Observations from a Hill

We're taking advantage of winter's customary garden devastation to tidy around and make a few changes to the place before spring growth takes hold. Pictured is the start of a new low dry stone wall I'm putting up to edge the patio at the point at which it drops off to the bottom garden. I've shifted a couple of decent sized boulders from by the woodshed at bottom right, which in itself is long overdue as I've been tripping over the buggers for years now. I used a technique shown to me by an old Anglesey farmer about twenty-five years ago. I say old, but I realise in retrospect that he was about the same age as I am now, at the time. Which I guess qualifies as old, I suppose. It's a simple and very safe way of moving field stones perhaps twice as heavy as one could normally manage to lift, at my age at least, so good for a weight of 80-150kg. I can still manage to lift fifty kilos at a pinch, although I doubt very much I could carry that uphill over rough ground ...

Funerals are, as to be expected, times of reflection and personal reappraisal, as yet another acquaintance, friend or family member departs one's orbit for the last time, at least in the corporeal sense. We managed to get to my brother-in-law George's funeral today, after a fraught drive down to Birmingham from North Wales this morning. The last funeral at Lodge Hill I attended was my mate Johnny Kyte [blog posts passim] which I only made by the skin of my teeth, then, just as they were closing the door on the chapel: a combination of roadworks and farm traffic on the more rural sections of the journey, and the hideously snarled-up roads around the Birmingham area conspiring to lengthen a three to three and a half hour journey to over four. Brummagem traffic is now as bad as London's: awful. Today was no different, and the timing worse still. Well over four hours from Rachub to Brum, yet again: you'd think I'd learn, wouldn't you? We barely made it for the servi...

It was gratifying to hear that Kemi Badenoch's sacrificial lamb, the former Post Office chair, Henry Staunton; sacked for allegedly lying about being briefed by government to slow down the compensation - hereinafter, redress - to the victims of the appalling Post Office scandal, has shown his teeth under oath at today's committee hearing, after having heard the current Post Office CEO earlier apparently perjure himself, also under oath. From what we are to gather thus far, it would seem that heads will inevitably have to roll: what needs to follow is the immediate criminal prosecution of all parties involved in this continuing criminal conspiracy and the immediate institution of financial and reputational redress to all sub-postmasters and their families who fell foul of this bunch of crooks, forthwith. Let's hope Henry Staunton's gambit pays off for the right people, and Badenoch and her ilk get their just deserves as soon as possible. The Phoenix in this little ragba...

  Diary post tonight, as I'm trying to nurse my back, which decided to get out of shape yesterday afternoon. When I woke this morning, having dreamt that my back had got better - a kind of lucid dream, I guess - I realised that my brain had lied, and had to lever my way out of bed and onto the vertical. Shit happens and, to be frank, it seems OK at the moment, but we'll see in the morning, when the wine's worn off. It's amazing how one's view of the world can change with backache, but the contrast when that pain goes and strength returns is all the more sweet and gratefully received. Pictured, tonight's repast of roast sumac/chilli chicken with roast potato wedges and a sauce of chicken stock and the deglaze of the meat juices and garlic from the roasting dish. Not 'alf bad. Been listening to Rick Beato's interview with the phenomenal bassist Mohina Bey, on YouTube, who I'm ashamed to have to say I've not hitherto been aware of. Check her out. Br...

As anyone who plays guitar will attest, there are always grail instruments, that one never seems to get one's hands on, let alone own. Obviously, the more famous and wealthy the guitarist, the greater access to the pool of desirable guitars. I've had the pleasure of playing a few such instruments over the last fifty-odd years, and also the disappointment of not getting my paws permanently on any of them. But there you go. My mate Kev had the good fortune to get his hands on a pre-CBS Fender Stratocaster from '62/'63, back in the early seventies, when they were still available for reasonably sensible money, ie. less than a new one of the time, about £160. Worth around £25-30,000 these days. A bloody good guitar, nevertheless, current fate unknown. I actually got to play Roy Wood's Gibson Hummingbird acoustic, at his home in Little Aston, Birmingham, back around 1971, although I can't say I did it much justice, but a nice memory nevertheless, as was afternoon tea ...

I downloaded a copy of the pdf of  "Lose-lose? - The Munich Security Report 2024", and although I've really only scanned it thus far and left it be for a few days as I've had other stuff to attend to, I've just flicked back to the Executive Summary [what does that phrase always sound so pompous to me?] and lit on the depressing fact that what this report demonstrates clearly is precisely what many of us predicted long before the '...zeitenwende...' - the turning point - of the end of the Cold War. Anyone who had lived long enough to have witnessed post-war recovery and relative prosperity for 'normal' people being subsumed by the cancer of the ultra-liberalism of the 1980s, could see that, yes, world Communism was withering on rotten boughs, which was good, but that the real problem was that it was being replaced by something far worse. A world without economic restraint. The 'End of History' that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ...

I've written previously about how working class families don't have 'histories' in the same sense that the 'upper crust' do. Ninety-plus-odd percent of the population of this archipelago have little stake in the centuries of history that led to who they are presently, which is, in itself, largely due to accidents of fate deep in their family's past. Never mind the salient fact that they have created through their labours and sacrifices, the histories of the privileged. Given that we are all descended from a very small cohort of individuals, one can't help thinking that those of us not sitting on storied histories and vast family assets today, might just have been royally - literally - shafted at some time in our past. Digging through my family tree has been instructive and enlightening, despite the plain fact that I am largely descended from poor people who frankly had infinitely harder lives than I could ever imagine. I'm simply saying that I am o...

What, we might reasonably ask ourselves, happened in the Commons yesterday? We were watching the Parliament channel - sad old buggers, I hear you say - and although we missed the very start of it all, and the initial departure of the Speaker, we witnessed the whole thing live. Amid the confusion and shouting, the sense of what was going on was obscure to say the least: again the context of the opening of the whole debate would have helped. From what I've gleaned so far today through the [partial] hindsight of the papers, is that Labour were facing a massive rebellion from their own rank and file which would have seen many of them voting for the SNP motion on an immediate ceasefire in Gaza in the absence of any official party stance to the contrary; and so arranged to table an amendment, which seems on the face of it to have been intended to flag a more sympathetic view on ceasefire than has been the party line hitherto, in order to head off the rebellion at the pass. In allowing t...

Well, I've been down the family tree rabbit-hole once more, initially trying to track down one of my Southall clan, specifically by grandad's brother, John Edgar. Having had mixed success thus far, I diverted my focus from the First World War to The Second World War, and to the Harvey side of the family, specifically my Uncle Arthur: my dad's second eldest brother. As I've noted before, he served latterly in Operation Market Garden with the 1st Airborne Division (gliders) and was fortunate enough to avoid getting killed, although unfortunate enough to subsequently spend the rest of the war as a POW. This much everyone in the family knew, but no more than that, as Arthur never spoke a word of what had happened, even decades after his demobilisation. I was astonished to stumble upon - whilst browsing through Ancestry hints and search returns, this afternoon - his returning POW questionnaire, in his own hand, dated 19th May, 1945, part two of the form being marked as Top S...

Been to the funeral today of a good acquaintance of mine, Patrick, who has died at the too-young age of fifty-nine, and whilst I knew him only in a way peripherally, we got on well, and I have known him on and off since he was a teenager, back in the early eighties. He was an all-round good guy, one of the first out gay men in Bangor, and someone who put his socialist - although he probably would have shied away from being pigeonholed as such - politics into practice, with voluntary work for The Samaritans, and later with offender rehabilitation, working with NACRO. Always a staunch opponent of injustice and corruption and supporter of those least able to defend themselves, I think he was a man on the side of the angels. God speed, youth.

Just a diary/cooking post tonight. Pictured, the penultimate stage in the cooking of tonight's repast: Chicken Tikka Fairview. I chose to use this one rather than the pic of the finished article as frankly, it's more photogenic. Two chicken legs were coated in a tikka marinade of yoghurt and spices as is usual, but in the absence of a barbecue or tandoor(!) in the immediate vicinity, I opted to roast the meat in a hot oven and then grill it at the end. Rather than serve it as two whole legs, I decided I would cook it whilst making the sauce, simmer the sauce down with the whole legs for twenty minutes or so, then blitz the sauce,  take the meat off the bone, and add it to the resulting, rather smoother gravy. A touch of cream and lemon juice, simmer for a bit longer, then serve with pilau rice and poppadums. I have to say: not bad at all. Maybe four-and-a-half out of five on the taste-o-meter. The recipe for the gravy is mine [blog posts passim] - I think it was the leftover la...

  Pictured are the sorry remains of the [now wood-]shed door, held on the bench by my refurbished wood-vice [both projects covered in blog posts passim]. As you can see, it wears the scars of my neglect rather sadly and obviously on its sleeve, so to speak. I was planning to build a new door altogether: I have made a fair number of doors over the years, so apart from the cost of the timber, the doing of it wouldn't have been any particular problem, and I rather enjoy the process, anyway. However, I've got a soft spot for the poor old thing: me and my mate built this shed over twenty years ago, one afternoon. Sadly, the shed outlived him, unfortunately, so I'm going to include as much of the original door in the repair as possible. It will also reflect my general sense of the aesthetic qualities of the old and worn, the travelled, and the well-lived. At my age that's as much a statement of intent as anything else, I guess. As you can see, I've removed the very worst ...

I've just taken delivery of the book I referred to a couple of days ago: "I Am a Strange Loop" by Douglas Hofstadter, secondhand from WeBuyBooks for the princely sum of nine quid on eBay. Just a few pages into the preface, Hofstadter references a Peanuts cartoon, which is reproduced to illustrate the author's - rather hidden from view - down-to-earth approach to life, seemingly at odds with his rather more cerebral written output. However, the payoff frame of the cartoon itself, as always with Peanuts, made me chuckle. The fact is that when I was a teenager growing up in Birmingham, England, the Peanuts strip had a massive cult following amongst us: the square pegs and misfits who couldn't or simply wouldn't toe the line and conform, the shy, un-sporty kids appreciating the dynamic between Charlie's apparent ordinariness and his friends' assumed sophistication.  At that age, Charlie occupied the [our] rôle of the reticent, slightly shy, square peg, sur...

When my son was born in 1991, there existed precisely one website on what we now generically refer to as the internet , an entity in itself that had already been in existence for some decades before, in the service of defence and subsequently, academia, alone. One . The original Tim Berners-Lee, CERN-hosted, experimental website: the very punctus fons of a system, which in just over thirty years has come to underpin every aspect of our lives. Every aspect . From what we buy, how we are paid and how we bank our pay, through to how we actually think and conduct ourselves as a society. Everything. Scary thought, if you mull it over for longer than a millisecond. Essentially, we're now in financial and psychological thrall to a mere handful of global mega-corps, whose sole purpose is to maximise the shareholder dividends of yet more mega-corps in the form of pension and hedge funds, merchant bankers and the like: moving huge amounts of money around in the meta-world of global finance t...

We live in a world where the  idée fixe  du jour is Artificial Intelligence and its potential to affect our existence as sentient occupiers of the space we choose to perceive, or maybe interpret [Plato's Cave?], as the world; so, it is perhaps worth reflecting on our sentience and consequent perception in the light of, for want of a better phrase, 'the competition'. Yesterday, I posted on Strange Loops, having only alighted on both the phrase and the concept yesterday morning, courtesy of the BBC, gawd bless 'er. As I said, my signal failure over forty-plus years, to get to grips with what Douglas Hofstadter was getting at in "Gödel, Escher, Bach..." was suddenly thrown into relief - in many senses of the word - by what I heard in the discussion mentioned. After I had written last night's scribble, I wrote down a phrase that immediately sprang to my mind: 'Strange Loops and Language Acquisition?'. Having studied postgraduate linguistics for a yea...

There was an interesting discussion on Radio Four this morning, which referenced strange loops. A strange loop, to quote Wikipedia, is: '...  a  cyclic  structure that goes through several levels in a  hierarchical  system. It arises when, by moving only upwards or downwards through the system, one finds oneself back where one started. Strange loops may involve  self-reference  and  paradox . The concept of a strange loop was proposed and extensively discussed by  Douglas Hofstadter  in  Gödel, Escher, Bach , and is further elaborated in Hofstadter's book  I Am a Strange Loop , published in 2007...' One of those contributing to this morning's discursivities was the mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy, who admitted that he'd tried and failed to read Gödel, Escher, Bach in his youth, and only much later in his career came to realise that the book is a treatise on consciousness and the development of identity, framed in rather ellipti...

Pictured, emergency woodshed rescue in progress. I built this with my late mate Jean-Charles over twenty years ago, so I don't think the structure owes me much, but I have to admit that this little thing has been sorely neglected latterly, and was frankly just about to collapse. It most certainly wasn't water-tight either, which is a problem when you consider its main rôle is to keep the garden tools and our reserve firewood pile dry. I thought, late morning today, that I might spend an hour nailing an old sheet of 5mm plywood that has been lurking at the back of the studio for several years now, onto the rather knackered weather-facing roof seen above. Four hours later, I'd not only done that, but, as can be seen, I've started patching up the holes on the door gable, having reinforced the frankly shot frame holding the roof and the door itself up. Which leaves me tomorrow's task: patching up the door before it crumbles completely, and re-hanging it in the now sligh...

I've been bending my brain on the family tree again this afternoon, after a customary break to untangle the synapses after the last session. I've returned to my father's mother's side: the Rudges. I have to report that the Tom Rudge who died in the early months of WWI, and who I identified as my Great-Uncle, is/was my second cousin, twice removed. I still find it difficult, even at nearly seventy myself, to get a grip on the hierarchy of cousinhood, but there we are. I've now made some inroads into my Great-Grandmother Prudence's antecedence, thanks to a couple of other family trees on Ancestry, that also, crucially, include the Australian connection; a key indicator of veracity. Funnily enough, the further one digs into family history, the more confirmatory connections get thrown up as you go, and cross-referencing gets easier. However, the flip-side of that is the increasing complexity of the tree, and the mental gymnastics needed to get one's head around ...

As I've noted before, I espouse  a very reductive form of Zen Buddhism: so reductive in fact, that it would go unrecognised as such by the major practitioners of the philosophy throughout the world. I chose a path very early on in life that eschews formal ritual, except where it suits my inner, mild OCD self, such as the way I make my tea in the morning, or make grilled-cheese crumpets: try 'em - they're lush for breakfast, lunch or even a light dinner. In contradiction, writing this blog is now a kind of meditative ritual space for me, so this in itself is a meta post: something I never intended five minutes ago, when I decided to head off on this track. I guess that the guiding precept of Zen is living in one's present with awareness of no-thing in particular, but all. The curious aspect about trying to live one's life this way, is that the trying creates awareness of itself, and in doing so, breaks the inner silence that simply being is. We are not; then we are; ...

Thankfully, the Post Office scandal has not yet been consigned to yesterday's news and buried under the mountain of crap that seems to get larger with each passing day. There appears to be some conflict, however between the government - who for once seem to want to actually do something about something in a vaguely timely fashion, for once - by expediting, en bloc, the exoneration of wrongfully accused and/or fined/incarcerated sub-postmasters in summary fashion. Well, good, is all I can say, as the whole sorry affair has been dragged out under a cloud of lies and legal obfuscation for far, far too long. Some ministers and the judiciary have apparently been quailing at the thought of the ability of a government to overturn decisions by judges, stating that it would set an unnerving precedent for the future. Again, I agree with that countervailing view also: the implications are plain to see, and God knows, we can see the effects of governmental autonomy over justice throughout the...

Been reading and seeing a lot over the last few days about water batteries. Of course, we've been generating electricity from water's power for a long time, and have had the ability to store latent energy in the form of pumped-storage plants for nearly as long. The difference between generation and storage is that one is continuous - as long as water flows, you can extract its energy to generate electricity: storage takes surplus energy and uses it to pump water to a high - literally - latent state, until it is needed, then releasing it to a lower, dynamic state to extract its energy and generate electricity on demand. Both systems have been tried, tested and are in daily use to this day. But there is a potential new kid on the block: High Density Pumped Storage, which looks set to up the renewable game to the next level, taking a known and time-tested technology and giving a twist to make it twice as effective as the existing systems. The technology of liquid-based electricity...

I've been much exercised of late with looking into - as I think I've mentioned before - my great-uncle Frank's short WWI tour in the Gallipoli Campaign, which of course centred around the shipping lanes and supply routes of North Africa and the Mediterranean, etc. It would seem that, yet again, we are moving into a phase of world history which might just push us into yet another European/World War, with many of the more serious of the commentariat agreeing with the idea that the multiple wars and territorial instabilities we are seeing from Ukraine to the Middle East and Palestine could prove to be a collective tipping point for another global conflict. That the very same trade routes, shipping lanes and ports would yet again be the epicentre of such a war would not have surprised my relative, as he also witnessed WWII and the Suez crisis within his lifetime. Suez was a harbinger of the current state of play in the region: add into the mix what's happening in Ukraine an...

It would seem from today's i that the Post Office's 'Capture' software, which preceded the disastrous 'Horizon' software with similarly dire results, brings to mind some software I came across decades ago, the exact purpose of which I've long forgotten, but which ran on a little Epson - the first true laptop computer  - the HX-20, which came out in 1981. It was truly a lovely bit of kit, if limited in capability by today's standards, or even those of the day, to be honest. However, it was genuinely laptop-sized, occupying the footprint of an A4 sheet of paper, which was utterly remarkable for the year. Data and programs could be stored on a tape drive using micro-cassettes, and it had a dinky little cash-register or calculator style dot matrix printer using narrow roll paper, from which you could output your program data or even dump the code of the program itself (written in BASIC: the Beginners' All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, one of the mo...

It now has to be official: our Prime Minister is simply, not to put too fine a point on it, simply crap. Being out-flanked by the master tactician - cough - Piers Morgan, in an interview and gulled into shaking the slimeball's hand in a £1,000 wager on the success (!) or failure of the undisputedly wrong, nay, utterly stupid Rwanda scheme, and then trying to weasel his way out of the faux pas by claiming he was wrong-footed by the crass idiot is, well, a measure of the man. He's the Prime Minister, ferchrissakes. Can you imagine - Liz Truss excepted - any former PM getting sucker-punched on live TV by a twat like Morgan? Even Boris Johnson would have had the smarts - and that's saying something - to have deflected such an obvious ploy into the rough. If you are that bad at dealing with a second-rate, sensationalist journo, how good are you going to be at the rather more serious business of governing a country? Answer: not very, as he's already demonstrated ably to dat...

OK - time to get very meta, if not outright tautological. Not content with my self-imposed hair-shirt of a daily write - this blog - or my descent into the rabbit-hole of my family's history via Ancestry.co.uk, I have today decided to start a Wiki. Also entitled Observations From a Hill. On the surface it seems - even to me - slightly bonkers to embark on something else at this point in my life. But, as I've said before: activity, both mental and physical, is absolutely essential to a good, happy, and hopefully longer , life. Trust me, it's a good plan.  As you can imagine from recent posts here, at my age I am feeling the decidedly cool draught of mortality; and whilst I have no bloody intention of yet shuffling off my personal mortal coil, thank you very much, the fact remains that I have already lived most of the life I could ever have reasonably expected to have. Whatever. Keep on keeping on, as the old hippie phraseology would have it. In some ways, I guess my latter-d...

Just watching Portrait Artist of the Decade on the TV (repeat? - I've no idea), and the blank sheet parallel between painting and doing a blog like this jumped off the screen at me. As is often the case, I don't have the first idea what the day's scribble is going to be - not always the case, granted - until I sit down to write it. I guess I made a rod for my own back when I decided at the outset that these pages would definitely not have a theme: unlike quite a lot of bloggers, I don't have the focus of a particular axe to grind, obsession or business to promote. I've always seen this as a kind of open-ended diary/stream of consciousness reflection on whatever takes my fancy, day-to-day; or a recording of other stuff I might currently be involved in.  Whatever, as a 'trained' artist, having served my dues in the art-school system in the 1970s, and having subsequently been involved for quite a few years with artists' groups and associations - mostly in t...

Wales came very close to snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in the second half of their opener in this year's Six Nations against Scotland today. Alas, a point behind, we pushed a forward pass, and the result was sealed: the first time Scotland have beaten us at home for twenty-two years. But the way we played in the second half would seem to indicate there are distinct possibilities with this young squad. And they managed to get a bonus point and prevent Scotland from getting their's; so, defeat apart, all in all a positive afternoon's rugby, in the end. The picture? Tonight's repast of Karahai Chicken, which was very good: I'll pass on the recipe at some point: I got it from a rather good YouTube channel that I've just subscribed to.  Details later...

At long last, the days are tangibly lengthening as we move towards the spring equinox: a time of year that, as always, fills me with hope and cheer for the coming year. It might seem odd then, that we chose to spend a couple of hours before lunch visiting a cemetery down in Bethesda on the other side of Afon Ogwen, at a place called Tanysgrafell, in the shadow of the mountain of slate waste created by the quarry at Penrhyn. Pictured is a long-fallen but still living tree as you walk into the place. It's a spot we've not been to for some time, and hitherto has been almost hidden from sight by lush overgrowth and brambles for decades, like a tiny, Celtic, Angkor Wat, buried in the woods. However, we read on a local Facebook group that volunteers had been busy clearing the place of its weeds and undergrowth, so that the gravestones are now all accessible to anyone interested in viewing them. Consecrated in March 1848, its original mother church, St. Ann's, built in 1812, was l...

I've been researching some of my family's military involvements in the Great War; I think I've previously mentioned my great-uncle Tom Rudge, on my father's side, who was killed in France in the early weeks of the war, on the twenty-second of December 1914 at the age of just twenty-one. I've just made an application to retrieve his papers from the archives, should they still be extant. I've also been looking into another great-uncle of mine on my mother's side, who was fortunate enough to survive the maelstrom of the Gallipoli campaign, and hence how I am able to converse with my cousin Francis to this day. His grandfather, Francis Hubert Southall (great-uncle Frank to me, growing up), my grandfather's brother, fought at Suvla Bay on the opposite coast of the peninsula to The Dardanelles; was wounded and captured, and spent the rest of the war in relative safety as a POW: without which fact, my late uncle Mike and cousin Francis would not have happened. ...