Observations from a Hill

Well, we're tooling up for our fortnight's sojourn to Shropshire next month - which month starts tomorrow! We haven't actually bothered going abroad since the Covid pandemic hit and went, partly because of the extra hassle that post-pandemic travel entailed, and partly because we've always also holidayed in the UK in tandem with our travels outside of the UK. All we've done is increase the number of domestic stays away from home instead, which these days means a stay or two in Shropshire and likewise in our backyard destination of Pen Lleyn, where Jane is headed to hook up with her sister for a few days next week, whilst I mind the ranch here. Pictured is one of my latest acquisitions, a travel-ready tournament-sized chess set and flexible board, which comes in a fairly compact little case: I hope to tempt number one son into a game or two, as he is joining us with his husband for some of the holiday. Also, we have ordered a new badminton set as the garden at Lower ...

Here's a thing: idly reading around and watching various YouTubes this afternoon - as you do - I picked up on three things that seem to reflect where we are at the moment in terms of large-scale computing. First off, COBOL: Common Business-Oriented Language; developed in the fifties and released in '59 as the de facto standard platform for handling significantly large amounts of data - principally financial transaction data - for banks, government departments and other large institutions: and it is still widely in use across the world today, with virtually all ATM transactions mediated and processed by it, as I think I've mentioned before; likewise the rapidly dwindling numbers of programmers left in the wild that can understand and modify/repair/extend existing codebases. Secondly, I chanced upon an advert for a software product/service that claims to hide the fact that someone has used AI for content creation - of whatever kind and for whatever purpose, from the intended ...

Tonight's musical fare has been essentially - no, entirely Gypsy - and centred around the music of the Camargue, and featuring, in particular, one of my all-time heroes: Manitas de Plata. Good stuff, indeed. However, I'd already decided to pen a short note on Komboloi; the ubiquitous 'worry beads' of Greece, favoured by most Greek men, and considered a national pastime: although habit would probably be a better characterisation. Deriving from religious 33-bead prayer beads - allegedly the lifespan in years of Christ - they were secularised to the now standard 23 bead string that has been in common use for generations. I've owned many [sets of?] Komboloi over the last nearly fifty years, and always carry a string in my pocket, and routinely pass the beads one-by-one through my fingers to pass some thinking time, or wrap them around my left hand as I type, as I have now. Don't ask me why, but I've always liked this little ritual, ever since I first discovered ...

It's funny - no, actually it's not; it's just plain tiresome - how the UK Labour Party, of which I've been a member for most of my life, is always castigated for its supposed failings, either when in office [seldom] or in opposition [generally the default case]. We are mere weeks into a new Labour government, and the carping - from both ends of the political spectrum - has started ramping up through the gears yet again. The economic and social shit-heap that the outgoing Tory [administration(?) - not worthy of the term] government [ditto] left in their wake is of such magnitude that it will take at least two terms of government for the current incumbents to even scratch the surface of it; so don't even try and tell me that they are failing already. They've barely had chance to pick up the baton and run with it. Even the Left have been weighing in on the government's tax and spend proposals, fer Chrissakes, arguing that the party has abandoned the principles ...

In an era of self-hyped, internet-media assisted, click-bait, like & subscribe influencers, it is tempting to imagine that pre-internet, social media life was devoid of such self-publicists. True, the opportunities for access to the realm of public influence and product promotion for profit were far fewer and far between, but access to it there was, nevertheless. I was thinking earlier about how the game of chess is suddenly big business - particularly online - and how these days there are so many content providers offering commentary, analysis and teaching to a vast, global audience and earning a very tidy income on the back of their endeavours, chwarae teg - fair play - to them: they are at least appropriately highly skilled in their niche and deserve to exploit that skill to their benefit as they see fit. But the likes of YouTubers like Levy Rozman, whose content is wonderful in my book, are not the first generation - by a long chalk - to exploit their talents in like manner. S...

The other night, I was listening to the album "Lick My Decals Off, Baby" by the ineffable Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band, released in 1970; a year after his masterpiece "Trout Mask Replica". Either album is a challenge to modern mainstream sensibilities, well over fifty years on: in themselves the very definition of 'progressive', and I don't mean that in the sense of 'prog rock', which simply took some standard classical tropes and wrapped them up in a rock-based framework; but rather in the sense of actual, musical progression: the natural ethos of jazz in the twentieth century, when it sought at every turn to overthrow the musical sensibilities of the previous generation. Each sounded fresh at its inception and challenged the orthodoxies that had preceded it. Somehow, however, its progress forward slowed and stopped altogether, just over fifty years ago: after the go-nowhere free jazz experiments, it just seemed to retrench into a post...

We went over to The Gazelle for a late lunch/early dinner today at five o'clock, on our monthly 'lunch club' thing that a few of us have been doing for a year or so, and a very pleasant meal and chinwag was had by all present. Our usual table with a view of The Menai Strait was occupied today, as the place was doing good business and was pretty full, so we were landlocked in the cosy little niche by reception. Had we had a view it would have been a fairly grey one today, with dark clouds closing in around Eryri and closing out the mountain panorama that is the normal backdrop to the sea, pier and Garth beyond. The straits were choppy and running fast on the outgoing tide, and the bite in the stiff breeze more redolent of February than August and what should be High Summer. Autumn seems to have started early again this year, but I'm hoping for an Indian Summer in three weeks time when we head off to Shropshire for a fortnight's break before the wind-down to Winter ...

OK, finally, I can write this post, despite the extraordinarily piss-poor performance of the technology that enables(!) me to write this daily scribble. I have spent the last thirty minutes on the verge of apoplexy - trying not to scream out loud and physically assault this aged but otherwise innocent laptop - because I simply couldn't get a simple photo to down/upload from my phone to the computer. I know I've had this problem before: Apple's iCloud sometimes chucks a curve-ball at me and refuses to synchronise my Photos from the iPhone to the MacBook via you-know-what. In the past I've managed to sort it, but I never bother to note down how I achieve the fix and promptly forget all about it as things normalise for the next few weeks/months. Whenever this happens and I can't be arsed to rediscover the fix, I simply email the picture I want to myself; as I attempted to do some fifteen minutes ago. Or so I thought. The first attempt resulted in the email itself getti...

Diary post tonight as I'm disengaged from the outside world this weekend as it's Number One Son's birthday: sod politics for a few hours. Pictured, tonight's repast: the curry I cooked last night and which I was correct in my assumption that it was best had tonight rather than then. The flatbread is a completely jazz affair, my having no suitable flour for chapatti or paratha construction to hand. This is based on a yeast-risen strong white flour with black onion seeds [Kalongi] chucked in. So, on post-prandial assessment, I can only say that the curry worked very well, and the third slab of bread I fried wasn't too bad at all: work needed on that, but I think there's a germ of a recipe in there somewhere, probably involving spring onions or chives or some-such to raise the game a tad. One thing I do have left after this is a large ball of dough in the fridge. I think I might just bake the bugger tomorrow and see what transpires...

Well, I've done it again: cooked myself something - Jane wanted something different, anyway - and then decided it would be better left overnight to eat tomorrow. As it is a chicken and tomato curry - jazz, naturally; no recipe for this one - I'm probably right in letting it steep in its juices overnight, anyway. And so it was a very fine cheese & ham toastie for me.  Earlier today for some random reason, I was pondering on the definition and scope of The Black Country: that amorphous expanse of geopolitical/economic/demography sat plonk in the middle of the UK mainland. Now, I, like my dwindling cohort of peers, was born a Brummie. And one thing is absolutely for certain: we were not born or raised in the Black Country, as Brummagem ay in it, despite the contemporary characterisation that The Black Country extends from somewhere just north of the Watford gap to Stoke-on-Trent; that ay true, my friend. Although, to be fair, I'm misappropriating ay as the contraction of i...

I was just listening to a piece of Gypsy Jazz on YouTube: 'Ballade Pour Django' by the Joscho Stephan Trio - which Pinpoint! [obscure reference to a very, very old TV thing] - brought to mind an old 78rpm record that we used to have at home when I was growing up. It was a White Label Spitfire Fund recording from WWII, intended as a fundraiser for the production of Supermarine Spitfires for the war effort. Our copy is lost in time, which I deeply regret, and I only hope it ended up in a good home: I think Dad gave it to a mate of his forty or fifty years ago. The record, as you can see from the image of its label above, is credited to one Pinchin Johnson's Witley Court Music Box; but to any listener at the time or since will know, just by listening to the thing, was in reality performed by no less than Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli incognito, with probably The Andrews Sisters on vocals. BTW, according to Wikipedia, the song is derived from a Ukrainian folk song, as...

There was a piece on BBC Radio Four's Woman's Hour this morning about bellies. Specifically in this particular discussion, women's bellies, and the cognitive disjunct between societal ideals and the actuality of being a normal woman. Despite all of the political and ideological progress that we have made over the past couple of centuries; despite all of the knowledge that we have accrued, and particularly despite knowing full-well in our own minds that the average human body is both normal and desirable: that the pursuit of ideals is baseless and futile in equal measure; no matter one's sex, sensibility or sexuality. The correct philosophical stance, no matter one's background or religion, is that God alone - whichever one you favour/cleave to, should you so choose - is perfect. My take is more immaterial and of course Zen on this: we are all simultaneously both perfect and imperfect: as the concepts of perfection and imperfection are in and of themselves meaningles...

  Pictured: a lot of things in progress. As usual, my butterfly mind can't keep still and I have to chuck more and more into the mental pot on a daily basis, but there you go: better buzzing than vacant, in my book. Life all amounts to one thing in the end: no-thing; but the inevitability of the void shouldn't prevent us from sucking in as much of the world as we can possibly manage whilst our consciousness [exists ?] allows. We are - we imagine, anyway - sentient; and therefore we should behave like sentient beings and experience/do stuff, I guess. Pictured, a bunch of such existential ephemera: the two books I've just started: Seamus Heaney's 1999 translation of Beowulf, and Anthony Bourdain's 'A Cook's Tour' from 2001; my recently acquired Soviet-era Zorki rangefinder camera, which is now loaded with a roll of 200 ASA Fomapan film, and the Palm XT PDA I've recently brought back from the dead with the purchase and installation of a new battery - so...

  OK, I was intending an update on various bits and bobs that I've got going on at the moment, but I ended up in the kitchen, rustling up the above. Sunday afternoon has become a a sort of domestic Ready, Steady Cook in Fairview Heights; with Jane arriving home from work with a bag of random ingredients from the M&S just below where she works at the British Heart Foundation in Bangor. Today it was belly-pork strips - a go-to in this house, anyway - baking potatoes, and some rather fine carrots. So, we have - had - belly pork roasted with apple, and sage leaves from the garden; the now ubiquitous roasted Greek potatoes in lemon juice, olive oil and garlic - oodles of all of them - and boiled, buttered carrots, topped with a crude but extremely tasty sauce of the meat juices deglazed with white wine, with the squeezings from the roasted garlic and apple added; and the result thickened with butter. All, as is usual in my kitchen, seasoned well with decent sea salt and black peppe...

Further to my comment in my post of September 28th last year "Slow-Tech", doubting whether anyone is still referencing the 1986, computer-based Domesday Project, and referencing a thought I had the other day about the dangers of relying solely on digitised data, no matter how well backed-up and redundantly duplicated it might be; prompted me to compare and contrast the 1086 Domesday with its millennial counterpart at a distance of just under forty years since the government/BBC backed project was finished. The original manuscripts of the Great and the Little Domesday are still in existence, at the National Archives in Kew: nine-hundred and twenty-eight years after having been written. The 1986 Project in its original form lasted less than twenty years in practical terms, due to the inevitable obsolescence of the technology employed in its construction, most notably the storage and delivery medium used: the LaserDisc, an analogue video stream capable of being accessed frame by...

In the light of having received my M2-Systems™ Subsystem 2 Journal: the shiny beauty pictured above atop its equally shiny slip case, I was going to meander into some abstractions involving Paul Klee and his '...taking a line for a walk...' approach to the production of his art, which subsequently became the mantra of many of us who went to art college in the seventies, particularly: although as that is the only decade in which I attended art school, that may well be a slightly partial view of things. The pictured tome is at present unsullied, and indeed unmarked by gesture: a bit like the dreaded white void of a blank canvas, screaming out for its first marks, however unstructured they might be. I'm hanging back, but I think I will adopt the measured approach of making the first stigmata on its pristine 100gsm, fountain pen-friendly paper with stamp and ink: a more formalised and considered vandalism with which to break the tyranny of the field. As to the eventual content ...

That's it - I've done with Twitter/X: I ditched my account last night, after the morning feed of unquestioning bile and uninformed crap from the digits of [?]: are these people actually people or are they the AI evocations of Musk's evidently venal and dodgy politicking? Who the fuck knows, but real actors or no, there is a lot of dangerously uncritical thinking going on in this most public - albeit vertical - arena. Some of the shit I read yesterday morning really riled me, though; with 'people' comparing the current - apposite and appropriate - judicial responses to those that have recently decided that they could do and say just whatever they wanted to do or say in public - viz the fomentation and execution of the recent racially-motivated riots here in the UK - to some alleged and newly-minted totalitarian state under Keir Starmer's government. I'm at a complete loss with these people's [?] deliberate ignorance of human history and their lack of coge...

My speculative eBay purchase of a Palm Tungsten TX PDA [if you're under forty, you'll have to Google it] I mentioned the other day, arrived this afternoon. As per the sale pictures, it powers up and does some stuff - but unplug the charger cable, and Pffft! Judging by the slight bulge in the back of the case, I figured the original battery had met its maker, so I opened the thing up - mercifully straightforward: nice design - and sure enough, the OEM Samsung battery had turned into bloated mush [the silver baggy on the right of the picture]. A bit of Googling later and I found and bought a new replacement on eBay, which is on its way. All that's required is to solder the new one to the board, give it a full three-hour charge, and it should be good for the foreseeable. What remains to be seen is to what use I put the thing, given my iPhone does all it does and a shitload more besides. But you know me, cold logic is never really the point with this retro thing. I like the des...

  OK, so this post is of the nature of a kind of appeal. Pictured centre-stage above are my extant three volumes of the Dewey Decimal Classification, Edition 20. There should be four volumes, however, and try as I might, I can't track down volume four to buy; or at least I can and have, but the vendor is a lovely little book-seller in Italy that won't post outside of that country. I respect that, since leaving the EU, we in this country who voted [not I] away our rights of freedom of movement and convenience of trade by means of the ineffably idiotic referendum that Cameron visited upon us all those years ago have reaped the rewards of so doing. So if there is anyone out there that has a copy of this volume, or knows of the whereabouts of one - at a reasonable cost, of course - I would be very grateful, indeed: just leave the details in the comment box below, or email me at observer@monochrome.quest. Also, don't try and fathom out why I want to complete a set of [already ou...

For quite a chunk of the 1990s, when James was but a youngster, we rented a place on the A5 road to Bangor, just outside Bethesda and on the crossroads to Tregarth and Rachub. It was called Brynbella Cottage, and whilst hard up against the busy Telford road, it suited us fine at the time because it had a large garden suitably walled and hedged off from the road, where James and his friends could play safely, and where we would subsequently host some fine spit-roast parties and late-night barbecues. I always wondered about the name of the place: the Bryn part of the name is Welsh for hill, but I could never figure out what the bella bit was about, or its etymology. For whatever reason - too busy in those days, I guess, I never thought to chase it up - and anyhow, the internet as we know it now hardly existed as such: and so I left it at that. However, I was thumbing through my copy of The Oxford Literary Guide to the British Isles this afternoon - a relatively recent acquisition - and c...

I know I bang on about the joys of analogue, and yes, I do like to buy up all manner of stuff in this department, both old and new: I am a collector at heart, it's the OCD in me; but I also like retro digital tech too. I've got all manner of obsolescent stuff lurking in various places in Fairview Heights - a bone of some domestic contention from time to time, but it's OK as all my stuff is essentially stock for resale if I get bored with it - and I'm currently bidding for a Palm Pilot on eBay. I used to own one of these little gems twenty-odd years ago, but gave it away to a friend when I bought my first 'smartphone', a Sony Ericsson P-something, which was a significant step up from my combo of the Palm and my Nokia 6310i [which BTW I still consider to be the apogee and apotheosis of mobile phone technology]. I kind of want the Palm, as the friend I gave my original away to is no longer with us, and so it would represent a reference point in my timeline and a ki...

  My workspace at the moment, a mixture of both digital and analogue worlds, and as usual, faintly chaotic: OCD librarian meets a pissed Loki head-on in a back alley. What's prompted this reflection is an email exchange between me and my old mate Phil, who shares a lot of my ink & paper-based peccadillos and obsessions: we both love analogue: notebooks, card-indexes, fountain pens, etc., etc., whilst both being firmly entrenched in the digital world: both of us early adopters, many, many years since. I sent him a link to what I consider one of my best finds in recent years: one of the loveliest pieces of pure graphic product design I've seen since the glory days of the late 1960s . As I said to Phil, I can't see this as being of any real practical utility to me, given that my approach to organising my stuff is unique to me: the modus operandi of a butterfly mind lends itself not to the tidy. But the purity of the graphic design and execution of this journal is just a jo...

  OK - pictured is my bastardised Filofax, now rechristened The Twenty [blog posts passim]: my sort of, kind of, take on the Zettelkasten [auch blog posts passim, meine Damen und Herren]. Atop the gnarly old leather folder is a relatively recent adoption, a 0.3mm Rotring draughting pen. Now - caveat - this is one of their cheap, disposable range of said instruments; but Rotring being who they are, do even cheap stuff very, very well. I don't normally cleave to disposable stuff, for environmental and moral reasons, but I wanted to revisit this style of pen without breaking the bank on something that might not get much further use if my memory of using these devices turned out to be rosier than the actuality of using one today. My first memory and use of this type of pen dates back to my sixth-form days at school, and the Art Room: the Rotring pen was very much a fetish object amongst those of us denizens of that hallowed space: we saved up to buy one of these - even in tho...

As late as today I was still pondering in which direction to go with the router lift mechanism: the makings of the lead-screw and all the various holes that need drilling in the plate and the router body are all but there, and I've got a pack of appropriately-sized ball races on the way. But, messing around with ideas this afternoon, I remembered that I'd got the rescued remains of an old 12v cordless drill [blog posts passim] in one of my bits boxes. I'd dismantled it some time ago, as its batteries were NiCads and had expired years ago, so it was confined to the unused stuff section of the studio - that's chucked in a corner to me and you. The guts of the thing can be seen in the photograph next to the router on its plate, the rather gutsy motor to the left and the business end of the drill to the right. The chuck is, like the batteries, knackered, but the two-speed sun and planet gearbox - metal! - still functions perfectly. So, I've determined that this will be ...

Nimbyism. This acronymic neologism - as it was back in the day - was coined as a counter to the hypocrisy of: 'anywhere else is fine, just not in my back yard ', in reference mainly to building schemes of one sort or another. The 'Oh, yes, we need more affordable housing, wind farms, nuclear powerplants, etc., but please not anywhere near where we live...' attitude. I was struck by a piece in the i today by Allegra Chapman: 'Living next to an Airbnb has totally ruined my life'. I have to declare an interest at the outset here, as we indeed run a small Airbnb as a supplement to our pensions; and I also would make it quite plain that I agree with Chapman's views and those of many others so aggrieved, and would never stoop to accuse any of them of nimbyism. In fact there is a growing movement against Airbnb across the UK and much further afield now, as unthinking and unscrupulous absentee landlords are buying up properties in picturesque rural areas such as ou...

I was brought up a Methodist, among which's precepts is the tradition of referring to one another as Brother and Sister [not that we did at our church, but it was the 1960s by then]; although as I've said before, I've tried in the many decades since I left that church to follow my own styling of Zen Buddhism, light on ritual and heavy on introspection. My take is that when the realisation of one's innate frailty and tenuousness in this world   takes hold,  then one is best placed to accept the condition of others with whom we share this temporary, temporal, and corporeal existence. Tolerance is de facto the Lingua Franca of one enlightened by this self-knowledge. Having said that, even I have been moved to suggest all manner of unpleasant Old Testament visitations on the perpetrators of hatred that have been so in evidence in UK cities of late.  The trouble is I [we] also run the risk of sounding exactly like the kind of swivel-eyed fascist...

As I wrote last evening, we called over to The Bull at Biwmares for lunch today. As is becoming usual and decidedly tedious: nay, frankly worrying; there was no Bass on, and the Hancock's ale was sub-par: another day and what's left in the barrel is ullage and destined for the drain; although I suspect that none of the staff will notice until someone sends their pint back. Two things about the once-estimable and historic Bull Inn highlight the parlous and perilous state of our hospitality sector today. One was that the kitchen was idle - for an unstated reason - half an hour after opening the establishment for lunch. Two was the issue I've just highlighted with the state of the real ale being offered and its serving by staff - one individual excepted - who seem incapable of serving a full, legally-enforceable pint measure of what after all is not a cheap product. I would suggest that this is simply a lack of training, as the staff concerned are far too young to have direct ...

I was hoping to make some progress on the long-delayed and now restarted router lift and table project, but the parts I ordered yesterday afternoon ended up arriving later rather than sooner this afternoon, and I'm currently cooking dinner, so no progress will be made today, as I'm already a couple of beers into the evening, with food looming. I've been mulling over exactly how I'm going to make this thing work and I've got a couple of alternative strategies in mind, but the final decision will inevitably be made on the fly, because, if you've read this blog before, that's just the way I work: jump, test, improve; iterate until happy. Old school empirical improvisation. Jazz. However, the thinking will have to continue in the background tomorrow, as Jane & I are off out to our [now] customary Monday lunch of beer [hopefully Bass ale], soup and chips at the Bull, Beaumaris, so I fear little practical progress will be made on the router thing. In the meant...

OK - this has been a long time in recess, I know, but I only just worked out how to make the rise/fall mechanism for the thing work, so bear with me. The nice new shiny countersink you can see in the plate is where the M6 countersink machine screw that will operate the lift will sit. This will be attached  to a long threaded rod that will pass through to the router body below, where a captive nut will be fixed, allowing the router to be inched higher or lower against the force of its built in compression springs, to raise or lower the collet and bit. I've got the threaded rod and some extension nuts on order which should be with me tomorrow. But a thought struck me that the adjustment screw, if left simply rotating in its countersink, would be under considerable tension: a steel countersink screw, running in an aluminium alloy countersink is a) going to face a good deal of friction in operation, and hence b)  exhibit an inordinate amount of wear to the softer metal of the plat...

We are living in treacherous times: climate change, the breakdown of economic 'systems' [category error there, methinks], the continued despoiling of our planet and peoples at the hands of out-of-control corporates and billionaires, exercising their power not just in the service of profit, but in influencing geopolitics and human development in the most sinister ways imaginable through the social re-engineering of communication and human discourse via disinformation spread at breakneck speed on social media. I refer mainly to the obscene events that followed the Southport killings the other day. That the outbreak of violence and hatred that ensued was uncalled for, callous and cruel to the residents of the community affected by the tragedy goes without saying. That it issued forth from unfounded rumour spread by a small number of far-right disrupters and influencers is not entirely surprising, given the track record of these destructive fuckwits. The principal actors? Andrew Ta...

  Pictured, today's micro-project: the repair of the occasional table that resides in the cottage. A cheap affair, despite the apparent elegance of form, this thing was seriously wobbly and had suffered some accidental damage to its surface. When I took it down to the studio for a good look at the state of the thing, it was obvious that one of the legs was, shall we say, less than securely attached to the rest of it, necessitating disassembly and clean-up, followed by gluing and re-screwing the offending limb back to the corpus. A couple of hours later, and stability was restored. I addressed the damage to the surface of the top with wire wool and beeswax polish. Job done...