Observations from a Hill

The last of coal-fired power generation in the UK: at midnight tonight, that's it for coal, 142 years after Edison started generating electricity at his Holborn Viaduct coal plant in London in 1882. On the turn of tomorrow, the sole remaining plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar will shut down for good, in both senses of the word. It's interesting to reflect that as recently as the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition government, the UK generated around a third of its electricity using coal. From midnight that figure will be zero: a sobering thought, given all the renewable naysayers spouting spurious arguments about the country's ability and will to implement sufficient wind, solar and geothermal, etc., energy to supply its needs. Less than ten years later, research, technical advances, political pressure and changing energy demands, have seen a dramatic up-turn in implementation of non-fossil fuel modes of generation. A good start, but it is only a start: we need to keep up the pressure. More i...

  Home again, home again, jiggetty-jig, my hiraeth assuaged by homecoming; my need of sea and mountains really is quite visceral. As much as I love the blue remembered hills of Housman's Shropshire, my home and heart is here, despite my Birmingham origins. Anyhow, pictured was tonight's repast before demolition: I think a bit of a repeat performance [cough!] but delicious nonetheless. Belly pork strips cooked with apple and oodles of good olive oil [most important]; my now ubiquitous Greek-style lemon & garlic roast potato wedges - cooked with oodles of olive oil, natch - and served with steamed broccoli, green beans and carrots, and a sauce of shallot, white wine and chicken stock, finished with the deglaze of the meat dish with more white wine. Everything as always very well seasoned; this dish represents the essence of what a good, treat-yourself meal should be. There you go...

  OK - here's a thing. Could it be that gnome-bombing is back in fashion? The meme du jour of a few years ago seems to have randomly revisited our garden whilst we were away in Shropshire: the above-pictured curiosity having greeted us on our return to Fairview Heights today. Whomsoever 'twas deposited this curious artefact on our patio must have had some muscle to lug it all the way up from the road, as it ways a good 25Kg. Most bizarre, and it's not actually even a gnome. Which brings me on to the modelling of the portly old cricketer: who on earth grips a cricket bat like this chap? He looks like he's putting for a birdie on the eighteenth, for God's sake. Anyhow, the surreal humour of the situation is not in the slightest lost on us, and the hapless old sportsman will remain in the garden, although perhaps in one of the more densely-foliated parts, methinks. Nice to know that people are still doing weird stuff without malice aforethought these days. The spirit ...

Kind of following on from yesterday's post: today I started to read a book I bought last week: "The Mechanical Turk" by Tom Standage. It's subject being the [in]famous automaton constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen that became the closest thing possible, in the eighteenth century, to a global phenomenon: the eponymous 'chess-playing' machine of the book's title. What prompted me to remark on this was a reference made in the book's Preface to an era [the book's year of publication: 2002] '...when it takes a supercomputer to defeat the world chess champion...' These days - just over twenty years later - you can play [virtual] opponents at the game that simply cannot be beaten by humans of any calibre, even on your smartphone. Back in Kempelen's day, the ability to play and excel at chess was seen as evidence of sentience and creative thought. Indeed, that mindset obtained well into the late 1990s, when the aforesaid supercomputers - pro...

I read with interest today that the former London Evening Standard - now The London Standard and a weekly rather than daily publication - is to run a one-off, AI-generated piece of criticism in the style of the late Brian Sewell; former art critic of the Standard from 1984. It's difficult to surmise just what Sewell - he of the arch, strangled RP vowels ['posher than the Queen'], would have made of it. No doubt he would have protested publicly at the crassness of the idea, whilst being secretly amused at the notion: the customary reactionary acerbity of his pronouncements were often I suspect a deliberate goading of his audience for effect; something I can attest to personally. Back in the mid 1980s, the then recently appointed Standard critic was invited by us to speak at an AGM of the Association of Artists & Designers in Wales [blog posts passim] somewhere in Mid-Wales, deep in the heart of Cymru Cymreig. Curiously, he accepted the engagement. I say curiously, becaus...

From the South Stafford's [contemporary] War Diary: ' ... About 18:30 hours, orders were received for a withdrawal to the south side of the river which was to begin at 22:00 hours. The troops in the Stafford's area were to move last, not before 23:45 hours, and they thus had the honour of covering the withdrawal. Surprisingly enough all seemed to go well and there was no German pressure. At about 23:30 hours the men began to smash everything which could not be taken with them, and a few minutes before midnight they moved out on their way to the 'boats'... Fortunately the night was very dark and it was still possible to cross unobserved up to about 06:00 hours. Then as it got light, the Germans began to realise what was happening and they shelled and mortared the bank heavily. Ferrying had to stop and a few of the Staffords were left on the wrong side of the river... The remnants of the battalion, who totalled 6 officers and 133 other ranks, joined up with their seab...

By the night of the 23rd September, going into the 24th, the twenty men holed up in the Vredehof villa at Oosterbeek have decided that they have passed the point of no return, and that none of them will leave alive: 'This is the end of the line. From now on we retire no more. We shall make a fortress of this house. We shall barricade the doors and windows, and we shall not leave this house again.' [RQMS Morris, 11 Battalion, Parachute Regt]. All that was soon to be left to them - given their continued survival of the relentless armoured barrage - would be close-quarters fighting with the enemy; with bayonets, pistols and knives, man to man, each staring the other's mortality in the face, with little hope of either's survival beyond the moment: medieval in its ferocity and desperation. A paratrooper who fought at Oosterbeek described it as '... a confused mass of struggling, leaping figures...', a pistol shot to the face, a knife to the heart, whoever could strik...

Under cover of dark the previous evening, troops of the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade attempt to cross the Rhine in dinghies and rafts with supplies, starting at 21:00, hoping to link up with and reinforce the beleaguered British Airborne troops; but are spotted quickly and suffer heavy casualties in the process. Maj Gen Urquhart is still hoping against hope that they can last out until XXX Corps arrive to form a bridgehead on the north bank of the river... In the eighty years since the Battle of Arnhem, much has been made of the pivotal rôle that the failure of comms played in the defeat. To quote the official account of the British Airborne Divisions: 'By the beginning of 1943, a suitable form of wireless set was yet to be forthcoming.' By virtue of the limitations of contemporary electronics, the power and range of radio kit portable enough to be viable for airborne troops to carry and deploy under the kinds of conditions they were certainly to face in battle, was severely li...

I said a couple of days ago that today's post would be in recognition of one young soldier, unknown to me but almost certainly known to my uncle Arthur at the time, as they were both members of HQ Company, Signals Platoon, 2nd Battalion, South Shropshire Regiment, and fought alongside each other at Arnhem. My uncle came from Smethwick, and Ivor Rowberry, the lad in question, from a few miles away in Wolverhampton. He was killed in action by the Old Church in Oosterbeek this day, [Friday] September 22nd, 1944. He was 22. This is the text in full of the letter he wrote to his mother before leaving for Holland on Operation Market Garden a few days before he was killed. No further comment needed...  ‘Dear Mum, Usually when I write a letter it is very much overdue and I must make every effort to get it away quickly. This letter, however is different. It is a letter I hoped you would never receive, as it is just a verification of that terse, black-edged card which you received some time ...

By the 21st. the situation was clearly extremely bad and the operation as it had been conceived was effectively over: to quote from Iain Ballantine's 'Arnhem; Ten Days in The Cauldron' in his chapter for that day: ' 'Two world powers at war, fighting at a distance of 25 yards from each other...' - Frans de Soet, Oosterbeek, September 1944.' The following statements are from the personal remembrances of involved individuals. They are not necessarily congruent in time, but serve to illustrate at distance, some of the intensity, confusion and horror of those few short days in September, 1944:   David Jebbitt, Medical Orderly, 181st Field Ambulance, RAMC:      '... I was part of the first lift of the operation, which took place on the 17th September 1944. We flew in a Horsa Glider (towed by a Dakota) from Down Ampney Airfield in Gloucestershire and landed at the drop zone near Wolfheze outside of Oosterbeek. As part of the 181st Field Ambulance, I was based ...

Sergeant Norman Howes volunteered for the newly formed Airborne in 1942 and was posted to the 2nd South Shropshires, on transfer from the Royal Fusiliers. I quote from his later reminiscences on his time at Arnhem:  -   '"We took off for Arnhem, as part of the second lift, from Broadwell on the morning of 18th September. This was not a popular decision amongst the men as by now the Germans knew that we we were coming... [we] landed at about 3 o'clock and were immediately sent to join the remainder of the battalion at the "Monastry" about 400 yards from St Elizabeth's Hospital."   -  "My company (A Company) took the lead and shortly after leaving the drop zone we captured a German Hauptman[n]. I made some remark about "Getting the bastard back to HQ" when, in perfect English, he rebuked me for my language... [adding] that they had known that we were coming but did not know our landing places - "Now we know that", he warned, "...

The day of the nineteenth of September 1944 was the day that my uncle Arthur was listed as missing in action. The circumstances and whereabouts are as yet unknown to me, but one thing I do know is that his unit was engaged somewhere around Oosterbeek, on the western approach to Arnhem. Judging from all the accounts I've read so far, the situation was an utter chaos of bloodshed, with lightly-armed airborne troops holed up against German armour and reinforcements and supplies nowhere to be seen where and when it mattered. The enemy strength had been woefully underestimated by the planners of the operation and the comms equipment available really didn't deliver when it mattered. I have a record gleaned from an excellent blog dedicated to those who fought and died at Arnhem: Nine Days in September , relating the story of one of Arthur's HQ Signals Platoon comrades, which I'll post in full on the twenty-second. Arthur was 'lucky': he was captured by the Germans; the...

Initially, the first wave of 2 South Staffs dug in and secured the landing zones and were due to await the second wave on the afternoon of the eighteenth, but at 09:00 hours, orders were given to advance to Arnhem to relieve 1 Para Battalion at the road bridge. En route, near the Wolfhezen Hotel, they came under sporadic sniper fire, and more seriously, were strafed by German fighters patrolling after heavy bombardment the previous day by RAF Lancaster bombers. Fortunately they suffered only a few casualties in this attack, before they managed to enter the built-up area around a cross-roads, where they picked up a good number of stragglers from 1 Para Brigade. These were unable to give much of a clue as to what lay ahead, but it was beginning to appear obvious that the Germans had used the intervening twenty-four hours since the first incursion of paratroopers to significantly reinforce their positions, and this became perfectly obvious when they came under heavy-machine-gunfire from t...

10:30 hours - the first Airborne lift took off from RAF Manston. The 2nd South Staffs were a battalion of the 1st Air landing Brigade, 1st Airborne Division, due to be lifted into Holland in two sections: the first, eighty years ago today, marking the start of the Arnhem campaign  [Operation Market Garden]  in earnest. The first Staffordshires to go were Battalion HQ, B Company, and D Company; a machine-gun platoon and HC Mortar Platoon, under the commands respectively of Lt-Col W.D.H McCardie, Major R.H Cain and Major J.E Philip: t he remainder of the battalion to follow on the eighteenth with the second lift. My uncle Arthur was attached to HQ Company, Signals platoon.  The first lift's rôle was to secure the landing areas for the second lift and so dug in for the task, meeting little opposition and spending a quiet first night. This was to prove, literally, to be the calm before the storm... [Once again, September rolls around and the story of The Battle of Arnhem is l...

Saturday, September 16th. 1944. RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England. The final briefings for the 1st. Airborne airlifts into Holland for Operation Market Garden were being completed, with the 1st. lift already prepped the day before; the 2nd. lift Orders Group were briefed in an all day general briefing, and at the end of it the CO and IO [Commanding Officer and Intelligence Officer] flew back to RAF Manston. According to the 2nd. Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment's War Diary for the period, the entry for the day reported the bare bones of the days activities, adding that "Everyone was in good spirits." Take off for the first lift was scheduled for 10:30 hours the next day, Sunday, September 17th. By 14:00 that afternoon they were on the ground in Holland, barely aware of what was to face them over the next ten days. The expectation was that the German forces they'd meet in their attempt to take control of the bridges over the Lower Rhine and to push on into G...

My take on the subject of the controversy surrounding The Winter Fuel Allowance [UK] issue remains that Gordon Brown’s annual distribution of extra cash sums to pensioners, which was instituted in 1997 [cf my post of September 12th] was less an entitlement or benefit than a regularised ex gratia payment in nature, in the gift and at the whim of a 'benevolent' government. This has over time been subsumed in the minds of the public and media into the now widely accepted view that the State Pension is a benefit. I repeat that it is no such thing . As I frequently am at pains to point out, it is a contributory entitlement , nothing more, nothing less; unlike the Winter Fuel Allowance, which was just an expedient backhander to plug a gap in pensions at the time, which inadvertently changed the narrative surrounding the nature of the entitlements. I understand the internal logic of separating the payment away from the core pension as a wholly means-tested benefit; but unless [and hop...

  Well, here we are again in Shropshire, for an early autumn break, and, at least for this afternoon anyway, the sun is out, the sky is blue and the air is moderately warm to boot. The forecast for the next week is none too shabby either, given some of the weather we've had this summer. Eighty years ago today though, my uncle Arthur and his mates from HQ Company Signals Platoon, 2nd South Staffordshire Regiment, were waiting for the go on Operation "Market", having been readied and subsequently stood down several times already. I don't know whether those, such as Arthur, who were stationed at RAF Manston got the reduced 24 hour leave that those at Brize Norton certainly got after a four-day battalion leave was chopped at the last minute; however it would have been a tall order for him to get back to the Midlands and back by 12:00 on the 15th anyway, as Manston was right at the tip of Kent on the Isle of Thanet. This sudden change in plans must have given them all a cl...

Pictured, three small purchases that had gone astray in the delivery process, for whatever technologically aggravated reason. At the top, a Koh-i-Noor 5.6mm clutch pencil - my second recent purchase of one of these fine but inexpensive things, as I figure that I can have two different drawing leads available at the same time - in the centre a rather fine - and again inexpensive - pocket fountain pen in wood and brass, which writes surprisingly well, straight out of its bubblewrap [box not included] and has an almost luxurious quality about it for no money. At the bottom is a lovely little Opinel No.4 knife which is absolutely tiny [although not the smallest one they make] with a proper carbon steel blade and the usual Opinel quality and simplicity of construction. Folded, it is literally only 65mm long: it will be an invaluable pencil sharpener, methinks. Anyhow, off to Shropshire for a fortnight's break tomorrow, so I'll keep you posted from there by snail-fi!

Had a slightly frantic round of emails with The Lads That Are Left [blog posts passim]: the last outpost of the boys from The Green who went to Lordswood School for Boys and survived: all of us boomers and all of us now retired to various parts of the UK/globe; curmudgeons all, The Last of The Summer Wine with an edge. The debate was - obviously - about the dropping of the winter fuel payment for us pensioners not on extra benefits. Some were reacting instantly, instinctively and rightly negatively to the ratification in the commons this week of the bill enacting this measure. I agree wholeheartedly and am personally affected by it. But I can't say it will have the same impact on us that it will on many, many others less fortunate than us: it won't. I'm just being honest when I say that: pleading false poverty for political edge is essentially wrong in my book. However, I do think that the new government has on the face of it , screwed the pooch with the decision to take su...

  Well, another portion of last night's Chicken Handi, a couple of chapatti, a puppadum, with the curry garnished with fresh coriander and chaat masala. Went down well, and as I mentioned last night this now leads me back to my Grail quest of the 1970s Brummie Anglo-Indian Madras curry; a late-night staple amongst our crowd, after a few pints in the pub; and the salve that made many a hangover tolerable at lunchtime the day after a session. It all started at - as I think I've mentioned before - The Light of Bengal on Bearwood Road in Smethwick, back in the mid-seventies, when I was a callow youth of twenty or twenty-one, about to embark on a lifetime's work of attempting to recreate that glorious experience in my own kitchen, one day. Well, yesterday was a major move forward toward that goal; another piece in a very subtle and complex jigsaw that I know I will never solve , as there is no [one] solution, and there are as many great Madras curries eaten over the years as res...

OK - as promised, Chicken Handi, or chicken in a pot, although this pot is French and oval, but there you go: it's a good pot, and very Hand[i]y, too. I pretty much followed the recipe/receipt/modus operandi on the spice mix packet, just to see if I could learn anything [new] about cooking South-Asian-style food: you're never too old to learn new tricks; something I firmly believe of dogs, too.  Anyhow, the experiment of actually following instructions in cooking anything- as you'll no doubt know is an unusual state of affairs for me - has actually borne some good fruit in this case. A fine sauce with an authentic consistency, and as I'd surmised, with the natural sweetness of the onion base to the fore and balancing the acidity of the tomatoes to boot; this was as close to my Holy Grail of South Asian sauce-making as I've got in forty-odd years of cooking. I will add that the spice-mix that came in the packet with the recipe is tailored to a spice-loving palate, so...

  The astute, and more importantly, observant among you will note, quite rightly, that the above picture is - indeed emphatically - not a pot of Chicken Handi. I floated this micro-project a couple of days ago and I have, in fact cooked the thing, but as we'd been over to The Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris] for our usual light lunch, neither of us felt like tucking into a rich curry for supper this evening. So the thing will sit and improve overnight for consumption tomorrow. Pictured is my repast this evening: an open toastie of good ham topped with grilled, melted cheddar, on thick, sliced white bread - which I consider to be the ideal base for such a sandwich, where the meat and cheese are the centrepiece, not the bread. I'll post a pic of the curry and tasting notes tomorrow...

Well, there we are then: another good one down. Herbie Flowers: bassist, tuba-player and creator of some of the most iconic bass-lines ever to grace the airwaves; most memorable for many of my generation being the ineffable backbone to Lou Reed's 'Walk on the Wild Side', which needs no explanation, elucidation or explication, musical triumph that it was. Flowers played on so many studio sessions and supplied the groove to so many bands in his time, but to me the Wild Side bass-line was the apotheosis of cool, treading the fine line of simultaneously being both firmly in, and subtly slightly out of the pocket of the groove; a genius interplay between the double-tracked string and electric bass parts which Flowers himself penned and which elevated a good Lou Reed tune to the truly great piece of work that was released in 1972, from Reed's album of that year, 'Transformer'; produced by David Bowie, with whom Flowers also collaborated on numerous occasions. As a ses...

Pictured, the pressure cooker we picked up from a charity shop some time ago - new and unused, by the look of it - and which has languished, unused since purchase, in various locations about Fairview Heights since. Which is just plain weird, as back in our early days here in the parish of Llanllechid, we were avid users of this splendid cooking aid: we used to own a splendid French device that resembled a pressure vessel from some kind of submarine, crafted from aluminium so thick it could have been a deep-sea submersible in its own right. Wonderful piece of kit, which I suspect is currently buried in the Twilight Zone that is our erstwhile garage, down the hill. Must try and rescue and refurbish it some day. Anyway, we made first use of the more modern version shown the other day, to make a chilli. We'd forgotten how easy these things make doing this kind of nosh: you can even - as we used to back in our food-co-op days of the early eighties - cook dried pulses such as chickpeas a...

  After last night's brief reflection on inspiration, or the lack of it, I got the idea for tonight's little scribble from messing around with something in the studio earlier today, involving Meccano. I was just mocking up a mechanism to better visualise whether it would suit my purpose - which it didn't, and I should have known better - with some old Meccano parts that I've got lying around the place. These bits came from the clearance of Aunt Lou's place [blog posts passim] and almost certainly belonged to her late son, David, who died in his forties. Now, this led me to reflect on my Meccano set, which Dad gave to me in around 1959 or 60, when I was around five or six years old. I'd got it into my head over the years that the set I had was a number five, but seeing some images of old catalogues online, I realised that it must have been at the very least a number eight set, as, in the illustration above, from a Meccano magazine of the time. The tower crane fea...

'It is a most remarkable thing. I sat down with the intention of writing something clever and original; but for the life of me I can't think of anything clever and original - at least, not at this moment.' Not my words, obviously, but those of the great Jerome K. Jerome; he of 'Three Men in a Boat' fame, in his first observational open epistle in a splendid little book entitled 'The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow: A Book For An Idle Holiday', published in 1890. Now the sentiment of blank page syndrome he expresses so eloquently applies to me most afternoons/evenings as I wonder what the beejesus to scribble for the day's post. Sometimes I've already cooked up a notion for a post in advance, or on rare occasions will have written most or all of it the day before - the ideal situation - but for the most part there's much head-scratching to be done before an idea comes to me. I guess the idle fellow in this case would be me, and tonight the idler ...

Tasting notes from the lamb steak thing... The meat itself looked decidedly unpromising from the outset: no bone and very little fat. But I persisted until the thing was at last cooked, with a modicum of caramelisation in evidence, and rested the bugger for a good twenty minutes, whilst I deglazed the baking dish with some decent dry white wine to make a crude sauce. I sliced the meat, napped it with the juices and put a dollop of the newly-discovered harissa alongside. Three things. The lamb was actually very good; the deglaze - with more white wine - was brilliant; and the harissa was a marvel. The depth of flavour in the lamb and sauce was one thing, but the complexity of the harissa just kept on developing and revealing more and more layers of taste long after my plate was cleared. It starts with a fairly powerful hit of smokey-ness, and develops into a complex of flavours that will take some time to fathom; ending in a glorious, but not overwhelming chilli hit. An extraordinary co...

I decided not to go down the couscous route tonight [cf last night's scribble], as it would produce too much food for a solo diner: Jane being away for a few days; so I've opted for a lamb steak, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, oregano and white wine; which I'm going to roast on a high heat and serve as a base to road-test the new harissa I've just bought. Whether or not I include a staple of some kind is moot, as my options are limited due to a depleted larder, and anyway, there's nothing wrong with just eating a simple meal of meat and a condiment, in my book. However, the thing I want to remark on tonight, is pictured above: I was rummaging around some book-boxes - I still have loads so stored, despite having extended my shelving - and came across my copy of 'Portrait of Dylan', Rollie McKenna's excellent photographic memoir of the poet, published in 1982. A friend of Thomas, and an artist whose chosen subjects were often poets, McKenna p...

OK, I was going to write about the frankly bonkers revelation in New Scientist this week that at the quantum level it is possible to cool things down by doing absolutely nothing, simply by detecting the absence rather than the presence of a photon. Mind suitably boggled once again. For the curious, the abstract for the paper can be found here . And no, it will not make much sense to the non quantum physicists out there, including me. Interesting, nevertheless. Instead, I report on possibly the most middle-class purchase I've made this year: the above-pictured jar of the spicy Tunisian condiment, Harissa. I've been a fan of the stuff since I first encountered it in France in 1983, in the form of the ubiquitous Le Phare du Cap Bon, which I recall being in just about every small shop and hypermarché at the time. I discovered the above in the ludicrous FT Weekend supplement HTSI [it used to go by its full title 'How to Spend It', but I think a touch of self-aware cringe mig...

I decided to pick up a copy of New Scientist from the shop this morning, as the main strap-line was 'Eradicating Dementia', which to one of my advancing years has to be a topic of interest. However the first articles I dipped into threatened to tip me into a state of mental discombobulation anyway, given the nature of their content. First off the bat, a DNA-based computer that has been programmed to solve simple chess and sudoku problems, by Albert Keung and colleagues at North Carolina State University recently. Now, weird as it seems, DNA computing, although still in its infancy, is not a new thing. But what is remarkable about these developments - despite the triviality of their current level of problem-solving: it's still proof-of-concept time, after all - is the sheer, mind-boggling storage data-density of this type of technology [bio-technology?]. 10,000 terabytes of data per cubic centimetre. Ten sodding petabytes. That's approximately 5000 billion pages of print...