Observations from a Hill

Pictured, tonight's repast of lamb loin chops roasted in olive oil and rose harissa, with boiled tenderstem broccoli and what are now becoming a personal standby: Greek-style potato wedges with lemon, oregano and garlic, served with the roasting juices as a sauce. Now, I didn't know I was going to cook this until we got back from town and Jane presented me with a bunch of random ingredient choices that she'd bought in Marks on her lunch break today., a bit like an episode of 'Ready, Steady Cook'. As I've said before in these pages, when we moved to North Wales forty-three and a bit years ago, I barely knew how to boil water, let alone cook food. But, armed with the experience I've managed to amass in the intervening decades, I knew straight away what I'd cook tonight, even though, as always with jazz cookery, I was riffing it. Anyhow, this an easy and extremely tasty Sunday supper for two: Marinate four chops in a roasting dish in three dessert-spoons [t...

Someone I know recently dropped the phrase '...new world order...' into a conversation we were having about the shitty state of the world and politics in general. Apart from the realisation that this person had obviously been exposed to the ravings of the - shall we say, more outré - streams of 'thought' that pass for information on't internet, I was surprised that someone older than I, [a man after all not in the first flush of youth myself, shall we say *cough*] - should buy into the mad narratives offered up by the lunatic fringe of the online community. When decades of pre-internet life and experience, a blessing to those of us born in the days of open-copper-wire telephony and 'the wireless', are swept away by anonymous paranoiacs stinking their lives away in foetid bedrooms, huddled over their laptops; one has to wonder at the levels of susceptibility - I hesitate to use the word 'gullibility' - of so many people in society to such crap. This o...

Further to yesterday's post about Gareth Jenkins testimony to the Post Office Scandal Enquiry, I stand on my thesis that he was put up by Fujitsu to take the flak that was headed their way in the light of the fact that their Horizon software systems for the Post Office created problems over an extended period of time, as is now a matter of record and widely known. It would appear as I hinted at yesterday, that the message-passing back down the line from PO Ltd. to Fujitsu regarding software issues was partial and restricted at best. That there was corporate/government subterfuge in the attempted cover-up of issues with the system is now also a given. What needs to be drawn out is the extent and scope of the conspiracy to pervert the course of justice, which now appears to lie at board level within both companies, and within government itself. There have been hints of some deeply unpleasant coercion of this week's witness to comply with the instructions of his 'superiors...

... is my take thus far on Gareth Jenkins' testimony to the Post Office Scandal Enquiry. Today, his penultimate day of giving evidence before the enquiry, and his final day of questioning by the enquiry legal, Jason Beer; has seen Beer painstakingly, and often quite painfully, tease out Jenkins' exact rôle and place in the affair. A carefully scripted alternation of attack and gentle cajoling on Beer's behalf, evinced, by the end of the day, a picture of a man nominated and used by his company's management to be their useful fool, assigning to a technician 'political' and procedural responsibilities that he had neither the skills nor experience to fulfil. In short, a fallback scapegoat should their ultimate corporate aims fail. A picture has emerged over the last few years of a peculiar and incestuous set of owner/client/provider relationships with roots stretching back to the days of the formation of ICL [which was to become a Fujitsu UK subsidiary], which Jenk...

We went down to the other side of Dolgellau for lunch at the Cross Foxes Inn this afternoon, meeting up with John and Sandra and John's nephew Gavin. We stopped off on the way, to have a mooch around Dolgellau itself, not have visited there for years: God knows why as it's a lovely town, and set against a backdrop of wooded hills and bathed in the early summer sun, it's an absolutely fine place to be, and only an hour-and-a-half or so from home. We had a drink sat outside The Royal Ship Hotel before heading off for our rendezvous at the Foxes. A very pleasant couple of hours spent over lunch on the terrace there and then we parted company and Jane and I took the coast route back from there, through Barmouth and Harlech - which has the most extraordinary swathe of beach and sand dunes beyond it - stopping off at the mouth of the Mawddach Estuary en route to take a picture of the railway viaduct that crosses it [pictured]; and home via Beddgelert, Dyffryn Mymbyr, Capel Curig ...

I was going to comment on the piece in the FT over the weekend about über-wealthy people fleeing these shores because of the forthcoming changes to Non-Dom status [why should any normal person care about that, anyway?]; the frenzy that is forming over 'Bet-gate' that has now spilled over from the Tory Party to the Metropolitan Police - insider information, your honour? - to a lone Labour Party candidate having placed a bet on his own electoral chances: a somewhat different kettle of gambled fish in my opinion, but indicative of the stupidly febrile times in which we live. I also intended to comment on the first day's testimony of Gareth Jenkins before the Post Office Scandal enquiry today, but I'm keeping my powder out of the rain on that one at least till the middle of his four day hearing. So I won't mention any of these at all, and just reflect on living in the glorious place that I do. Pictured, the fledgeling arch over my recently-finished steps down from the p...

At last, June feels actually like June: twenty-four Celsius late on this afternoon rounded off a pleasant day all round. We went over to The Bull, Biwmares for lunch, where, again to my dismay, the Bass was off once more. I settled for a perfectly fine pint of local ale, which in any other context would be lauded for its qualities. But when you want a pint of Bass, you want a pint of Bass, and nowt else will cut it. I'd have it mandated by statute that the stuff should have protected status; be compulsorily for sale in all pubs, hotels and other hostelries; and have a dedicated, brewery-trained cellarman attached to each outlet, with no other duties to perform save nurturing the finest pint of the golden nectar possible for the consumption of its doting audience. This is as close to a secular religion as one could imagine. The strangest thing here in North Wales? The pubs are closing as fast as the chapels: makes no sense whatever to me...  

  Tonight's repast: belly pork slices roasted with apple and olive oil, Greek-style potatoes roasted with lemon, oregano and olive oil, and boiled tenderstem broccoli. We like our flavours big up here in Fairview Heights, and this one has it in spades. I will say that as usual, the spuds take centre-stage and the meat itself rolls in third: the fat layers below the meat, however are something else. Growing up a working class lad in Birmingham in the fifties and sixties, rendered meat fat; particularly pork and beef, were a significant part of my diet. The best chip-shop in the part of the Green [blog posts passim] where I grew up was at the the bottom of Chiswell Road, where my mate Jeff lived: they were the last in the immediate area that still fried their fish and chips in beef dripping: if you've never tried it, you've never lived. Hake - yes hake - and chips fried in beef fat: glorious to the point of fainting on the spot from its unctuousness and all-round gorgeousness...

A good sidebar piece by Mariana Mazzucato in the New Statesman this week, under the portmanteau article titled "How to Fix a Nation": a series of short essays by commentators various. The byline is titled ' Britain is stuck in a cycle of underinvestment. The next government has to break it '. It encapsulates for me the essential truths that lie at the heart of our economic and societal woes presently, and emphasises the lies that are at the heart of them all. Lies that have been consistently propagated and continually reinforced by the right wing for the last forty-odd years. The main plank of course is the bilateral mantra of increasing economic growth and reducing public debt, which was infantilised by Margaret Thatcher with her domestic budgeting simile. The ultimate corollary of this childish notion is austerity and the strict application of fiscal rules. OK to an extent on the micro level, but applied at the macro? - the results can tragically be seen in the effe...

I can't but mention the extraordinary testimony given today by George Thomson - Former General Secretary of the National Federation of Postmasters - to the Post Office Scandal enquiry today. He was described by Sam Steen KC, appearing for aggrieved sub-postmasters/mistresses, as aggressive and belligerent, which kind of neatly, if a tad politely, summed up Mr. Thomson's 'performance', for that is exactly what it was: performance. Loquacious(!) in the extreme, Mr T defended the Post Office position in general  (whilst curiously, apparently rubbishing the organisation itself at every turn)  and the Horizon system in particular, to the hilt. Even when challenged with the evidence that both Post Office and the software's provider Fujitsu, and indeed the very association he formerly headed, all had admitted there were concrete issues with the system in question - Horizon - that had led to the one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK legal history, he doubled down, ...

I was going to continue where I left off yesterday with the Government/Post Office/Fujitsu axis of evil, but I've spent several hours today in starting to clear the rather fierce growth of ivy off the gable end of Fairview Heights. I gave up for the day at the point shown: the remaining clump high up being at the apex, which is the most difficult to access due to the uneven nature of the ground below. I'll have to use the stile-extender on one leg of the ladder to make it stable enough to get a decent reach on the job. The [ghastly, I know] expanse of grey pebbledash that can be be seen, was almost completely covered in a thick carpet of ivy, and the bases of the tendrils at ground level were 3/4" thick. The growth in the foreground can be dealt with from the front of the building, so will be much easier. I do love the sight of a covering of the stuff on a house, but it does carry some concomitant penalties with it, so cull it once in a while we must. More on the GovPolFuj...

More watching the Post Office Scandal Enquiry today, with the testimony - and I use that word advisedly - of two former Chief Execs of Fujitsu: Richard Christou, former CEO and Executive Chairman of Fujitsu Services Holdings plc; and Duncan Tait, former CEO of Fujitsu Services Ltd. The former seemed simply peeved to be there answering questions at all, interjecting the interrogative 'Yes?' as if to suggest that he was simply above the whole affair and really should be playing golf in the Algarve, rather than answering questions put to him about his part in what, after all, is a matter of some public gravity, to say the least. His assertion that the product provided to Post Office Ltd., which was designed and supplied by the company he headed, did not [I paraphrase wickedly, but the crux and substance of the issue remain] actually need to function correctly, so long as the word of the contractual relationship with the client was kept [he even tried the 'Angels dancing on the...

I was watching a YouTube on the channel 'Jolly', where the small British team and frontman were getting the reactions of a number of groups of Americans to their eating British chocolate for the first time, on camera. All fairly innocuous stuff and quite entertaining content. But what stood out for me, as it has quite often these days, was the inclusion in the 'panel' of a fellow YouTube creator, Gotham Chess, aka Levy Rozman, whose channel I frequently watch. It strikes me that YouTube is a pretty accurate mirror of that wonderfully regressive social construct, the 'Urban Village'. I say wonderfully regressive in the sense that the natural human tendency is to form manageable-sized relationship groups, even - perhaps more so - when living in a large metropolis alongside millions of others. Which makes sense, given the way societies develop: we feel safer and happier when we have a 'neighbourhood' that fits our scale and scope. We can easily cope with a ...

  Pictured, photographer David Parkinson: Joe's mate from the seventies and much vaunted snapper of that era, who worked as a street and fashion photographer: a combination of sub-genres already well established in the wake of people such as David Bailey, Terence Donovan, et al, from the fifties through the sixties, combining the quick fire shooting techniques of the photojournalist, urban landscapes, social commentary and fashion: the emphasis being on spontaneity, real or 'orchestrated'. I wondered where one might put the origin of at least the core of the genre. The obvious divider would seem to be purely technical: a lightweight and unobtrusive camera seeming to be the most significant driver in capturing one's environment and its inhabitants with as little intrusion on it as possible. Again, the obvious starting point would conceivably be the development of the Leica by Oskar Barnack, which was the first adoption of 35mm cinematic film to replace the slow-to-use ph...

Right, I was going to write a piece about street photography, inspired by something Joe shared with me this morning, but I have to break off from that trajectory for this evening due to the above pictured meat and potatoes. Jane brought back a couple of 'Lamb Rump Steaks' from M&S this afternoon - the meat meat shelves had been blitzed; we'd wanted to cook a half-shoulder and roast potatoes, but this was all that was left in the lamb department - and to be frank, I was not entirely sure how I wanted to cook them: they are, after all, not really a 'cut' of meat; rather some marketing wonk's idea of how to sell the remains of a carcass after all the 'proper' cuts have been taken from it. There's a lot of - too much - connective tissue and not a great deal of fat to work with; so I decided a Middle-Eastern marinade of pomegranate molasses, chilli flakes, garlic and olive oil etc., would possibly do the trick. The spuds were a pack of bakers, so I fi...

Today's welcome announcement that Alan Bates has been knighted in the King's birthday honours list is a feather in the cap for The Other Ranks, The Man on The Clapham Omnibus; The People With 'Ordinary' Lives: People Like Us. The news came just as the Post Office's legals have finished being interrogated by the Scandal Enquiry this week; the last of which effectively making public, under oath, the Post Office's strategy to let the postmasters outspend themselves into defeat in the face of the inexhaustible [public] coffers of cash at the organisation's disposal. Next week sees the start of testimony featuring Second Sight and Fujitsu, which, all things being equal, should give us insight into the nature of the command/control structure at the heart of the scandal. Maybe we'll see the face of Colonel Kürz in the shadowy depths of The Establishment, maybe not: but one thing's for sure, we'll see a little more clearly the rôle the spooks of Whitehal...

Well, I'm slowly homing in on exactly where my Uncle Arthur, 'humble' Private that he was, featured in Operation Market Garden at Arnhem, Holland, in 1944: it's very difficult to focus down on the rôle of 'other ranks', given the nature of military structure and reporting. I signed up to a website run by the Paras and put Arthur's details up for inclusion on the roll that they have there; including all the details known to me about his service. Upon checking my entry, I got confirmation that they had checked the details out and put him up on the site: When I looked at the entry, I found that they had included the very detail - unprompted, so they must actually be referring to his actual records - that I've been wondering about how to glean for some time: I now know which company and platoon he was with, which narrows things down for me considerably. He, according to their amendment to my submission, '...fought as a member of HQ Company, Signals Plato...

  As much as yesterday's weather was marked by the deepest blue, today is a uniform grey in tone. It's raining and blowing a bit of a hoolie out there, and the sea is concomitantly rough: you can just make out the white horses at the top right of the picture. I'd like to get a closer look and a more representative image, but I won't: I'm staying put with a cold beer and a bar of chocolate. I won't need much more to eat today as I had a good plate of excellent fish & chips and a couple of pints of blonde ale for lunch at the aforementioned Sun Inn, Llanengan. We did venture into Abersoch, first thing, for a mooch around the shops; but that somehow loses its appeal when the weather outside more resembles late November than high summer. We had coffee and read the papers for an hour in a rather pleasant bistro in the middle of the little harbour town, and then baled out back to the cottage until lunchtime. We'll see what tomorrow throws at us, as and when......

We went over to the Nefyn side of Pen Llŷn today, to try and find a little cove tucked away almost out of sight from the world: Porth Iago. It's like a little slice of a Greek Island, and the sky and sea today were as blue as the Aegean itself in the sunshine. Only the chill Northerly we're still in the grip of belied the impression of a Mediterranean summer's day. It was as quiet as quiet could be, but I guess that now the Wales Coastal Path has been re-routed close by, that it will experience a bit more footfall than it currently enjoys. However, as Pen Llŷn is practically our back garden, we will get plenty of opportunity to enjoy the place out of season. Whatever, it's a little pearl of a place: a place to be savoured and lingered over. Rain and wind forecast for tomorrow, although looking out at the bay this evening, you'd never guess. So it's the pub for lunch tomorrow, methinks...  

Been a bit of a mixed batch of skies today: at six this morning, the sky was blue and cloudless, the sun shining. Through the morning it clouded over and became quite overcast. We'd already decided to have a less strenuous day today and the two of us drove into Pwllheli to mooch around the shops for a couple of hours, whilst Carol & Kevin headed over towards Aberdaron for the day. We bought a couple of books from a lovely little bookshop we usually frequent when down this way, and the town is always a pleasant place to visit in general. The only downer this year is finding that there was only one operating bank left, with the only other closed for 'renovation', leaving just one cashpoint in the main streets, and the bookshop only accepts cash. Chwarae teg [fair play] to him though, as we should really try and use more of the stuff before it disappears altogether. Stopped off at Abersoch - rammed to the gunwhales as usual by tourists with money and big cars - for groceri...

We finally, after many years of goading and cajoling back and forth, got the four of us; myself, Jane Carol & Kevin, to the top of Carn Fadryn this morning; a round trip to the top and back of around four kilometers [two-and-half miles], with about 620 feet each of ascent and descent, and at 1200+ feet at the top, the wind was cold, strong and straight from due North. I last went up there some twenty-five or six years ago with Jane's father, Alec. The picture above was taken from just below the trigpoint at the top of the summit tor, and features the distinctive saw-back ridge of Yr Eifl in the distance, often called The Rivals in English, although the Welsh name means 'The Fork'. From whichever direction you care to face from there, however, there is a magnificent panorama spread before you. 

Today's weather has been rather less clement than yesterday's; overcast and chilly, and since late afternoon, wet; so I've been stuck into my most recently-purchased book on Arnhem, pictured. Thus far, I've reached Tuesday, September 19th. 1944, a week before my uncle, Arthur Harvey [blog posts passim] was captured - September 26th. - and moved to his first German POW camp. Reading the personal accounts of soldiers on both sides and Dutch civilians, I am increasingly bewildered as to how he got out of it physically unscathed. As the battalion diary recorded at the time, he might have made it home: 26th September 1944 Place: Holland   The remnants of the Bn, moved down to NIJMEGEN through a drizzle of rain.  Everyone was wet, but the men were cheerful.  Met 1st seaborne who took them to billets where they found food and dry clothing.   27th September 1944 Place: Holland   The Bn was refitted with new battledress.  The men were smart again, and once again, ch...

Looking out towards Ynys Enlli [ or Bardsey Island] and Aberdaron across the bay from where we stay down here. As usual, the sun greets our arrival, belying the keenness of the wind, which is still exhibiting a Northerly sharpness. The earthen bank to the right centre of the picture is a type of field field boundary common here, although the facing stones that prevent erosion have in this case been subsumed over time into the grass of the fields it separates. Boundaries such as these - along with other types of such structures are called cloddiau; each clawdd consisting of an earthen bank faced with sloping retainers built of field stone. The earth between is rammed compact for strength, apart from the top fifth or so, which is left loose enough to encourage growth of grass and plants. The style above is most common here in the North West of Wales, particularly here in Pen Llŷn and on Ynys Môn [ or Anglesey ]; although the style can be found in many parts of the UK. BTW, the 'ston...

Off down Pen Llŷn tomorrow for a short break, to our usual haunt above Hell's Mouth [pictured], more properly known as Porth Neigwl, the magnificent four-mile stretch of beach that goes from Mynydd Rhiw at one end to Mynydd Cilan at the other, with the smaller cove of Porth Ceiriad just around the small separating headland that divides them. It's so good to live somewhere where it's possible to take a complete break and change of scenery easily within an hour of home: the sheer variety of North Wales landscapes within our county is, even now, after forty-four years of living here, frankly staggering, and a wonder to behold. I'll be posting, as usual, from our temporary base, over the next week. Not sure what the weather will bring to the party, but we'll roll with what we get, nevertheless.

There's little crowing, and even less overt optimism over the coming election from a Labour standpoint, in this week's New Statesman, even given the poll lead that Labour continue to command and the self-evident meltdown of the Tory government and even the party itself. How very British. How very cautious and unwilling to hope for too much of the outcome of the election. Even when droves of Tory MPs are heading for the fire exit in fear of their future employability in the real world. Even when the government are throwing scraps at what they imagine is the last remaining dregs of their electorate - my generation of oldies - wrong move, dickheads, we're Boomers. Even[!] when all the economic arguments, the sleaze, grift and the unbelievable levels of social inequality point inexorably to an absolute, fundamental, visceral  need for seismic political change; still the Left are cautious to the point of fretting that we have somehow got it wrong and we will get bitten yet agai...

Just read a 2018 essay on the estimable Tommy Flowers [blog posts passim], by Thomas Haigh of The University of Wisconsin in the IEEE annals of the History of Computing, outlining his background, rise and eventual [effectively] sidelining in the postwar years; his achievements for the war effort not becoming publicly-known until 1976: a true Working Class Hero. His achievements went unsung for so long because of government secrecy rules, even though the technology that he employed in the creation of the machine to aid in breaking the German Lorenz cypher was obsolete, even by the 1960s. Today, also, we watched the bulk of the first day's testimony to the Post Office enquiry by its former Chair, Alice Perkins, who, in lockstep with her former CEO, Paula Vennell's testimony and so many others interrogated thus far, remembered in great detail all that would not impinge on her own self in a court of law, should it eventually come to that. In a sea of pinpoint recall with strategica...

If you thought F1 had become stultifyingly boring through corporate interference and the continuing escalation of sponsorship bollocks; think again: there's a new kid in town and he's even worse. I share with you possibly one of the most surreal, nay, absurd spectacles of our modern age: the AI-powered motor race that recently 'happened' on the Abu Dhabi F1 circuit. Shambles, farce, outright folly, or triumph of software engineering; call it what you will, but t'weren't racing, m'boy. A stupidly expensive attempt at something completely bereft of purpose or future maybe, but the future of motorsport? Give me break. As clever as it is to actually get these vehicles to navigate their way around anywhere is; the failure of these cutting edge vehicles to do so consistently or frankly safely,  makes me worry that, like the Post Office and Horizon, we cleave too much to 'tech' at the expense of basic utility, and at a potential cost to real people's l...

Pictured is what I thought was going to be my next repair project: a Pentax MV1 with a 50mm f2 lens, purchased for the princely sum of twenty quid plus change, including postage; which arrived this afternoon. The lens has issues in that the focussing helix is jammed, and I thought initially that the body also had problems: the override 1/100th sec. speed (it's flash sync speed) was functioning OK and was sounding sweet as a nut. But when I put fresh batteries into it, neither did the electronics fire up, but the flash sync and B settings failed to work properly, which I thought odd. I did the usual YouTube search for known problems and repairs and came across a guy repairing a Pentax ME - the more expensive predecessor of this one [although they are pretty much mechanically one and the same camera]. His video seemed to indicate a possible failure of a thin, flexible circuit board wrapped around  the pentaprism at the top of the camera, which he repaired with some heroically delicat...

So, Sunak's mentalist National Service concept for our eighteen-year-olds idea is, to quote most of the media coverage on the thing, '...meant to appeal to the over-65s...'. I'm now approaching seventy, and neither am I a Tory voter - see just about any of my blog posts for confirmation of that simple fact - or anywhere old enough to have had any direct experience of the post-war National Service Programme that they imagine our demographic will be nostalgically be misty-eyed about: I was still at junior school when they got shut of the damned thing, fer chrissakes. As far as I can remember, the previous generation weren't exactly keen on the idea of peacetime conscription either, largely making themselves as useless as possible at whatever allotted tasks or rôles they were assigned to, if so conscripted. Any hopes he has of winning over the legions of socialist pensioners such as us - and all of our social ambit - are doomed to failure, as I would rather string myse...

I read this letter in yesterday's Guardian and I want to share it with you in the light of Rishi Sunak's ridiculous notion of re-introducing National Service. Think on people... Click the 'Read More' button to see his letter in full.