Observations from a Hill

I am absolutely tatered, to use the colloquialism [origin unknown to me: worth researching], and it is entirely self-inflicted. Not through physical effort or exercise, productive or otherwise, but through the simple expedient of deciding to take a very rare hot bath [picture not our tub]. Although I shower every day, I seldom take a soak, as the bath takes so much hot water it has to be considered an absolute luxury these days. But aches and pains various, and the usual winter outbreak of the old eczema issue on my legs [since childhood: long thought over, but in recent years, back on the plot again], motivated me to turn the immersion thermostat up full for half an hour and fill the tub to the brim. Bliss. Only now, I'm reduced to a kind of - had I been smoking something - stoned state, where I simply want to eat something and settle down in front of the wood stove for the evening. Ray's funeral is tomorrow, so a period of reflection is in order anyway... 

I listened to a beautiful piece of radio this afternoon [on BBC Radio Four], about the Voyager missions, which I found moving, humbling and to be frank, very Zen in placing us all collectively and me personally very firmly in context within the vastness of the Universe and of time itself. One of my all-time heroes, the astronomer and frankly, a great philosopher in his own right, Carl Sagan, who was deeply involved in the Voyager programme; had the prescience, vision, insight; call it what you will, to ask that Voyager I be turned around to face home, six billion kilometres away, and just before being flung out into deep space, so that it could photograph the Earth before it left, finally blinded, as our ambassador to the stars and an unknown future, in 1990: the year before my son was born. The presenter of the programme herself was only born the year the mission was launched. The resulting image: The Pale Blue Dot. Beautiful, humbling and terrifying in equal measure. Pure Zen. BTW - ...

Pictured, tonight's repast: a Frankenstein Freezer Curry, with chappati, poppadum and lime pickle. Featured is the "Manchester Curry Spoon" of yore, from the ill-fated spontaneous weekend out to Paris in 1989 [blog posts passim]: we only got as far as Manchester due to a French air traffic control strike, so spent the evening in various [very fine, admittedly,] pubs, and ate at the Rajdoot Indian Restaurant, from which this surprisingly long-lasting souvenir was half-inched by moi in some small, drunken recompense for a totally trashed weekend. You win some, you lose some, n'est ce pa?

A good journey home this morning, broken by a short coffee break at around halfway for half an hour at the services where we leave the A49 for the A5 and homewards. Our little car was somewhat stuffed to the gunwales with all of our stuff and the three of us, but we still made decent enough time, getting back early afternoon. It's only ninety-five miles, but cooped up in a little Citroen with all that clutter, it can often seem a tad longer than that: it's a noisy little motor at the best of times, with its lack of frills such as basic sound-dampening to soften the road-noise. Anyway, on reaching the bottom end of Nant Ffrancon and approaching Bethesda, the sun emerged and the sky was blue for the first time all week: although the air still has a keen cut to it. Above, the view out from our place this evening, looking southwest-ish. Anyhow, that's it for tonight, as I'm for getting in front of the wood stove and refilling my glass of wine...

Having watched 'testimony' from Angela Van Den Bogerd at the Post Office Scandal enquiry for a good part of today, I feel I should write something about it, but I think I'll cogitate further on the subject before scribbling about the matter. Suffice to say I've theories about the whole thing, but nothing concrete that I can truly use. Powder dry for a bit, methinks. So just a pic of mine from this visit and as it's our last night in Shropshire tonight, I'll keep it brief, anyway. Back up to North Wales and home, in the morning, so an early start is in the offing, in order to get tidied up and out on the road. More tomorrow - Nos Da!

It's difficult to imagine - at the moment at least - that in August 2022 on arrival here at Lower Down, that every stick, twig, leaf and blade of grass in the garden, and in the fields beyond, as far as the eye could see, was a uniform shade of roasted brown, and everything - everything - plant-based appeared dead to this world. The lawn was crunchy underfoot in a way I'd never experienced before here, or anywhere else for that matter. Fast forward to now - and I know we're only just into Spring now, but the contrast remains - the place is as verdant as it's possible ever to imagine: albeit fuelled by the wettest Autumn and Winter this area has seen for a very long time. It's small wonder that work is underway to improve drainage for the barley fields below the cottage, before the next deluge occurs, as it undoubtedly will. But the cycle of stupidly hot, dry weather, alternating with so much rainfall, annually, is death on a stick to arable farmers, and not much be...

  Went over to the White Horse, Clun for lunch - again - today, before Leo bailed out back to North Wales for a college lecture later this afternoon, and an exam tomorrow: the rest of us will follow on Saturday. Pictured in the grainy blow-up above, is the said establishment circa 1907. The publican's name on the licensee's plate above the door: one Elizabeth Graves, who, as I've mentioned before, was my great-great-great-aunt - I'd left out a *great* in the previous mentions: it's difficult to keep track of it all. However, we realised today, that the very Victorian lady in the doorway of the inn alongside the younger woman in servant's attire, was almost certainly said aunt. By the time she died at the age of 85 in 1922, she'd lived a colourful old life. Born in Fromes Hill, Herefordshire in 1837, at the age of fourteen she was living in as a servant in The New Inn, working for her aunt Agnes Hodges, sowing the seeds for a future career as a publican, lear...

An intriguing fact emerged from idly checking the altitude here in Lower Down: we're actually a hundred feet higher in elevation than we are at home in Rachub, in the mountains of Eryri, which is a kind of surprising fact at first glance, given where we live - clue: mountainous, vs the hills of this part of Shropshire. But thinking about it, and referencing last nights post about The Long Mynd, I suppose it's not such a shock after all. I think the cognitive disjunct lies in the fact that we never walk up the hill from the nearest hamlet - Brockton - to here, whereas we've made the quite similar - in altitude gain - ascent from Bethesda to Rachub  many  times over the last quarter of a century and more. The big difference is that the pull up from Brockton up to here is a direct, relentless, and calf-straining catenary of a road, getting gradually steeper as you approach the lane that guides you here. From Bethesda up to our place, however, the walk can be made on a series o...

A trip out to Church Stretton today turned out to be a bit more of an adventure than originally planned, as the road we normally take from the Bishop's Castle side was blocked for some unstated reason with as yet no diversion signs to guide us on an alternative route. Anyhow, we made our way up onto The Long Mynd, a seven-mile long and three-mile wide ridge, rising at its highest to 1,693 feet at Pole Bank. Parts of the narrow road that winds up and over at its middle are worryingly close to steep drops without fencing or walling to prevent the less-attentive driver from making a very rapid and probably fatal descent into the landscape below, although we avoided the steepest and scariest thoroughfare at the Craven Arms end of the ridge, which is OK when ascending - at least for the driver - but going down is a feast of brake dust, and in the old days, brake fade, as I found out years ago when I trashed a brand new set of brake-pads on the descent. If you're a nervous driver, yo...

After a distinctly grey, cold - very cold - and misly start to the day this morning, the weather has perked up nicely with some welcome sunshine, despite the cold air, which has a landlocked, damp feel and intensity to it that we seldom get back home in North Wales, being so close to relatively warm seas and sheltered as we are by the Carneddau range of mountains, which take some of the sting out of the hairier weather of winter and autumn. Spring warmth arrives a little later here in the Shropshire Hills. But, as always there's an upside to coming here outside of high season: the abundant Japonica in the gardens here is in full flower at the moment, and there are tulips everywhere in Clun. Both will be past it - certainly the Japonica will be gone - by the time we normally come here in high summer. Our next visit will be in September this year, which will bring late summer warmth [hopefully!] and the colours and textures of harvest time in the rolling fields that surround the plac...

  As I wrote last night, spring seems to be emerging from winter at last, and warm sun has blessed our journey down here to Shropshire, for our brief holiday in the blue remembered hills. Pictured, the last rays of the setting sun through my glass of beer. Tomorrow we'll head into Clun for Sunday lunch at the White Horse Inn, my family connection with which I've mentioned before in these here posts. Fish & chips and a couple of pints of the house-brewed Clun Pale Ale - excellent stuff, and still at Medieval prices - to wash it down. I can't recommend the place, or praise the landlord, Jack Limond, highly enough. Priceless: one of the few survivors of the pandemic, and someone dedicated to continuing a tradition, rather than trashing it for profit, and surprise, surprise, creating a highly profitable business in the process. Result? Happy punters, happy landlord, tradition preserved for the next generation(s)...  

At last, the first signs that Spring might just be here. It's been a long, wet and very windy transition from last Summer, through Autumn and Winter this last year, so who knows what the coming seasons will bring in its wake. We're off to Shropshire for a few days tomorrow, and the weather forecast is uncertain at best, but we'll make the most of what we're offered. A change of scenery is a change of outlook, after all. My posts for the next days will be concise - terse, even - as the broadband and mobile connectivity down there is sketchy to say the least. I'll keep you posted, nevertheless, he said, tersely...

Some days it's difficult to know where to start, things are just so fucked up. We've watched a good chunk of the Post Office Enquiry at odd times throughout the day today; with Rodric Williams -  former Litigation Lawyer at Post Office Ltd and current Head of Legal (Dispute Resolution & Brand), squirming and [badly] attempting to avoid incriminating himself or fall foul of whatever covert legal legal strictures are being held over him by PO Ltd; often tongue-tied, and at times practically unable to form a complete, cogent sentence in answer to questioning by Jason Beer KC, on behalf of the enquiry. Later on this afternoon I dipped into the documentary about Harold Shipman and was floored by some 'expert commentator' from the period - I didn't catch who it was - intoning about by such-and-such a date there would be more people over seventy than of any other age-group. I don't know whether he was advocating for Shipman's apparent crusade to cull the 'o...

So the Tobacco and Vapes Bill passed its second reading by pretty much a landslide: the 67 votes agin I would guess coming from the cohort of inveterate cigar smokers on the Tory back benches. Yet another bread and circuses gesture on the government's behalf, aimed at deflecting attention from the real issues at hand: climate, the economy, inequality, poverty, a decimated health and social care system, local authorities in a financial death-spiral, polluted rivers, out-of-control cost of living, completely stuffed public services generally, und so weiter, ad nauseam. There are so many more   important issues to deal with, caused primarily by Conservative non-policies and fourteen years of ineptitude and laissez faire shirking of responsibility [for just about anything and everything]: that pissing about with a tobacco ban - that will take a generation to take effect anyway [down the road it goes...] - is just plainly and obviously diversionary, much like their ridiculous witch hun...

I mentioned a couple of days ago that I had sort of iatrogenically created a problem with my Weston Master V light meter in curing an existing issue. I also mentioned that I'd spent some time fettling a small pin to act as the by then lost pawl for the film speed ring of the exposure calculator that forms the bulk of the front of the device. Since then, I've discovered that, as is so often the case, I was missing the point, having made assumptions as to how the thing worked. Turns out that the 'round' pin was no such thing, and whatever replacement for it I came up with had to be a thin blade of an affair. This I've fabricated from a piece of brass strip from an old mains socket, again cutting and filing down a piece I could barely see properly, let alone hold securely: I had to make a pair of vise-jaw extensions from a couple of hinges, so that I could grip such a tiny piece of work in my frankly too-butch-for-the-job metal vise. Much perseverance and a lot of swea...

A late and consequently possibly inconsequential post tonight as I've been moidering around doing other stuff today, and this evening we've been finishing off watching the docudrama about The Yorkshire Ripper, which I recommend highly, and though I'm tempted to make barbed references to the police and the media, I'll leave it to you to make up your own mind about the catalogue of failures involved. I might add that not a great deal has changed in the decades since, and many - if not most - institutions, companies and corporations operating today do so within similar cultures of intimidation, fear, prejudice and, well, more intimidation; or to be honest just plain bloody-minded egotistical stupidity, relying on the status of the stupid carrying the day. As I've mentioned before, many of my family have seen this crap first hand in the workplace, from my dad to Jane and myself, my son and his husband: all of us have experienced it. 'T'ain't right, t'ain...

I've spent some time today trying to effect a small repair on the pictured; my Weston Master V exposure meter. I'd noticed that the needle was sticking at the far end of its travel, and I worked out that the little panel of aluminium that carries the scale it references was tilted up on one side, fouling the needle. Simple, thought I, so I Googled for the modus operandi - which I'd already worked out, but I wanted to be sure - for opening the thing up, and did just that. I fixed the issue that was causing the sticking needle, no problem, but then discovered that I'd managed to lose a tiny, weeny pin which creates a ratchet for setting and holding the film-speed setting. After very much searching - this thing is really   tiny after all, I gave up and started in on the process of trying to engineer a solution of my own. I had to find a piece of stock approx 1mm diameter, and cut it down to about 3mm in length. Given the tools at my disposal, and not possessing a watchmake...

James and Leo were 'round this afternoon, and as usual, a lively debate was had for a while, sparked by the presence on the dining table, aka my winter "office", of my recently-acquired copy of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" of 2014, which I mentioned in a recent post. James had just watched a documentary based on that book and Piketty's later works, such as 2019's "Capital & Ideology", on Amazon Prime the other night, which I intend to watch soonish. BTW, the irony of watching documentaries about the evils of rentier global capitalism on Prime is not lost on me, so don't bother calling me out on that one. The central plank of Piketty's thinking is that were are being dragged back into the horrors of eighteenth and nineteenth century economics, where the gentry had, by dint of birth, enormous wealth in the form of land; and latterly, the captains of industry, usually emerging from the 'lower orders...

In a sideways continuation of last night's post, I'll return to analogue in the audio domain: I've mentioned before how I prefer the sound of old-school analogue recordings, warts and all, over the clinical presentation of digital formats. This has more to it than nostalgia or pigheadedness, and is more nuanced than the geeky-hifi-clinical-accuracy-crowd might have it. Music, and for that matter speech, and their reproduction are complex psycho-acoustic phenomena wrapped up in the enigma of human perception. The fact is, there's no such thing as a hifi recording that everyone could or would agree upon for 'accuracy', and anyway, the term was coined in the days when people only talked about recordings of live acoustic material, which was mostly orchestral: in fact I'd go so far as to say that the 'hifi' trend and its subsequent market rollercoaster of an industry was built upon that very narrow basis. Therein lies the fundamental untruth of the hifi m...

After I'd posted last night about the depiction vs. narrative aspects of the photographic space, I experienced a sudden and enormously welcome, almost Damascene revelation that, despite having been digitised and tweaked slightly in the virtual "darkroom" of software, the two images I used to illustrate the piece were still unequivocally, demonstrably and evidently analogue - film - in their origin: something I'd never considered before. Thinking about it in retrospect, though, no matter how we try, even at this late stage in our technological development [analogue photographic pun intended], making a digitally originated image look genuinely, organically analogue has simply escaped us, although the historical, generational and experiential cognitive bias of those born post analogue should be taken into consideration here: If you don't know what old school silver photography looks like in the first place, there's no comparison to be made. This has, understanda...

‘Photography unites the obvious and the unconscious at the level of the liminal - the border between what we see and what we suspect.’ Philip-Lorca diCorcia I said yesterday that I would talk about of the bifurcation of representation in photography and the arts into the literal and the narrative. The quote cited - specifically referring to photography - sums this up so eloquently, I do so wish I'd penned it myself. I've talked about the power of liminal spaces in the past, and have talked about narrative and time in photographs before, so I thought I'd chuck out a couple of examples from my own meagre output to illustrate that borderland between seeing and inference. Both pictures were shot by me in the late 1970s: the one at the top is titled "Chain & Anchor Works - Rowley Regis, 1978". The one at the bottom, "Waiting - Birmingham, 1978". The two carry very different narrative loads, one pretty much fixed and the other open to interpretation by t...

I did have a notion to explore the boundary lines between literal and narrative depiction, primarily in photography, but in the visual arts generally; and the rôle of the critic in shaping the overall structure and framing of those arts into the generalised - frankly spurious, in my opinion - groupings that we call 'movements', an idea to which no single artist would aspire, let alone adhere to. But I won't. I'm ready for the warmth of my fire, so I'll leave that one for now, but I'll definitely come back to it soon. In the interim, the storms have temporarily abated and the sky is somewhat more settled, as above [it's all relative, I know]. I've also dug out the Rollei SLX medium-format camera that I was gifted two or three years back by my old friend John from Aberystwyth, and which I intend to partner with Uncle Mac's 35mm Chinon and the Sigma zoom lens I won on eBay [blog posts passim], when we go down to Shropshire in a couple of weeks. The [Ro...

Liminal spaces: the intersections, boundaries and - almost- places - of change or union, are deeply embedded in the human psyche, evoking fear and fascination, anxiety and contemplation in equal measure. They provoke something visceral in us, reflecting, maybe, our uncertain or otherwise thoughts about our own mortality; that liminal space between being and not-being at the cusp of the ultimate change for each of us: the moment of our end as a person. I was reading the Life & Arts section of this weekend's FT, in the pub today, and came across a couple of pieces of note, which I think are not unconnected. The first was an appraisal of the exhibition of  Constantin Brâncuși ' s sculpture at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the second, looking at a show of the work of the ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu at the Noguchi Museum in New York. The former's work I have been aware of since I was a schoolboy, the latter blissfully unaware of until now, as I've been out of touch wi...

I was going to feature tonight's repast of Tagliatelle al la Ragu Bolognese, but decided against it: I've posted enough about my cooking for a while. Suffice it to say, the tried and tested recipe from the late, great Antonio Carluccio - the simplest and best - came up trumps yet again; although one day, I would like to mince my own pork and beef from the best butcher I could find, as I know it would raise the bar on quality of result by more than a few notches, as the meat is the absolute star in a ragu. Instead, pictured, the calm after the bloody storm that has raged and battered us for the last twenty-four hours. All through last night, and well into late afternoon today, it was pretty-well relentless, wearing itself out - finally - this evening, and leaving us with relative calm and an uncertain sunset. Winter ain't over yet; but the weirdest meteorological stats this weekend were the temperatures in the south of the UK, touching twenty-two Celsius. It get's weirde...

Interesting 'security alert' thrown up in the newspaper today, from a Labour backbencher, of all people; Fabian Hamilton, regarding China harvesting British genomic information by hacking into NHS DNA data via a Covid testing contract given to the BGI Group [a Chinese outfit], in order to '...analyse and predict which diseases may affect the British, or any other population...allowing Beijing to "acquire pharmaceutical patents and technologies that could seriously undermine any UK health initiatives."' Further, this page-eight piece in the weekend's i asserts that the Chinese have '"exerted enormous leverage" over the UK via its dominance of the solar panel industry to "punish strategic competitors" and create "dependancy". Really? And the West's slavish adherence to neoliberalism and macroeconomic free-market theories has nothing whatsoever to do with our turning over most of what we are to the Chinese in the first p...

Economically and socially, where we stand appears substantially to be where we stood back in the dark days before the Enlightenment of The New Left, and - in the UK at least - the Social Contract of the postwar era. For a fleeting period of our history, we seemed to have finally shed ourselves of the shackles of capital and inherited privilege. From the perspective of my youthful self, growing up in the fifties and sixties, the rest of the twentieth century and beyond offered the promise of a more egalitarian, equitable and simply fairer and saner society than had obtained prior to the Second World War, for centuries. As Thomas Piketty saw it - cf. the interview with him in the current New Statesman - in his 2014 book, "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", we have regressed, economically and politically, to an age of ..."patrimonial capitalism", paralleling the 'great' families of the landed gentry and the wealthy industrialists of the eighteenth and ninete...

  Finally achieved some significant progress on the wood/potting-shed rescue front, having got a door hung just before the rain started again this evening. I elected to do a kind of horse-box two-part barn-door thing, as it was easier and I like them anyway. There's some fettling and obviously a lot of painting to do, but at least it's reasonably watertight in the interim. This is a very old and badly maintained structure - mea culpa - but I felt it better to spend a few quid and some of the time I have in reasonably ample quantity - but you never do know, do you? - in giving the old thing a few more years of use. Which brings me to solar panels. I can start with a statement that I thought I would never hear myself making in a thousand lifetimes: I find myself in agreement with a bunch of Tory MPs. Apparently, the Conservative Environment Network are putting pressure on the government to legislate that all new-build housing in the UK be fitted with solar panels as standard: so...

  Pictured next to today's i newspaper are some examples of up/re-cycling. The rolls of old American colour film are out of date by some sixteen years, the camera pictured is a splendid example of an Olympus Mju Tough digital some fifteen years old, and next to it, there's a roll of Kodak motion picture film repurposed in a limited run for 35mm still camera use. All of these I intend to use on our upcoming short holiday in South Shropshire: the Olympus will make a pleasant substitute for doing the majority of my picture taking on the iPhone, despite the lower resolution of the output, and the rolls of film will be put through Mac's old Chinon [blog posts passim] using a rather oddball short Sigma zoom lens won on eBay for no money - originally released in 1975 - as its optics. As to the article visible in the paper in the photo, it would seem that a significant section of the Tory Party want to recycle what they consider to be abandoned Tory values, kick out those they deem...

A lazy diary post tonight - again - as I've been working on the woodshed door and sundry other domestic stuff all day. I was going to kick cooking into touch tonight, but a couple more beers revived my spirits, and I revisited a recipe I dreamt up a while back [blog posts passim], for the  leftover lamb from Easter Sunday, plus a few tweaks, such as full-fat greek yoghurt, fresh coriander and extra lemon juice. 'Twas spicy and the tasty buds did gyre & gimble on the tongue, so to speak. Anyway, I'm for putting my feet up as I've got to finish the woodshed door and paint the whole shebang tomorrow, so nos da, and I'll keep you posted...

  My little corner. I normally write this blog from the dining table, in winter in the dining room, or in summer the conservatory, when we move the table there for the warmer part of the year. However, I had to vacate my usual spot for yesterday's Easter lunch. I was intending to post a post-prandial report on the meal, with a pic of the rather splendid shoulder - we very seldom bother with leg: not enough flavour - of lamb, but time compressed, everyone arrived and we ate most of it before I realised I hadn't committed a thing to camera. Still, there you go, I've pictured many of our meals in the past, and lamb shoulder has featured a few times, to my reckoning, so a quick trawl through my previous posts will suffice to provide documentary evidence of the actual cooking of such stuff. This post is a bit meta, but it has reminded me that I should talk at some point about our experience of spit-roasting whole lambs, back in the 1990s, when we lived at Brynbella Cottage. I...