Observations from a Hill

  Well, another portion of last night's Chicken Handi, a couple of chapatti, a puppadum, with the curry garnished with fresh coriander and chaat masala. Went down well, and as I mentioned last night this now leads me back to my Grail quest of the 1970s Brummie Anglo-Indian Madras curry; a late-night staple amongst our crowd, after a few pints in the pub; and the salve that made many a hangover tolerable at lunchtime the day after a session. It all started at - as I think I've mentioned before - The Light of Bengal on Bearwood Road in Smethwick, back in the mid-seventies, when I was a callow youth of twenty or twenty-one, about to embark on a lifetime's work of attempting to recreate that glorious experience in my own kitchen, one day. Well, yesterday was a major move forward toward that goal; another piece in a very subtle and complex jigsaw that I know I will never solve , as there is no [one] solution, and there are as many great Madras curries eaten over the years as res

OK - as promised, Chicken Handi, or chicken in a pot, although this pot is French and oval, but there you go: it's a good pot, and very Hand[i]y, too. I pretty much followed the recipe/receipt/modus operandi on the spice mix packet, just to see if I could learn anything [new] about cooking South-Asian-style food: you're never too old to learn new tricks; something I firmly believe of dogs, too.  Anyhow, the experiment of actually following instructions in cooking anything- as you'll no doubt know is an unusual state of affairs for me - has actually borne some good fruit in this case. A fine sauce with an authentic consistency, and as I'd surmised, with the natural sweetness of the onion base to the fore and balancing the acidity of the tomatoes to boot; this was as close to my Holy Grail of South Asian sauce-making as I've got in forty-odd years of cooking. I will add that the spice-mix that came in the packet with the recipe is tailored to a spice-loving palate, so

  The astute, and more importantly, observant among you will note, quite rightly, that the above picture is - indeed emphatically - not a pot of Chicken Handi. I floated this micro-project a couple of days ago and I have, in fact cooked the thing, but as we'd been over to The Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris] for our usual light lunch, neither of us felt like tucking into a rich curry for supper this evening. So the thing will sit and improve overnight for consumption tomorrow. Pictured is my repast this evening: an open toastie of good ham topped with grilled, melted cheddar, on thick, sliced white bread - which I consider to be the ideal base for such a sandwich, where the meat and cheese are the centrepiece, not the bread. I'll post a pic of the curry and tasting notes tomorrow...

Well, there we are then: another good one down. Herbie Flowers: bassist, tuba-player and creator of some of the most iconic bass-lines ever to grace the airwaves; most memorable for many of my generation being the ineffable backbone to Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', which needs no explanation, elucidation or explication, musical triumph that it was. Flowers played on so many studio sessions and supplied the groove to so many bands in his time, but to me the Wild Side bass-line was the apotheosis of cool, treading the fine line of simultaneously being both firmly in, and subtly slightly out of the pocket of the groove; a genius interplay between the double-tracked string and electric bass parts which Flowers himself penned and which elevated a good Lou Reed tune to the truly great piece of work that was released in 1972, from Reed's album of that year, 'Transformer'; produced by David Bowie, with whom Flowers also collaborated on numerous occasions. As a ses

Pictured, the pressure cooker we picked up from a charity shop some time ago - new and unused, by the look of it - and which has languished, unused since purchase, in various locations about Fairview Heights since. Which is just plain weird, as back in our early days here in the parish of Llanllechid, we were avid users of this splendid cooking aid: we used to own a splendid French device that resembled a pressure vessel from some kind of submarine, crafted from aluminium so thick it could have been a deep-sea submersible in its own right. Wonderful piece of kit, which I suspect is currently buried in the Twilight Zone that is our erstwhile garage, down the hill. Must try and rescue and refurbish it some day. Anyway, we made first use of the more modern version shown the other day, to make a chilli. We'd forgotten how easy these things make doing this kind of nosh: you can even - as we used to back in our food-co-op days of the early eighties - cook dried pulses such as chickpeas a

  After last night's brief reflection on inspiration, or the lack of it, I got the idea for tonight's little scribble from messing around with something in the studio earlier today, involving Meccano. I was just mocking up a mechanism to better visualise whether it would suit my purpose - which it didn't, and I should have known better - with some old Meccano parts that I've got lying around the place. These bits came from the clearance of Aunt Lou's place [blog posts passim] and almost certainly belonged to her late son, David, who died in his forties. Now, this led me to reflect on my Meccano set, which Dad gave to me in around 1959 or 60, when I was around five or six years old. I'd got it into my head over the years that the set I had was a number five, but seeing some images of old catalogues online, I realised that it must have been at the very least a number eight set, as, in the illustration above, from a Meccano magazine of the time. The tower crane fea

'It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the intention of writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't think of anything clever and original - at least, not at this moment.' Not my words, obviously, but those of the great Jerome K. Jerome; he of 'Three Men in a Boat' fame, in his first observational open epistle in a splendid little book entitled 'The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow: A Book For An Idle Holiday', published in 1890. Now the sentiment of blank page syndrome he expresses so eloquently applies to me most afternoons/evenings as I wonder what the beejesus to scribble for the day's post. Sometimes I've already cooked up a notion for a post in advance, or on rare occasions will have written most or all of it the day before - the ideal situation - but for the most part there's much head-scratching to be done before an idea comes to me. I guess the idle fellow in this case would be me, and tonight the idler

Tasting notes from the lamb steak thing... The meat itself looked decidedly unpromising from the outset: no bone and very little fat. But I persisted until the thing was at last cooked, with a modicum of caramelisation in evidence, and rested the bugger for a good twenty minutes, whilst I deglazed the baking dish with some decent dry white wine to make a crude sauce. I sliced the meat, napped it with the juices and put a dollop of the newly-discovered harissa alongside. Three things. The lamb was actually very good; the deglaze - with more white wine - was brilliant; and the harissa was a marvel. The depth of flavour in the lamb and sauce was one thing, but the complexity of the harissa just kept on developing and revealing more and more layers of taste long after my plate was cleared. It starts with a fairly powerful hit of smokey-ness, and develops into a complex of flavours that will take some time to fathom; ending in a glorious, but not overwhelming chilli hit. An extraordinary co

I decided not to go down the couscous route tonight [cf last night's scribble], as it would produce too much food for a solo diner: Jane being away for a few days; so I've opted for a lamb steak, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, oregano and white wine; which I'm going to roast on a high heat and serve as a base to road-test the new harissa I've just bought. Whether or not I include a staple of some kind is moot, as my options are limited due to a depleted larder, and anyway, there's nothing wrong with just eating a simple meal of meat and a condiment, in my book. However, the thing I want to remark on tonight, is pictured above: I was rummaging around some book-boxes - I still have loads so stored, despite having extended my shelving - and came across my copy of 'Portrait of Dylan', Rollie McKenna's excellent photographic memoir of the poet, published in 1982. A friend of Thomas, and an artist whose chosen subjects were often poets, McKenna p

OK, I was going to write about the frankly bonkers revelation in New Scientist this week that at the quantum level it is possible to cool things down by doing absolutely nothing, simply by detecting the absence rather than the presence of a photon. Mind suitably boggled once again. For the curious, the abstract for the paper can be found here . And no, it will not make much sense to the non quantum physicists out there, including me. Interesting, nevertheless. Instead, I report on possibly the most middle-class purchase I've made this year: the above-pictured jar of the spicy Tunisian condiment, Harissa. I've been a fan of the stuff since I first encountered it in France in 1983, in the form of the ubiquitous Le Phare du Cap Bon, which I recall being in just about every small shop and hypermarché at the time. I discovered the above in the ludicrous FT Weekend supplement HTSI [it used to go by its full title 'How to Spend It', but I think a touch of self-aware cringe mig

I decided to pick up a copy of New Scientist from the shop this morning, as the main strap-line was 'Eradicating Dementia', which to one of my advancing years has to be a topic of interest. However the first articles I dipped into threatened to tip me into a state of mental discombobulation anyway, given the nature of their content. First off the bat, a DNA-based computer that has been programmed to solve simple chess and sudoku problems, by Albert Keung and colleagues at North Carolina State University recently. Now, weird as it seems, DNA computing, although still in its infancy, is not a new thing. But what is remarkable about these developments - despite the triviality of their current level of problem-solving: it's still proof-of-concept time, after all - is the sheer, mind-boggling storage data-density of this type of technology [bio-technology?]. 10,000 terabytes of data per cubic centimetre. Ten sodding petabytes. That's approximately 5000 billion pages of print

Well, we're tooling up for our fortnight's sojourn to Shropshire next month - which month starts tomorrow! We haven't actually bothered going abroad since the Covid pandemic hit and went, partly because of the extra hassle that post-pandemic travel entailed, and partly because we've always also holidayed in the UK in tandem with our travels outside of the UK. All we've done is increase the number of domestic stays away from home instead, which these days means a stay or two in Shropshire and likewise in our backyard destination of Pen Lleyn, where Jane is headed to hook up with her sister for a few days next week, whilst I mind the ranch here. Pictured is one of my latest acquisitions, a travel-ready tournament-sized chess set and flexible board, which comes in a fairly compact little case: I hope to tempt number one son into a game or two, as he is joining us with his husband for some of the holiday. Also, we have ordered a new badminton set as the garden at Lower

Here's a thing: idly reading around and watching various YouTubes this afternoon - as you do - I picked up on three things that seem to reflect where we are at the moment in terms of large-scale computing. First off, COBOL: Common Business-Oriented Language; developed in the fifties and released in '59 as the de facto standard platform for handling significantly large amounts of data - principally financial transaction data - for banks, government departments and other large institutions: and it is still widely in use across the world today, with virtually all ATM transactions mediated and processed by it, as I think I've mentioned before; likewise the rapidly dwindling numbers of programmers left in the wild that can understand and modify/repair/extend existing codebases. Secondly, I chanced upon an advert for a software product/service that claims to hide the fact that someone has used AI for content creation - of whatever kind and for whatever purpose, from the intended

Tonight's musical fare has been essentially - no, entirely Gypsy - and centred around the music of the Camargue, and featuring, in particular, one of my all-time heroes: Manitas de Plata. Good stuff, indeed. However, I'd already decided to pen a short note on Komboloi; the ubiquitous 'worry beads' of Greece, favoured by most Greek men, and considered a national pastime: although habit would probably be a better characterisation. Deriving from religious 33-bead prayer beads - allegedly the lifespan in years of Christ - they were secularised to the now standard 23 bead string that has been in common use for generations. I've owned many [sets of?] Komboloi over the last nearly fifty years, and always carry a string in my pocket, and routinely pass the beads one-by-one through my fingers to pass some thinking time, or wrap them around my left hand as I type, as I have now. Don't ask me why, but I've always liked this little ritual, ever since I first discovered

It's funny - no, actually it's not; it's just plain tiresome - how the UK Labour Party, of which I've been a member for most of my life, is always castigated for its supposed failings, either when in office [seldom] or in opposition [generally the default case]. We are mere weeks into a new Labour government, and the carping - from both ends of the political spectrum - has started ramping up through the gears yet again. The economic and social shit-heap that the outgoing Tory [administration(?) - not worthy of the term] government [ditto] left in their wake is of such magnitude that it will take at least two terms of government for the current incumbents to even scratch the surface of it; so don't even try and tell me that they are failing already. They've barely had chance to pick up the baton and run with it. Even the Left have been weighing in on the government's tax and spend proposals, fer Chrissakes, arguing that the party has abandoned the principles

In an era of self-hyped, internet-media assisted, click-bait, like & subscribe influencers, it is tempting to imagine that pre-internet, social media life was devoid of such self-publicists. True, the opportunities for access to the realm of public influence and product promotion for profit were far fewer and far between, but access to it there was, nevertheless. I was thinking earlier about how the game of chess is suddenly big business - particularly online - and how these days there are so many content providers offering commentary, analysis and teaching to a vast, global audience and earning a very tidy income on the back of their endeavours, chwarae teg - fair play - to them: they are at least appropriately highly skilled in their niche and deserve to exploit that skill to their benefit as they see fit. But the likes of YouTubers like Levy Rozman, whose content is wonderful in my book, are not the first generation - by a long chalk - to exploit their talents in like manner. S

The other night, I was listening to the album "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" by the ineffable Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, released in 1970; a year after his masterpiece "Trout Mask Replica". Either album is a challenge to modern mainstream sensibilities, well over fifty years on: in themselves the very definition of 'progressive', and I don't mean that in the sense of 'prog rock', which simply took some standard classical tropes and wrapped them up in a rock-based framework; but rather in the sense of actual, musical progression: the natural ethos of jazz in the twentieth century, when it sought at every turn to overthrow the musical sensibilities of the previous generation. Each sounded fresh at its inception and challenged the orthodoxies that had preceded it. Somehow, however, its progress forward slowed and stopped altogether, just over fifty years ago: after the go-nowhere free jazz experiments, it just seemed to retrench into a post

We went over to The Gazelle for a late lunch/early dinner today at five o'clock, on our monthly 'lunch club' thing that a few of us have been doing for a year or so, and a very pleasant meal and chinwag was had by all present. Our usual table with a view of The Menai Strait was occupied today, as the place was doing good business and was pretty full, so we were landlocked in the cosy little niche by reception. Had we had a view it would have been a fairly grey one today, with dark clouds closing in around Eryri and closing out the mountain panorama that is the normal backdrop to the sea, pier and Garth beyond. The straits were choppy and running fast on the outgoing tide, and the bite in the stiff breeze more redolent of February than August and what should be High Summer. Autumn seems to have started early again this year, but I'm hoping for an Indian Summer in three weeks time when we head off to Shropshire for a fortnight's break before the wind-down to Winter

OK, finally, I can write this post, despite the extraordinarily piss-poor performance of the technology that enables(!) me to write this daily scribble. I have spent the last thirty minutes on the verge of apoplexy - trying not to scream out loud and physically assault this aged but otherwise innocent laptop - because I simply couldn't get a simple photo to down/upload from my phone to the computer. I know I've had this problem before: Apple's iCloud sometimes chucks a curve-ball at me and refuses to synchronise my Photos from the iPhone to the MacBook via you-know-what. In the past I've managed to sort it, but I never bother to note down how I achieve the fix and promptly forget all about it as things normalise for the next few weeks/months. Whenever this happens and I can't be arsed to rediscover the fix, I simply email the picture I want to myself; as I attempted to do some fifteen minutes ago. Or so I thought. The first attempt resulted in the email itself getti

Diary post tonight as I'm disengaged from the outside world this weekend as it's Number One Son's birthday: sod politics for a few hours. Pictured, tonight's repast: the curry I cooked last night and which I was correct in my assumption that it was best had tonight rather than then. The flatbread is a completely jazz affair, my having no suitable flour for chapatti or paratha construction to hand. This is based on a yeast-risen strong white flour with black onion seeds [Kalongi] chucked in. So, on post-prandial assessment, I can only say that the curry worked very well, and the third slab of bread I fried wasn't too bad at all: work needed on that, but I think there's a germ of a recipe in there somewhere, probably involving spring onions or chives or some-such to raise the game a tad. One thing I do have left after this is a large ball of dough in the fridge. I think I might just bake the bugger tomorrow and see what transpires...

Well, I've done it again: cooked myself something - Jane wanted something different, anyway - and then decided it would be better left overnight to eat tomorrow. As it is a chicken and tomato curry - jazz, naturally; no recipe for this one - I'm probably right in letting it steep in its juices overnight, anyway. And so it was a very fine cheese & ham toastie for me.  Earlier today for some random reason, I was pondering on the definition and scope of The Black Country: that amorphous expanse of geopolitical/economic/demography sat plonk in the middle of the UK mainland. Now, I, like my dwindling cohort of peers, was born a Brummie. And one thing is absolutely for certain: we were not born or raised in the Black Country, as Brummagem ay in it, despite the contemporary characterisation that The Black Country extends from somewhere just north of the Watford gap to Stoke-on-Trent; that ay true, my friend. Although, to be fair, I'm misappropriating ay as the contraction of i

I was just listening to a piece of Gypsy Jazz on YouTube: 'Ballade Pour Django' by the Joscho Stephan Trio - which Pinpoint! [obscure reference to a very, very old TV thing] - brought to mind an old 78rpm record that we used to have at home when I was growing up. It was a White Label Spitfire Fund recording from WWII, intended as a fundraiser for the production of Supermarine Spitfires for the war effort. Our copy is lost in time, which I deeply regret, and I only hope it ended up in a good home: I think Dad gave it to a mate of his forty or fifty years ago. The record, as you can see from the image of its label above, is credited to one Pinchin Johnson's Witley Court Music Box; but to any listener at the time or since will know, just by listening to the thing, was in reality performed by no less than Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli incognito, with probably The Andrews Sisters on vocals. BTW, according to Wikipedia, the song is derived from a Ukrainian folk song, as

There was a piece on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour this morning about bellies. Specifically in this particular discussion, women's bellies, and the cognitive disjunct between societal ideals and the actuality of being a normal woman. Despite all of the political and ideological progress that we have made over the past couple of centuries; despite all of the knowledge that we have accrued, and particularly despite knowing full-well in our own minds that the average human body is both normal and desirable: that the pursuit of ideals is baseless and futile in equal measure; no matter one's sex, sensibility or sexuality. The correct philosophical stance, no matter one's background or religion, is that God alone - whichever one you favour/cleave to, should you so choose - is perfect. My take is more immaterial and of course Zen on this: we are all simultaneously both perfect and imperfect: as the concepts of perfection and imperfection are in and of themselves meaningles

  Pictured: a lot of things in progress. As usual, my butterfly mind can't keep still and I have to chuck more and more into the mental pot on a daily basis, but there you go: better buzzing than vacant, in my book. Life all amounts to one thing in the end: no-thing; but the inevitability of the void shouldn't prevent us from sucking in as much of the world as we can possibly manage whilst our consciousness [exists ?] allows. We are - we imagine, anyway - sentient; and therefore we should behave like sentient beings and experience/do stuff, I guess. Pictured, a bunch of such existential ephemera: the two books I've just started: Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation of Beowulf, and Anthony Bourdain's 'A Cook's Tour' from 2001; my recently acquired Soviet-era Zorki rangefinder camera, which is now loaded with a roll of 200 ASA Fomapan film, and the Palm XT PDA I've recently brought back from the dead with the purchase and installation of a new battery - so

  OK, I was intending an update on various bits and bobs that I've got going on at the moment, but I ended up in the kitchen, rustling up the above. Sunday afternoon has become a a sort of domestic Ready, Steady Cook in Fairview Heights; with Jane arriving home from work with a bag of random ingredients from the M&S just below where she works at the British Heart Foundation in Bangor. Today it was belly-pork strips - a go-to in this house, anyway - baking potatoes, and some rather fine carrots. So, we have - had - belly pork roasted with apple, and sage leaves from the garden; the now ubiquitous roasted Greek potatoes in lemon juice, olive oil and garlic - oodles of all of them - and boiled, buttered carrots, topped with a crude but extremely tasty sauce of the meat juices deglazed with white wine, with the squeezings from the roasted garlic and apple added; and the result thickened with butter. All, as is usual in my kitchen, seasoned well with decent sea salt and black peppe

Further to my comment in my post of September 28th last year "Slow-Tech", doubting whether anyone is still referencing the 1986, computer-based Domesday Project, and referencing a thought I had the other day about the dangers of relying solely on digitised data, no matter how well backed-up and redundantly duplicated it might be; prompted me to compare and contrast the 1086 Domesday with its millennial counterpart at a distance of just under forty years since the government/BBC backed project was finished. The original manuscripts of the Great and the Little Domesday are still in existence, at the National Archives in Kew: nine-hundred and twenty-eight years after having been written. The 1986 Project in its original form lasted less than twenty years in practical terms, due to the inevitable obsolescence of the technology employed in its construction, most notably the storage and delivery medium used: the LaserDisc, an analogue video stream capable of being accessed frame by

In the light of having received my M2-Systems™ Subsystem 2 Journal: the shiny beauty pictured above atop its equally shiny slip case, I was going to meander into some abstractions involving Paul Klee and his '...taking a line for a walk...' approach to the production of his art, which subsequently became the mantra of many of us who went to art college in the seventies, particularly: although as that is the only decade in which I attended art school, that may well be a slightly partial view of things. The pictured tome is at present unsullied, and indeed unmarked by gesture: a bit like the dreaded white void of a blank canvas, screaming out for its first marks, however unstructured they might be. I'm hanging back, but I think I will adopt the measured approach of making the first stigmata on its pristine 100gsm, fountain pen-friendly paper with stamp and ink: a more formalised and considered vandalism with which to break the tyranny of the field. As to the eventual content

That's it - I've done with Twitter/X: I ditched my account last night, after the morning feed of unquestioning bile and uninformed crap from the digits of [?]: are these people actually people or are they the AI evocations of Musk's evidently venal and dodgy politicking? Who the fuck knows, but real actors or no, there is a lot of dangerously uncritical thinking going on in this most public - albeit vertical - arena. Some of the shit I read yesterday morning really riled me, though; with 'people' comparing the current - apposite and appropriate - judicial responses to those that have recently decided that they could do and say just whatever they wanted to do or say in public - viz the fomentation and execution of the recent racially-motivated riots here in the UK - to some alleged and newly-minted totalitarian state under Keir Starmer's government. I'm at a complete loss with these people's [?] deliberate ignorance of human history and their lack of coge

My speculative eBay purchase of a Palm Tungsten TX PDA [if you're under forty, you'll have to Google it] I mentioned the other day, arrived this afternoon. As per the sale pictures, it powers up and does some stuff - but unplug the charger cable, and Pffft! Judging by the slight bulge in the back of the case, I figured the original battery had met its maker, so I opened the thing up - mercifully straightforward: nice design - and sure enough, the OEM Samsung battery had turned into bloated mush [the silver baggy on the right of the picture]. A bit of Googling later and I found and bought a new replacement on eBay, which is on its way. All that's required is to solder the new one to the board, give it a full three-hour charge, and it should be good for the foreseeable. What remains to be seen is to what use I put the thing, given my iPhone does all it does and a shitload more besides. But you know me, cold logic is never really the point with this retro thing. I like the des

  OK, so this post is of the nature of a kind of appeal. Pictured centre-stage above are my extant three volumes of the Dewey Decimal Classification, Edition 20. There should be four volumes, however, and try as I might, I can't track down volume four to buy; or at least I can and have, but the vendor is a lovely little book-seller in Italy that won't post outside of that country. I respect that, since leaving the EU, we in this country who voted [not I] away our rights of freedom of movement and convenience of trade by means of the ineffably idiotic referendum that Cameron visited upon us all those years ago have reaped the rewards of so doing. So if there is anyone out there that has a copy of this volume, or knows of the whereabouts of one - at a reasonable cost, of course - I would be very grateful, indeed: just leave the details in the comment box below, or email me at observer@monochrome.quest. Also, don't try and fathom out why I want to complete a set of [already ou

For quite a chunk of the 1990s, when James was but a youngster, we rented a place on the A5 road to Bangor, just outside Bethesda and on the crossroads to Tregarth and Rachub. It was called Brynbella Cottage, and whilst hard up against the busy Telford road, it suited us fine at the time because it had a large garden suitably walled and hedged off from the road, where James and his friends could play safely, and where we would subsequently host some fine spit-roast parties and late-night barbecues. I always wondered about the name of the place: the Bryn part of the name is Welsh for hill, but I could never figure out what the bella bit was about, or its etymology. For whatever reason - too busy in those days, I guess, I never thought to chase it up - and anyhow, the internet as we know it now hardly existed as such: and so I left it at that. However, I was thumbing through my copy of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles this afternoon - a relatively recent acquisition - and c

I know I bang on about the joys of analogue, and yes, I do like to buy up all manner of stuff in this department, both old and new: I am a collector at heart, it's the OCD in me; but I also like retro digital tech too. I've got all manner of obsolescent stuff lurking in various places in Fairview Heights - a bone of some domestic contention from time to time, but it's OK as all my stuff is essentially stock for resale if I get bored with it - and I'm currently bidding for a Palm Pilot on eBay. I used to own one of these little gems twenty-odd years ago, but gave it away to a friend when I bought my first 'smartphone', a Sony Ericsson P-something, which was a significant step up from my combo of the Palm and my Nokia 6310i [which BTW I still consider to be the apogee and apotheosis of mobile phone technology]. I kind of want the Palm, as the friend I gave my original away to is no longer with us, and so it would represent a reference point in my timeline and a ki

  My workspace at the moment, a mixture of both digital and analogue worlds, and as usual, faintly chaotic: OCD librarian meets a pissed Loki head-on in a back alley. What's prompted this reflection is an email exchange between me and my old mate Phil, who shares a lot of my ink & paper-based peccadillos and obsessions: we both love analogue: notebooks, card-indexes, fountain pens, etc., etc., whilst both being firmly entrenched in the digital world: both of us early adopters, many, many years since. I sent him a link to what I consider one of my best finds in recent years: one of the loveliest pieces of pure graphic product design I've seen since the glory days of the late 1960s . As I said to Phil, I can't see this as being of any real practical utility to me, given that my approach to organising my stuff is unique to me: the modus operandi of a butterfly mind lends itself not to the tidy. But the purity of the graphic design and execution of this journal is just a jo

  OK - pictured is my bastardised Filofax, now rechristened The Twenty [blog posts passim]: my sort of, kind of, take on the Zettelkasten [auch blog posts passim, meine Damen und Herren]. Atop the gnarly old leather folder is a relatively recent adoption, a 0.3mm Rotring draughting pen. Now - caveat - this is one of their cheap, disposable range of said instruments; but Rotring being who they are, do even cheap stuff very, very well. I don't normally cleave to disposable stuff, for environmental and moral reasons, but I wanted to revisit this style of pen without breaking the bank on something that might not get much further use if my memory of using these devices turned out to be rosier than the actuality of using one today. My first memory and use of this type of pen dates back to my sixth-form days at school, and the Art Room: the Rotring pen was very much a fetish object amongst those of us denizens of that hallowed space: we saved up to buy one of these - even in those days ex

As late as today I was still pondering in which direction to go with the router lift mechanism: the makings of the lead-screw and all the various holes that need drilling in the plate and the router body are all but there, and I've got a pack of appropriately-sized ball races on the way. But, messing around with ideas this afternoon, I remembered that I'd got the rescued remains of an old 12v cordless drill [blog posts passim] in one of my bits boxes. I'd dismantled it some time ago, as its batteries were NiCads and had expired years ago, so it was confined to the unused stuff section of the studio - that's chucked in a corner to me and you. The guts of the thing can be seen in the photograph next to the router on its plate, the rather gutsy motor to the left and the business end of the drill to the right. The chuck is, like the batteries, knackered, but the two-speed sun and planet gearbox - metal! - still functions perfectly. So, I've determined that this will be

Nimbyism. This acronymic neologism - as it was back in the day - was coined as a counter to the hypocrisy of: 'anywhere else is fine, just not in my back yard ', in reference mainly to building schemes of one sort or another. The 'Oh, yes, we need more affordable housing, wind farms, nuclear powerplants, etc., but please not anywhere near where we live...' attitude. I was struck by a piece in the i today by Allegra Chapman: 'Living next to an Airbnb has totally ruined my life'. I have to declare an interest at the outset here, as we indeed run a small Airbnb as a supplement to our pensions; and I also would make it quite plain that I agree with Chapman's views and those of many others so aggrieved, and would never stoop to accuse any of them of nimbyism. In fact there is a growing movement against Airbnb across the UK and much further afield now, as unthinking and unscrupulous absentee landlords are buying up properties in picturesque rural areas such as ou

I was brought up a Methodist, among which's precepts is the tradition of referring to one another as Brother and Sister [not that we did at our church, but it was the 1960s by then]; although as I've said before, I've tried in the many decades since I left that church to follow my own styling of Zen Buddhism, light on ritual and heavy on introspection. My take is that when the realisation of one's innate frailty and tenuousness in this world   takes hold,  then one is best placed to accept the condition of others with whom we share this temporary, temporal, and corporeal existence. Tolerance is de facto the Lingua Franca of one enlightened by this self-knowledge. Having said that, even I have been moved to suggest all manner of unpleasant Old Testament visitations on the perpetrators of hatred that have been so in evidence in UK cities of late.  The trouble is I [we] also run the risk of sounding exactly like the kind of swivel-eyed fascist

As I wrote last evening, we called over to The Bull at Biwmares for lunch today. As is becoming usual and decidedly tedious: nay, frankly worrying; there was no Bass on, and the Hancock's ale was sub-par: another day and what's left in the barrel is ullage and destined for the drain; although I suspect that none of the staff will notice until someone sends their pint back. Two things about the once-estimable and historic Bull Inn highlight the parlous and perilous state of our hospitality sector today. One was that the kitchen was idle - for an unstated reason - half an hour after opening the establishment for lunch. Two was the issue I've just highlighted with the state of the real ale being offered and its serving by staff - one individual excepted - who seem incapable of serving a full, legally-enforceable pint measure of what after all is not a cheap product. I would suggest that this is simply a lack of training, as the staff concerned are far too young to have direct