Observations from a Hill

Many, many moons ago, back in the 1960s, I was growing up, and out of my first 'proper' bike; a 24" wheel Rudge bicycle, that I had ridden since I graduated to it from the 'kiddie' cycle on which I learned to ride at the age of four or five, and which was nicked from me, anyway, by miscreant or miscreants unknown [the local police then, as now, saying that I would never see it again: they were right]. My dad, unable and unwilling to fork [sorry] out for a new machine of more sensible proportions to accommodate my growing frame [sorry], opted to do what was natural to him as a long-standing, poverty-stricken cyclist: he built one for me from component parts he either already had or made available from small ads in the Evening Mail or from friends and acquaintances. The basis of the build was a frame: a Reynolds 531 tube racing frame, that hung on the cellar wall, looking for wheels, crank and all the other bits that would complete a bicycle. As was usual, dad built ...

  Pictured: tonight's repast of lamb's liver with garlic and parsley, a recipe I wrote about here three years ago and mentioned in passing the other day. The actual origins of this particular thing are unknown to us, but we've been cooking it on and off for forty years or more, after finding it in a recipe book when we were still learning the ropes with cooking. Apologies for the rather hastily taken photograph, but this stuff needs eating straight away, as it continues to cook out in the dish, and will rapidly turn dry. The offal is literally cooked for scant seconds and should still be pink in the centre and slightly bloody in places at the surface when it comes out of the frying pan. The coups-de-grace of warmed butter, garlic, parsley and vinegar combine with the roux formed from frying the floured liver in copious quantities of extra-virgin olive oil, to form a sauce, which when mixed in with the meat, is not only sheer bliss on the tastebuds, but is actually really he...

    Whittling Whittling shavings drop And dry, Eventually to rot and dust And return To earth where they were once green And strong, that strength now gone. The knife cuts cut And now Dying wood, Its sap stickying On the blade, And darkening in the sunlight; Its own sun-light setting now. We pass as wood passes, And dry; Eventually to rot and dust And return To earth where we played And laughed; that laughter silenced.   From an idea that struck me on the drive home from Bangor this morning. The picture is of my grandma Harvey and her mother, taken many, many years ago in their backyard in Smethwick.  

OK - I said last night I would report on the Hot Jazz Broth of a curry I concocted yesterday. It was mighty fine, but not quite where I wanted it to be, so I won't post the recipe: call it a staging post or some such, on the way to my grail of recreating a classic Brum Madras, circa 1975. I will get there in the end, I'm sure of it, but I have been chasing this particular culinary rainbow now for well over forty years, ever since I first learned to cook, just after we came to North Wales, in 1980. What we'll be cooking tomorrow, though, is the legendary liver recipe we've been making and savouring for almost as long as my grail trail. A recipe that has been passed on to friends, who have since promulgated its glory amongst their friends and so on, to the present day. As I've written before, we can't claim authorship of the original recipe, and neither is it what its originating recipe book claimed it to be:  Provençal . As my late friend John-Charles Boude would...

  Tonight's bit of jazz cookery: chicken and green chillis in a thin broth of tomatoes, garlic, ginger, and Kashmiri chilli; featuring cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala and a touch of asafoetida. So far it tastes good , but I'm leaving it to steep overnight before attacking it full on. If it proves to be as fine as I think it will be, I'll post the recipe for you to have a go at. I'll be stocking up on the fine ready-made Indian breads and poppadums from my local Asian/African supermarket to accompany the thing tomorrow, anyway, so Nos da for now!

  It never ceases to amaze me how much about the world we inhabit there is to know: no matter how much education, formal, self or otherwise we have. No matter how many books we read, documentaries we watch, lectures we attend; the world we think familiar, everyday and mundane can offer surprises at every turn. I've started reading the english version of John Davies' "A History of Wales" recently - not a rewriting in English from an English perspective - of the original Welsh edition, but, as he says in the preface to my edition: '...there seemed to be a demand among English-speakers to read what was already available to Welsh-speakers. I decided to do no more than translate the original...' I'm glad he chose that path. I am still firmly entrenched in stone-and-iron-age Wales at the moment; and so at the very start of my journey with this book, and I was struck by a reference to an archaeological site, the modern topography of which I am only too familiar;...

Back in the late '70s/early '80s, the circle-A symbol could be seen practically everywhere, on flags at festivals, graffiti on the streets, t-shirts and punk fanzines: "Anarchy in the UK" by The Sex Pistols charted in 1977. The meme persisted well into Thatcher's reign of terror in the '80s. Anarchy is defined as an absence of government and law, and an anarchist as one who opposes all forms of government. A conservative is defined as one tending to avoid change; moderate: in favour of the rule of law and order. Unfortunately, I think someone forgot to brief the neo-liberals who have infested the chambers of Westminster for far too long, who are neither conservative nor moderate in temperament or intention, intent as they have been on removing the rules of law that govern and constrain the activities of big business and corporate finance and governance. This has resulted in numerous economic crashes and near total economic disaster by their hands over the d...

I dipped back into the family tree work yesterday after a short break from it - you can tie yourself in mental knots if you don't leave it out periodically - and came across  the above photo, posted by another researcher on Ancestry, who himself is a cousin of mine, although we don't know each other. The photo shows the children of Ironfounder Walter B. Rudge of Stafford, taken some time in the 1890s. All are my second cousins twice removed. The two in the foreground are Mary Constance and her brother Tom. Their lives panned out very differently indeed. Mary Constance was born in 1889 in Stafford, and by the age of twenty-two was an assistant schoolteacher in the employ of the County Council, where she appears to have stayed until 1927, when on the 28th of July, she embarked at the port of London on the P&O liner "Khyber", and bound for Shanghai, a journey of some three to four weeks in those days, sharing a berth with another teacher, from Cheshire. She was to st...

I came across an interesting, if somewhat disturbing piece in today's Financial Times, down on page twelve, about a potential and barely-averted financial catastrophe, centred on Citigroup, who have been fined some £62mn for briefly throwing European stock markets into a flat spin with a series of cock-ups and mis-steps between 2018 and 2022. They stand accused of having inadequate trading checks and controls in place, which resulted in one particularly eye-watering instance of a mistaken sale of $1.4bn of shares, when the original trade should have been $58mn. Some ham-fisted trader accidently typed in $444bn(!) and hit the go button. $255bn of the trade was actually blocked by Citigroup's internal controls, leaving $189bn to a trading algorithm to execute sale on automatically. Approximately $1.4bn worth of shares were sold before the trader managed to hit the panic button and stop the software from selling any more. The markets responded as they usually do - knee-jerk sellin...

  There you go: they've cracked at last and gone for a summer election and parliament is about to be dissolved until July. Why now, exactly, is open to much speculation, but my surmise is that fourteen years of trotting out the same old empty platitudes, internal culture wars between the far right and the - erm - less-far right might just have weakened their resolve to continue with the farce, with the stark reality of the polls further cementing their decision to jump. Sunak's outgoing performance - for surely to God there can be no return from this - was further reinforced by his bedraggled appearance: his silk suit ruined by the constant rain over Downing Street. If he imagined that continuing stoically through it all would lend an air of pathos to the situation, and garner him a measure of sympathy, this was loudly denied by some naughty people in the close environs of Number Ten playing 'Things Can Only Get Better' through a PA, almost drowning out his voice as the...

Been a fine day today, around 21C, and although a tad humid earlier on, very pleasant to be out in the garden and doing stuff. Pictured is the little plot I've been paying some attention to today. Some years ago, I created a little turn of steps down from the 'patio' into the side garden. Also, some years ago, the second cypress we planted suffered fire damage and we had it cut down as it was mostly dead. The ivy-covered post to the right of the picture is the remains of the thing. For some time I've been wanting to create an ivy arch from it to the shrub on the left, over the steps. Today I actually got around to starting the thing. I had some large withies left over from one of our annual culls of the old willows at the bottom of the garden, and one of them had set over a couple of years into a gentle arch shape, so I lashed that between the cypress stump and the shrub and tied the ivy that has been trying to find a home to it. I also took a slender branch of the shru...

Here's an optimistic mini-project for you: one of my dad's old chisels that somehow got left to rust and rot, overlooked in the shed-now-formally-known-as-the-woodshed. I found this venerable old thing amongst the piles of stuff - the most unsalvageable of which has been since chucked - that were infesting that small space and frankly getting right in the way of it being in any way, shape or form, functional, let alone useful. As you can see, it's not in a pretty shape, but as this is one of the old Winson Street tools that I remember from childhood, I think it only fair, right and proper that I should give it some care and attention in attempting to salvage it and return it to usable form. This could very well be easier said than done, as rust is a pernicious thing. However, I suspect that the underlying steel is of a pretty decent quality, and that it might just - through judicious cleaning, grinding and honing, be rescuable: keep you posted...

Very much a diary post tonight as I'm waiting for Paula Vennells three-day grilling at the Post Office Enquiry next week, with bated breath. How she will square her action/inactions with her God, let alone the enquiry itself or indeed the church she represents, will be a good watch, I'm sure. However, for now: pictured, the view from the side garden this evening, after a glorious day's sunshine that started with Fairview Heights looking down onto thick mist a hundred foot or so beneath us, first thing this morning. When I drove Jane into work at about half-past-eight, Bangor lay under a thick layer of dense, cool mist, with the only things visible out to sea at Hirael being the masts of boats moored out there. A good day, though, all in all...

Two things - maybe three - or even four, if I can hold the thread together: I am post-prandially challenged at the moment and have driven a fair few miles earlier in the day, picking Jane up from The Stretton Fox this lunchtime, en route back from her visit to her mom in Carnforth, this week. Two points firstly, raised from pieces in the i newspaper yesterday and today. Katy Balls in the weekend rag asserts that the Tories are losing the very last bastion of their electoral support: pensioners. Speaking knowledgeably as one of that amorphous cohort of older people myself, I can honestly state, hand on heart, that I have never - ever - voted Conservative in my entire life, and the thought of changing that position simply for the reason that I had entered the - ahem! - twilight years of my life, would never have crossed my mind in a million years [why on earth would I?]. Secondly, the debate over what Labour should, will or can do about turning this benighted archipelago's econom...

Just a diary post tonight - pictured, three acquisitions made today in Bangor. The two books from Relics and the lens sitting atop purchased from the Junk Shop which now occupies the original Relics building at the Mount Street end of town. On the left is a copy of The Planiverse by A.K Dewdney, which I've been on the look out for a long time now. I originally read a copy that my mate Dave lent me some thirty-five years ago: it cost me two quid. On the right is a copy of Ahead of the Game, by Calvin Tomkins, again two quid, which was a book I had throughout my time doing my degree in Fine Art in the 1970s, which I mislaid somewhere along the way: good to find another copy. The lens is an enlarger lens: a Durst Componon 1:5.6/150 by Schneider-Kreuznach; tailor made for the Durst enlarger I won on eBay for 99p some time ago [blog posts passim]. The cost? the princely sum of a fiver. Similar lenses go for ninety quid on eBay, although there are a couple of scratches and blemishes on t...

I've been watching the [UK] Post Office Scandal Enquiry today and listening to the testimony of Lesley Sewell - former CIO at Post Office Limited. I'll just say that she came over as someone completely and utterly traumatised by a seriously negative workplace experience. What she actually said, or simply alluded to, will have far-reaching and hopefully legally dire implications for those at the heart of this corporate travesty. Two things: Firstly, Horizon was built upon an off-the-shelf system called Riposte. The naive among our number would naturally imagine that a complex, networked accounting system would be based on a robust DBMS [database management system], programmed appropriately for the purposes of account management; the fundamental principles of which were laid down by Italian bankers and merchants centuries ago [the principles of double-entry book-keeping still hold good to this day]. But no, they chose to build this shoddy edifice on the back of an XML-based mes...

  Just a diary post tonight as I'm short of ideas at present. The view above was last night's sunset/dusk from the garden. We've had a good day's sunshine today, too, with a very short, very sharp rain shower in the late afternoon. One thing of note, today, though, is that I took delivery of a book I ordered the other day: a reprint of one of the official books produced on the Second World War, regarding the airborne forces. The volumes in these official accounts offer incredible amounts of detail, both textual and graphical, about orders of battle - as granular at least as to regimental involvement - in all of the various deployments featuring them, and I hope to flesh out my uncle Arthur's story with the First Airborne [blog posts passim] - from Sicily to Arnhem - with a great more detail than I currently hold: I will definitely keep you posted on this...

Been watching some of today's testimony before the the Post Office Scandal Public Enquiry from Mark Davies, former Group Communications Affairs Director for Post Office Limited. It's interesting that the further up the food-chain of corporate management this enquiry interrogates, the slicker and less intimidated the individuals concerned become: almost to the point of pathological dissociation from the events they actively participated in. Rather than simply lying about their individual culpability, the current lot seem perfectly happy in claiming the high ground of having being misguided, in hindsight of their appreciation of their former misdeeds. Rather than than throwing other participants under the bus, these latter interviewees seem confident in extolling the virtues and actions of their seniors in the affair, whilst denying personal culpability on the grounds that that was then and this is now, despite solid evidence of their contemporaneous complicity in attempting to p...

Whatever one thinks of Natalie Elphicke, MP - not a great deal in my case - her defection to the Labour side of the house was not at Labour or Kier Starmer's instigation. Welcoming a defector from the right of the Tory Party into their ranks might be considered politically pragmatic on the one hand, and a free cudgel offered to the client press backing the current government with which to beat the Labour Party on the other. No-one believes that Elphick has experienced some glorious Damascene epiphany on the road to Enlightenment, but the sudden *reveal* of her alleged scandalous attempt to lobby the law on behalf of her husband, 'itchy-twitchy-fingers' Charlie - accused and later convicted of sexual assault on two women - a scandal unremarked by anyone until she crossed the house, smacks frankly of a pathetic attempt to ally Ms Elphick with Kier Starmer in some foetid conspiracy. That is, frankly, pathetic bollocks, and I really don't think there are many left out there...

I've written before about my uncle Arthur's involvement in the Second World War, and I've mentioned that he spent eight hours floating in the Med after his glider, along with many others, was released too early by inexperienced American crews flying the tugs that would take them to the planned invasion of Sicily, and dropped them in the drink. Two hundred and fifty two men drowned as a result. My uncle survived. Only to end up being redeployed to Holland on Operation Market Garden - the subject of the film 'A Bridge Too Far', where he was captured after experiencing God knows only what, and as a result of which he spent the rest of the war in relative safety as a POW. But I want to leave you with a quotation relating to the previous World War - The Great War - and the Western Front where my distant cousin Tom died a few weeks into his service at the age of barely twenty-one years old. It's from 'The Middle Parts of Fortune' by Frederic Manning, a novelis...

Jane picked up on this today on Facebook: my sister posted it. I can't say I'm particularly familiar with Steinbeck, but this resonates so much, I had to put it out there. That last phrase: '...but the sky was as mournfully bright as memory...' sums up so much about life in just nine words, as to be an entire philosophy in itself. Thanks, sis...

Red chillis drying in the afternoon sun, beim Wintergarten heute: a sure sign that things, weather-wise are on the turn for the better. We've had such a long and miserable Autumn and Winter this twelve-month, that I think we deserve a bit of solar cheer at long last. There was evidence of a mackerel sky this afternoon that can only bode well for the next few days. We've got guests in at the moment and they look to have struck lucky for their three nights with us. All power to it, and let's look forward to more of the same! 

  A lovely afternoon here in Fairview Heights [fans of the late, great John Peel should get the oblique reference when I use the term], with a temperate - ahem - temperature and some decent sunshine and blue sky. The male blackbird that sits atop the tallest tree we have - a good forty or fifty-footer - has sung at the top of his voice for most of the day: glorious, and all of it as a piece leaving one with an absolute glow of positivity for the coming season. Pictured, me going sub-optimal Walker Evans in monochrome: the studio door etc., in the slanting light of the late afternoon sun.

  Made a start this afternoon on getting some semblance of order back into the chaos of the studio. Last summer, I scored the above storage unit in a roadside freebie, near the Co-op in Bishop's Castle. It's been sat under a pile of nuts, bolts, washers, etc., all still stored in their original purchase containers and taking up far too much valuable volume and floor space. Aside from those, there were also - still are - myriad random jars and tins of stuff lying around the place, largely unsorted. To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, the studio itself is six metres by four by three metres to the apex, and it's rapidly approaching capacity now. Into the compact little unit pictured has gone the contents of half-a-dozen plastic boxes and a similar number of jars of various sizes. There is much more to be sorted: I can't locate my little stash of 1/4" Whitworth hex bolts [I need those for the old man's lathe] for instance, and much more besides. I can ...

  Today really has been the first flush of Spring, with some genuine warmth in both the sun and the breeze. We've done a stint in the garden today, including the above bit of late afternoon tree surgery up in Wuthering Heights, the tumbledown remains of number six, Y Ffridd, the corner stones of which descended to ground-level in an earth tremor one night, a few years back, which I think I've mentioned before elsewhere in these pages. The cut end you can see pictured was a branch that had split and partially fallen in the storms this Autumn/Winter. I guess it was about twenty foot in length. I duly separated it from its erstwhile host with the chainsaw and stacked up the larger bits to season for firewood next year. Very bucolic, indeed: wine and pizza beckons...

Pictured, the results of the much-needed re-engineering of the cheap-as-chips fireside log rack we bought just after we installed the wood-stove. You can just see the pair of M8-threaded studs I made to pull the thing together, through the original tubing that forms the links between the two frames. The other two pairs of tubes now effectively act as mere spacers, whereas in the original construction, the six were meant to hold the whole thing together: there were crappy push-in plastic plugs with a nut pushed into them, which were stuffed into the open ends of the tubes. These took little hex-bolts which went through the holes in the outside of the frames, which in themselves are of a perfectly decent construction. The end-result was obviously always going to be rubbish; as when you tightened up the hex-bolts, the natural tendency was for the crappy plastic plugs to be pulled from the tubes. Worse still, some of the nuts simply came away from said crappy plastic plugs. Garbage. So I d...

...I wonder where the boidies is? [© the late, great Spike Milligan]. It actually did feel like Spring today, with warm sunshine all day, a light - albeit still edgy - breeze, and birdsong to die for as a backing track. Everything in the garden is at its best this time of year, and the devastation of the previous Autumn and Winter seem at last to be behind us. We need to make the most of it while we can: there's shrub-taming to be done, and the grass will be needier of attention, but it's all do-able. There's a couple of projects I need to start in on, such as finishing repainting the old shed and sticking some felt on the roof before Autumn; or there's the idea of a shady area bench/table combo that I'd really like for when the hot weather kicks in. A pond for the amphibians would be nice, and some bat-boxes; nesting boxes for the small birds for next year, and cutting back the holly trees would be a good idea, too. Who said retirement would be a desert of inactivi...

Very short diary post tonight. Leo's birthday supper: chilli beef and beans, followed by blueberry cake. A good session of music and conversation that lasted until nine in the evening: frankly a record, these days, considering the very long time - usually into the early hours - we used to spend around the table in our [relative] youth, back in the eighties and nineties: much of which culture was touched on in conversation tonight. A proper evening, methinks, and I look forward to more of the same in the future...  

Difficult to know where to aim this one, as I'm knackered - nothing unusual there, you might hazard - and I don't have a lot to offer on the Post Office enquiry front, as my internal jury is out on whether Jarnail Singh is anything but the Post Office's corporate fall-guy in all of this. It remains to be seen. The whole thing I think hangs on the proposition that the government inherited this Thatcherised bastard of an organisation in 2010, and were intent on offing it to the private sector at a decent profit as soon as possible, in true Tory style. The only flaw in their plan, however, was the uncomfortable fact that the company's gloriously shoddy software 'system' had caused myriad accounting errors that led to hundreds of erstwhile decent and honest sub-postmasters and mistresses being falsely accused and convicted of crimes they had not committed, due to the frankly crappy programming of their flagship 'system', Horizon. Embarrassing, and not conduc...

Lasagne, like politics, Italian or otherwise, is frankly messy. And whilst getting meat sauce and  Béchamel  down the front of one's shirt is one thing; messy politicking is far from easy to clean up. Today's PO Ltd. Horizon scandal enquiry session rather exemplifies that. Shaggy's "It Wasn't Me..." should be the theme tune to every broadcast episode: especially now we're into the legals: on the face of their evidence, not one of these eejits should have passed their degrees in law in the first place, let alone been called to the bar [where applicable], so apparently incapable of recall as they appear to be. It's amazing that total recall from these people is possible when tasked with remembering something non-self-incriminating and involving third parties; but how memory simply fades to a blank when that asked would land them in the drink. The question for me, is just what sword of Damocles is hanging over these coward's heads? If they simply fes...

Ray's funeral today at St. Cross Church, Tal-Y-Bont, followed by her committal at Coetmor cemetery, joining her late husband Ronald, at last. A lovely service, part humanist, part Christian; with a Christian burial along with Ronald in what can only be considered a beautiful resting place: looking back East towards their home in Caellwyngrydd with the low foothills of the Carneddau behind.