Observations from a Hill

  Pictured, my latest acquisitions; a Soviet-era Zorki-4 camera, familiar to anyone who follows old-school film photography as one of Russia's 'knock-off Leicas', and an Opinel No:08 gardening knife I picked up on my trip to Kirkby Lonsdale yesterday. The Opinel purchased new from a wonderful surplus/outdoors shop in the town; and the camera was waiting for me in my veranda when I reached home this morning. The first - the Opinel - is of a quality, as always that belies its purchase price: they are among the best value for money utility knives on the market, with keen and easily maintainable edges, simple and robust construction, and always a lifetime's use ahead of them. The Zorki is from a stable of Soviet cameras that used to attract scorn and avoidance 'from those of us in the know - sadly me included' back in the day, and were usually relegated to the status of 'beginner' cameras, such as the Zenit: the SLR that most of us - me included - started ou...

  Pictured, a pillar in the rather lovely St. Mary's Church in Kirkby Lonsdale, which I revisited this afternoon. This heavily-incised pillar is one of two built and carved between 1090 and 1135, and which still bears the chisel marks of its maker, nine-hundred years later. Just running your fingers over the still crisp striations in the depths of the carved grooves gives you a sense of connection with the craftsman who created the beauty so many generations ago, something that transcends the Christian purpose behind the place: soul, cast in stone. A very peaceful and pleasant space to spend some time: heartily recommended, and do use your sense of touch rather than simply looking...

  It's never short of astonishing just how much brass neck the current Conservative lot have between them: the most ineffective and corrupt government that this country seen in a very long time, they seem intent on displaying the self-same tone of bullish denial and arrogance now, in opposition; trotting out the same tired cliches about the nature and motives of the Labour Party now that it is resoundingly in power as the new government. In response to Chancellor Reeves' statement to the Commons, the now Shadow Chancellor Jeremy Hunt rapidly defaulted to personal attack mode, accusing Reeves of lying to cover up tax rises that he infers will follow in the autumn budget, and claiming that their own cover-up of funding gaps during their fourteen years of achieving precisely nothing save the almost total dismantling of public services, the NHS, state education, &etc., &etc: an almost endless litany of failure and abnegation of responsibility on their part, was actually j...

  This morning I decided to check out the recently completed promenade at Hirael Bay, in Bangor [pictured], which takes the line of the new flood defences that have been installed over the last couple of years there. Whilst the work on the storm drainage is yet to be finished, I was told by a Hirael resident that the old King George V playing fields will be restored on their completion, thus bringing weekend football back to the place after some time away. All I can say is that the promenade is rather damned fine, and includes a part of the Bangor cycle path along its length. Recently, Bangor was voted the worst seaside town in the UK, and with good reason: the place has suffered from underinvestment and the ravages of corporate speculation for years now, with most small, private enterprises having been driven out by high rents and business rates and unfair competition from the loss-leader giants who came, stripped the place bare and then moved out of town into bigger and more prof...

Earlier on today I picked up a notification from an academic feed I subscribe to, alerting me to an old paper [1965] written by someone whose name was extremely familiar to me but which I couldn't place: Albert Renger-Patzsch [pictured]. The paper was entitled 'On Photography's Significance and the Photographer's Responsibility'. I hadn't hitherto seen the piece - or so I imagined - and haven't yet done other than to skim it, but it seemed to me to have some points of interest, placing his views square in what was the territory of my degree dissertation back in '78. On Googling Herr Renger-Patzsch, I found that I was indeed familiar with some of his images, and therefore I can only blame age and time in explaining my forgetfulness in his case. I'll get back to you with some more cogent thoughts on the essay when I've fully digested it. Like I say, if I read it at the time, I've mislaid the memory somewhere along the way, and if I referenced i...

I had been intending to expand on the post of the twenty-first, this week, so the night before last I took out my recent replacement copy of Giorgio Vasari's 'The Lives of the Artists [my original, ancient paperback, which I can no longer find: it was seriously knackered anyway, being nearly fifty years old], to dig out some reference material for a piece on the often chaotic backgrounds that underpin the lives of great artists and their output. However, eventually I thought that Caravaggio would make a good central figure for the piece and around whom to hang the theme of brilliance issuing forth from chaos: but of course, Caravaggio was only three years old when Vasari died. Anyway, the book was still on my desk when yesterday, the summer edition of The New Statesman dropped through the letterbox. I opened it up, only to find they had run a piece on Vasari: 'The Inventor of the Renaissance', and they had illustrated it with a photo of the self-same painting pictured o...

I have no idea what the world's most 'advanced' nation's politicians and 'businessmen' think they are doing (apart from serving Mammon): on the one hand they pay politically-motivated lip-service to the combatting of the effects of human impact on the environment and climate, whilst heading in completely the opposite direction altogether: new oil and gas licenses to all and sundry mega-corps are being strewn about like confetti as we speak. We are making great headway with the development and deployment of renewables, both here in the UK - particularly here in Wales - and around the globe, and the increase in EV sales is encouraging if a tad slow, underpinned by higher retail prices and the lack of a second-hand market. The downside to a lot of green tech, however, is its reliance on some pretty exotic and scarce mineral resources to make a lot of it work efficiently. Unfortunately, the deep ocean is stuffed with a lot of these facilitating substances, and spec...

  Well, here it is then: the crux and substance of my note-taking-system-in-the-making, 'The Twenty'. I've collected three of the layers of note sorting in portable form, using my old Filofax, which I never really utilised in the manner intended by its inventors, anyway. To the left is a notebook for jotting down ideas and found information on the hoof; below that are the current index cards for the two current binders, on the right. As mentioned before, to the right of the Filofax is my deskpad: as Phil pointed out in his comment on my previous post, an excellent Exacompta item [still made in France by the original company], which works in tandem with the Field Notes [or whichever type of daybook I'm carrying at the time], organising note fragments to add to the binders and thence to the index, which is kind of an overview: each of four index cards referencing five note cards in one binder: so very duodecimal! I love it: it appeals to my inner geek OCD Civil Service/li...

If ever there was an example of the need for, at the very least partial, market control and reform, it is summed up in the conundrum, nay enigma, of the current global crisis in the solar panel industry. In yesterday's Financial Times, I read of a total price collapse in the sector, with Germany's Solarwatt having to shut down its domestic operations and move production to China, the world's largest - by far - manufacturer and supplier of solar panels to the market. Even the Chinese are likely to feel the pinch in this area very soon as there is apparently a complete glut of the tech at present: supply currently outstrips demand by a very considerable margin. The conundrum of course lies in the fact that driving prices down should lead to greater consumption of the cheaper product, but things aren't apparently panning out that way, leading to mothballing and plant closures. Which begs the obvious question: when the world is in dire need of as close to 100% adoption of r...

Further to last night's post, I've finally got a handle on what kind of form I want my note-taking-and-linking method to take: pictured the bare bones of a system, which I've nicknamed 'The Twenty'. The core of it all is the little homemade ring binder of folded three-by-five record cards, which each take a single, short note: a reference to some external idea or resource, for instance a book reference. Each note is given a unique ID number and a title, and each can be linked to other cards and ideas by adding their unique IDs to the card. So far, so Zettelkasten, mentioned several times before in these pages, for example September 23rd. 2020 . The comments and responses to the post reflect the ongoing process of my 'formalising' a methodology for my researches and writing, as much as the post itself. The starting point for a note entry can be something written on the desk pad, which can remain there until I feel everything has been dealt with, including da...

Following on from last night's reflection on the precipitous state in which we've managed to leave the world, with its over-reliance on poorly-designed and badly-maintained monolithic systems and structures of economics, technology and politics; I want to add a phrase that cropped up in conversation during the drive home from town yesterday afternoon: '...in any given system, one needs multiple points of entry and exit...' to be safe in the knowledge that not everything will turn to rat-shit instantaneously and irrevocably. Again, the lessons can be learned from the history of engineering and the development of technology in particular, and life in general. However, the human brain/mind/consciousness that creates such systems is simultaneously fallible, chaotic, fragmented and brilliant. What it most definitely is not, is inherently organised or capable of that oh, so tired and fallacious cliché, multi-tasking. We just can't do it so forget it, right off the bat. In...

I suppose the key takeaway from this week's news is that we are sorely lacking in tech redundancy, judging by the monumental knock-on effects of what really should have been a routine software update. We are really going to learn the hard way that we have have rushed headlong into a compact with the devil, resulting in our total immersion in and dependence on technology we think we own and control, but neither understand fully nor implement properly. You have to remember that the world we live in as we experience it now, was largely framed little more than thirty-five years ago, and came of age just about a decade later than that. We've moved from  a world where the vast majority of people didn't own a computer or mobile phone; were unaware of the concept of 'online', and still communicated largely via landline, fax and snail-mail: even telex was still in use in the early nineties, and the cutting edge of information gathering was Ceefax, via the TV. This has all ha...

Although most photographs are presented - either portrait or landscape - in various aspect ratios of the rectangular form, I've always preferred the square format image for its purity and adaptability, and the fact that it doesn't mimic any of the cinematic formats. Don't get me wrong, I love most other aspect ratios; 4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1, 2.39:1, and so forth. But for still photography, it's still square that gets my vote. When I worked at Birmingham University as a photographer/technician in the late seventies, my favourite camera by far was the department's Hasselblad 500C. The definitive 6x6cm [2-1/4"x 2-1/4"] roll-film camera of its era - and it still is definitive today, to be honest - a camera of eminent simplicity of use, military build and optically superb, via its Zeiss Planar lens; producing quality images really was like falling off the proverbial log. But at the end of it all, it's the format that is key: a square frame doesn't theatrical...

Just a small observation. Today's FT's Science byline covers a piece that Radio Four referred to this morning, on research being carried out into a protein - named IL-11 - that would appear to be instrumental in the ageing process, the suppression of which could slow ageing down and suppress normal degenerative diseases such as age-related cancers, and thus concomitantly increasing the potential lifespan of a complex organism such as a human. They have shown as much to be so in middle-aged mice, increasing their longevity by up to 25% in laboratory experiments. It should be said that the therapy at the moment is only being aimed towards humans with fibrotic lung disease, but the implication remains of the possibility of more generalised therapies going forward. This obviously could throw up deeply philosophical and moral quandaries and questions, let alone the practical economic and logistical issues that would follow as a result of increasing general human longevity. Anyway, t...

Is the heat and tone of British politics finally cooling to a more temperate level of discourse, now we have, at last, a change of government? It's literally only a few days into its tenure, but the signs are good from Labour under Starmer and Rayner, et al. The King's Speech, although I've not gone through the whole thing or digested the thirty-nine bills flagged therein, seems to indicate that Labour do indeed have a plan - more than several, in fact - for the renewal of this hitherto blighted archipelago. The key news is the phased partial re-nationalisation of the railways, the creation of a national energy company tasked with developing a green energy infrastructure, the removal of zero-hours contracts and further employment rights are to be restored. All of which can surely only be welcome news to all but the totally jaded cynics out there: and believe me, I count myself on the periphery of that group, but as always, I'm a glass half full type of bloke, so I'm...

Another day in the ongoing saga of The Post Office Enquiry: Andy Dunks, a lifer at Fujitsu to this day [man & boy, guv] giving testimony for a second time to the enquiry, shows himself to be a yes-man to the company and Post Office, and hence the UK government and whatever cabal of spooks that lurk in the wings of this sorry affair. Frankly he seemed like a fish out of water, both in the job and in his latter-day testimonies. Tasked with providing witness statements upon which the fate of innocent people would hang, he appears to simply have parroted the corporate instructions provided for him in the form of mandatory templates, having relied upon the word of people themselves unwilling to testify in a court of law, and on the instructions of people he is still unwilling to name to the enquiry. This implies either abject complicity on his part - although the lack of apparent motive of gain on his part makes me doubt that - or that he was operating under distraint the whole time [t...

Spent a good chunk of the middle of today taming the ivy infestation left over after my original cull of a couple of weeks ago. The aim is to try and limit the ingress of woodlice into the cottage: the little buggers are so adept at finding their way into the tightest openings into a building, it's frankly admirable, but nevertheless bloody annoying, especially as there's a quarter of an acre of garden with plenty of deliberately-left rotting wood piles [for the hedgehogs etc., during autumn and winter; and the rest of the wee things that need such habitat, generally], let alone the thousands of acres of National Park just over the garden wall. No, they instead choose to try and colonise the one part of our house that we really don't need them to: the guest accommodation. Hence the ivy clearance from the roofline: they seem to use it as a kind of highway into the roof, under the slates, and into the roof-space and thence into the cottage itself. I know they're harmless,...

Two games, two washing machines. The two games of course being the Wimbledon Men's final and the Euro thing in Germany. In the first, Spain's Carlos Alcararaz took the title again, beating Novak Djokovic in straight sets; in the second, England are playing Spain in the Euros. It is currently half-time, and the score is, surprise, surprise: 0-0. I honestly can't remember when the era of boring football began, but it's going back a few years. These days it really is a tedious game, and it comes to something when tackling a malfunctioning washing machine trumps what is laughably termed 'The Beautiful Game'. These days, it reminds me more of some endless corporate boardroom debate than a sport. As to the washing machines, the one pictured is the outgoing, having exhibited software bugs, exceptions and/or anomalies in its microcontroller: the vast bulk of the machine being perfectly fine and capable of normal function. [By the way, Spain have just scored] This leads ...

I've just been reading a piece in this week's FT Weekend Magazine about the case of Ethan Crumbley, a fifteen-year-old from Michigan, who perpetrated a mass shooting at his school in the small town of Oxford, just outside of Detroit, in November 2021. A depressed teenager, who was quiet and normally no trouble, he had been exhibiting, had they been recognised as such, signs of fairly obvious psychosis. His parents, too wrapped up in their own messy lives, largely left him to his own devices, and ignored the signs of his gradual mental deterioration. In fairness, most teenagers exhibit some - to their parents - odd behaviour as they struggle to find their identity and come to terms with puberty and impending adulthood; as any parent knows full well, but: Of course, this particular scenario played out in America, and in a State where gun ownership and use is particularly popular and encouraged. Also, his parents, keen to indulge Ethan in at least one of his interests, guns and sh...

  As I posted yesterday, I was saving the pot for tonight's repast: as promised, chorizo and chickpeas with spinach, served with saffron rice, toasted flaked almonds and sultanas. Not half bad, even though I say so myself. Nothing more to say this evening, except to say the men's final at Wimbledon is shaping up to be a good 'un: roll on Sunday...

  Further to my post of the night before last, here is picture of the current state of play with the chorizo and chickpea stew I started back then. After the initial long slow cook-down of the sausage [I emphasise that the chorizo has to be the uncooked, soft variety] and chickpeas with onion, tomato, chillis, pimenton, etc.; yesterday I sweated down a large bag of baby spinach into the stew, and although it would normally have called for a more robust green such as kale, I decided on spinach just because I like it, which is reason enough. We each had a bowl last night with crusty bread, and very fine and spicy it was too. Tonight, I've fried off two more sliced sausages in lots of olive oil and added them to the simmering pan of stew, along with the oil, and added a tablespoon of tomato puree. This I'll cook through for a while then let it cool for tomorrow, when we'll have it with saffron rice. This kind of food just gets better with age...

This week at the Post Office Scandal enquiry has opened up a complete can of verbal wormiage, as various members of the Shareholder's Executive [the government's 'eyes' into the Post Office boardroom: make of that what you will] are giving testimony in the kind of insouciant tones that only 'top executives' can manage without curling up with embarrassment in the process. The language employed by these upper echelon 'lifers' is frankly - and deliberately - baffling to anyone actually living in the real world outside of their boardroom bubble. Words like 'process' take on an almost magical-realist hue in their world of lexical totems and 'best practices'. Reporting, surfacing, capturing, risk-socialisation, the C-Suite [anyone whose title starts with Chief, basically], all fantastically characterising the - to be honest - banal and mundane mechanics of running a business, in the Harvard Newspeak that is now the lingua franca of the ghetto ...

In honour of today's return to a parliament coloured mainly red, after Labour's hard-won, deserved and frankly glorious victory in the General Election, I present tonight's culinary concoction: chickpeas with chorizo: this will take a while to cook down, so I won't partake tonight, as even I find eating after ten o'clock in the evening slightly taxing, having been brought up in these rather different Northern climes: 7pm's my natural time of eating. Whatever, I'll let you know how successful this latest improv turns out to be: tonight will be a snack of toasted buttered crumpets, methinks...  

I caught an interesting piece on Radio Four two or three days ago, on the programme Naturebang: the thrust of it was ultimately about language acquisition. The initial topic visited was the song of the Australian Zebra Finch, which like that of many species of songbirds is now considered to have some manner of linguistic purpose: for the males - the female apparently does not sing - to find a mate. Their song is also known to be both social and individual, with each successive generation of a colony or population of the birds learning the songs of their elders and as they grow, inventing variations and enhancements of their own. Research has shown that some males of the species, for whatever reason, grow up isolated from their communities and don’t learn their ‘tribal’ song from their elders, developing only as far as a dissonant ‘proto-song’. This usually leads to them not finding a mate, as the only ‘song’ they can produce fails to impress most females, and many of these proto-vocali...

  I was - again, I know - going to pen a bit about Zebra Finches and language acquisition in the cohort of deaf children in Nicaragua in the 1980's, prompted by a wonderful BBC R4 piece the other day. But I've been busy with other things, including cooking tonight's dinner, pictured: the old standby, belly pork and potatoes. Can't beat it, and to be frank, I'd rather eat fatty pork than the finest fillet steak any day: there's simply no comparison and no contest on so many levels. If you want flavour, the pig wins hands down every time. Of course, then there is the fattier end of the lamb spectrum: shoulder. The more expensive leg of lamb doesn't cut it for us by comparison: and as for hogget, mutton or goat? Monster flavour!

With the dust just starting to settle from the initial impact of the election meteorite strike [pictured], which whilst not representing quite the extinction-level threat to the Conservative Party that many of us would have wished for, it was nevertheless a stonking result for the saner amongst us. A number of observations spring to my mind in its aftermath. Many pundits have been quick to point out the poor turnout and the disparity between the winning margin it turns of seats, and the very low vote-share: to which I would say: 'so what?'. A low turnout is a function of people's willingness or otherwise to engage with the democratic process; and my answer to any one of those that stayed at home and are now dissatisfied with or enraged by the result of the election would be: 'You could have voted, but you didn't, so you'll just have to suck it up, I'm afraid: tough shit, compadre'. For those who argue that our first-past-the-post system stinks, and that ...

  ...at long last: and a map of Wales that the late Paul Davies would have loved to have been able to create in his ritual of making a map of Cymru every day. Twenty-one years gone this year - this one's for you, wherever you are. I've mentioned Paul before in these pages, and the informal affiliation of artists' that he co-founded,  Beca, to bring Welsh politics and the visual arts to the foreground of the - formerly mainly literary - Welsh art scene, as Ifor Davies points out in this short video . If you're not already aware of who Paul was, please take a few minutes to watch his friend and collaborator Ifor's encomium to him...

  Pictured, a mounted photo I dug out of the filing cabinet of curiosities that lurks in our spare room upstairs, which fell out of office use years ago, when I joined BT as a humble engineer. Since that time it has been home to our extensive collection of OS maps [bottom drawer], numerous & sundry newspaper savings, old family photos &etc. I can't claim this particular image to be in any way connected to myself or indeed anyone I'm either related to or who I've ever known [this latter would be extremely problematic anyway, given that the image was taken around the time my grandparents were born]. I would guess this was bought in a charity shop some time ago. It is a genuine Hulton Picture Library/Radio Times print, obviously borrowed some sixty or seventy years ago and never returned to the library by the borrower. It is mounted but unframed, yet has the backboard and hanger intact. The picture is of Fraülein Kätchen Paulus, by a photographer simply listed as Guttm...

Just when you thought the Tory Party election campaign couldn’t get any worse - and with each passing day it does - they go and trump the day before’s efforts to scupper their cause. The campaign has been a fitting parallel to their fourteen-year tenancy of No. 10: it started off indifferently, moved rapidly to chaotic then became simply catastrophic. In the last few days they have not only proved that they can piss off their own moderates and One-Nationers, half their electorate, former red-wallers [who we guessed would turn against them quickly, push come to shove] and a good section of the pearl-clutching home counties set; but now they’ve sunk to the depths of insulting the blind and Jewish communities to boot. Staggering. As Jane characterised it this evening, the coffin [of their failed aspirations] has been tipped into a volcano; and I think their chances of getting to the other side of this election in one piece are just about as good as the wooden box and their remains. Make ...

Not much to say tonight as Wimbledon has landed, and some pretty interesting matches have been and are being played as I write: the first round always throws up those new players of promise; often to be cut down at t he first pass to either return as future contenders or even champions of the future. Sometimes the old guard passes in these early stages, too; replaced by the upcoming generation of future kings and queens of the grass court. One thing’s for sure, the last man standing in the men’s golden era is Novak Djokovic, who cruised his match today to go forward to the next round. Of the UK tennis scene, we have so many really good young players coming through now, some or even many of whom are potential slam winners; and more power to their collective [tennis] elbows in my book. Watching the damned thing is still a compulsive distraction from other things as ever. I'll try and post some of the stuff I alluded to last night as and when I stop gawping at the tennis...

It’s strange how, when casting around for ideas to form the day’s blog entry - not always an easy task, especially as this particular blog is not themed - sometimes a forgotten document reappears at random from the hidden depths of one’s laptop. I’ve just experienced just such a serendipity. I was thinking of putting something down about a lovely piece I read in this weekend’s Financial Times Magazine, or even something on national debt with relation to Edward the First: but while I was idly searching for some note-taking templates - free, of course - a link I clicked on opened the app I’m now typing this on. Focuswriter is a tool I used for some time in the earlier days of the blog, but for some reason had stopped using some time ago. Anyway, the thing about the app is that it opens with whatever document was being worked on - or read, in this case - previously. The article that popped up onto the screen, was a 2017 paper, submitted by a Michael Peterson to the ‘Hazardous Time-scapes ...