon, so a lazy food post today. Pictured, tonight's repast of chicken drumsticks, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic paste, salt, pepper and chilli flakes, air-fried with the lemon shell for around thirty-five minutes. Nice...

Further to last night's post. We are not born with the ability to 'see' as we imagine it from the standpoint of a fully-grown human, and despite the exquisite construction of our two organs of sight, they are optically fairly rudimentary, consisting of a sole - albeit focusable - [optically] simple lens, an attendant variable aperture to compensate for changes in light level, and a hemispherical 'focussing screen' onto which the light entering the eye is focussed. A sort of highly developed biological camera obscura , if you will: a [spherical in this case] box or room with a small aperture equipped with a lens with which to realise an image of the outside world on the screen behind. So far, so simple, even given the millions of years of evolution that led to the development of our eyes from the prototype cluster of light-sensitive cells in a shallow depression in the skins of creatures long since extinct. But the fact of the matter is that we have to learn to see. ...

I was pondering earlier - before Wales' inevitable defeat to South Africa this afternoon [Rugby Union Autumn Internationals] - on the nature of visual perception, at least in relation to photography, as it largely is today, on the smartphone: in this case the iPhone 16 Pro. The compound camera on the latter is an optical wonder in and of itself, but what the phone's firmware and software do with its input beggars belief to be frank. At the very simplest level, you can actually set the f-stop of a given lens without there being any physical form of f-stop: it's all calculated by the AI engine built into the hardware of the phone. It allows you to isolate foreground objects against their background with differential focus: all at the soft/firm/hardware level. Coupled with an actual and astonishingly good 5x optical zoom, a choice of lens focal lengths, and a heinously good macro setting, and you've got a very strong contender for an actual, proper tool camera here. What ...

So, what to make of the current escalations in the Ukraine war? Will Putin's Russia deploy their much-threatened nuclear arsenal at the 'wider West'? The temperature of the conflict is undoubtedly rising, and the election victory in the US of Donald Trump can do little to allay fears of the destabilisation of NATO: after all Trump is a fanböi of Putin and is currently shaping up to withdraw US support from the alliance. He sees everything through the lens of business [I might add badly as he's more crook than entrepreneur] and wants to ally himself with the money rather than engage with international politics or even his own people. His self-interest is glaringly obvious to those from whose eyes the scales have fallen, or indeed the rest of us who already see clearly what he represents. But what of the threat of nuclear war by Russia? In a world dominated by zero-game mentality one would think that this pointless winner-takes-all mindset would inevitably prevail, no mat...