Observations from a Hill

So - the first Labour budget for half a generation or so by the UK's first female chancellor - cause for celebration in itself on both counts - and has been commended to the House and to the country in general. And the world hasn't fallen apart, despite the ex-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's petulant tirade of a response to it; still sticking to his 'the Labour Party hasn't got a plan!' schtick. It's almost like he's on endless loop and nobody knows where the off switch is. Listening to the budget speech I would say that the government not only has a plan, but it's a pretty good one at that. Working with the meagre scraps left behind after fourteen years of self-interested Tory greed and grift, they've made the best of a bad lot and eased as much of the inevitable pain as possible. That the markets didn't immediately melt down is testimony to the groundwork negotiations with business that the party have been engaged in during their last year in ...

Pictured in the gloom of a late October afternoon here at Fairview Heights: my studio workshop roof newly clad in a fetching blue tarp - for some weird reason, my iPhone has rendered it in mauve, but life's too short to piss around with editing it for accuracy - that doesn't quite cover the whole shebang and will need another similarly-sized sheet overlaid in the opposite direction to finish the job. However, it means that for tonight at least, the place is now leakproof. I still have plans to stick a corrugated fibre roof on the poor old structure - I built it fourteen years ago, and it shows - but my budget doesn't currently allow for it. However, at least one winter of no leaks will be a welcome change! Keep you posted on progress...

  Pictured: tonight's repast of pork, smoked bacon and chilli beans alongside an appetiser of some excellent spicy chorizo to nibble on with a glass of cold pilsener beer. So, Tex-Mex meets Spain and Germany head on at Fairview Heights this evening. I really can't be arsed with picking the bones out of the continuing press speculation over the possible contents of tomorrow's budget. I'm of a mind to wait and see just what the Chancellor has to offer. My attention span isn't that short: I just wish that everyone else would stop second-guessing what hasn't yet happened to fill pages with possibles and what-if's. Analysis is only possible with actual data to go on. Speculation and porky-pies don't cut it for me...

  It seems like the transatlantic geopolitical zeitgeist at the moment centres on the metaphorical toss of an electoral coin, so close is the race for the next President of The United States. A round-robin email from my old mate Jeff this morning linked us out to a Guardian piece on Trump's Madison Square rally yesterday, which by all accounts, in any sane country, should have seen him arrested and banged up for incitement and race-hatred. But oh, no, not in the USA, where freedom of speech is paramount, so long as you're white and wealthy. The implications of this freedom to publicly abuse large swathes of the American population, his political opponents and just about anyone else who springs to his ever-diminishing mind, are legion and serious. This madman's psychotic ramblings should not merely be dismissed as such, though: pretty much half the US electorate takes this guy seriously, despite his track record of grift and sleaze, his incoherence and childish tantrum-throw...

Twelve and Twenty are interesting numbers. Although for the most part these days in the UK we use pretty much the base-10 metric system, with its apparently flawless internal structural logic, 'twas not always thus, as I've written about several times over the lifetime of this blog. Up until 1971, our national currency system was a largely duodecimal one, [base-12], albeit with the addition of the proto-decimal 'florin', equal to one tenth of a pound. But crucially, the pound was comprised of 240 pence, and so the florin actually equated to 24d [pence], or 2s [shillings]: a shilling being 12 pence or one twentieth of a pound. Clear so far? The point of all this, as I've mentioned before, is that the divisibility of twenty and twelve is much greater than that of one hundred and ten. Whereas decimal chunks subdivide equally into chunks of two and five, twelve and twenty subdivide equally into two, three, four, six; and in the case of twenty, also five and ten: affordi...

  Pictured, my newly-acquired fountain pen: a Parker Junior Duofold in Burgundy and 14K gold, which arrived from the eBay seller I bought it off yesterday. It was meant to be a birthday present to self, but a day past the date doesn't really matter much at my age. I wanted this particular pen because I had one exactly similar to this, bought for me as a present by I think my maternal grandparents - I could be wrong - over sixty years ago for school use. Tragically the original, like so much other stuff one gets gifted in childhood, got lost along the way of growing up. I stumbled across this one the other day and decided it was time to replace like with like: right model, right colour and right age.  On arrival, I flushed the nib out and filled the thing with Diamine "Imperial Purple" ink, and after a little shake and some customary scribbling, it writes perfectly and most importantly, suits my hand as if I'd worn the nib in myself. Lovely, and in amazing condition fo...

André Kertész. Got there in the end, didn't I? Above is "Atelier Mondrian" [Mondrian's Studio], from Kertész' Postcards From Paris, a series of photographs produced by him during his period working and living in the French capital between his arrival from Budapest in 1925, and 1936, the year he moved to live out the rest of his life in New York, dying in 1985 at the age of 91. Kertész was a Hungarian photojournalist and photographer, who first picked up a camera aged 16, a gift from his mother to him and his brother Jenö. Apparently he quickly adjusted to  the device and the expressive medium itself, becoming technically skilled in what was then still a relatively arcane and skilled art, learning early on the delicate skill of long-exposure available-light photography at night: a technique that yields images of surprising quality and beauty, having that absolute, physical imprint of 'time' implicit within a single, exposed frame of film or glass plate. A f...

Another year, another supposed milestone: I've reached my allotted biblical span of three-score years and ten [... 'The days of our years are three-score and ten...' Psalm 90, verse 10]; or to put it another way:  [ '...how terribly strange to be seventy...': Simon & Garfunkel, "Old Friends" from the album "Bookends", 1968]. Both carry with them the view that the precipice is nigh: how bloody depressing is that thought? This now septuagenerian epicurean for one would rather take life as it comes: I don't need a road-map to decrepitude and oblivion, thank you very much; I'll simply wander around randomly until I drop off the edge under my own steam. There's still some fuel in the tank and apart from a mild dose of the lurgy, gifted me to celebrate my birthday, all has been well today, with a fine lunch out at the White Eagle at Rhoscolyn on Anglesey, with James, Jane, and Irene: pictured at table; Leo being away at the moment. A v...

I'm backgrounding the Kertész piece again today as Jane suggested something else dear to my heart: beer. In yesterday's Guardian they ran a piece on an emerging trend: the takeover of 'craft' brewers and their products by large brewco's, which then continue to trade on the 'small brewer' image that the original brewers had as their USP and which obviously colours the consumers' choice in choosing their particular tipple. Brands such as Beavertown and Camden are set up now in direct competition with still genuinely independent breweries which operate on a very small scale and really can't operate at anything near the same commercial level as the giants with their enormously deep pockets, making the smaller fry yet more targets for the big fish to sweep up. One thing made me sit up in surprise in reading the piece was the revelation that Fuller's, that venerable old London brand, home to London Pride and ESB: two of the finest ales out there, is ac...

  I was thinking about writing something about André Kertész, the émigré Hungarian photographer and photojournalist who ended up in New York via a stint working in Paris between 1925 and 1936 and in particular his series of Cartes Postales from that period. But I think I'll leave that one for tomorrow's post. Instead, as you can guess from the image above, I'm in food mode. John [cf. my post "Memory = Society" of the 19th inst.] came round for a short lunch with us this afternoon. We had Jane's excellent take on Minestrone, followed by a brief cheese course of the above: three pretty damned decent French soft cheeses; all excellent and all with completely different characters. The one at the top, Epoisses, was one of my late french mate JC's favourites, and has a texture and mildness redolent of clotted cream, despite its up-front pungency on the nose front. Below, the St. Marcellin has a stronger flavour and displays a hint of acidity and chalkiness despi...

Today's Financial Times editorial comments on what appears to be an impending modern gold rush, with tech Über corps such as Amazon and Google in the vanguard of the development and deployment of 'small modular [nuclear] reactors' or SMRs, to provide the power that their increasing use of AI will require, and which is unlikely to be available to them from national grids, with their huge demand for electricity proving an unsupportable burden on domestic supply and systems already throttling back on carbon. Instead they are looking toward SMRs to provide their energy needs on a decentralised [private] basis. All well and good you might think, given that nuclear energy is inherently low emission at a normal operating level, theoretically cheaper and long-serving, and is very energy-dense in nature: more bang for your buck for longer, one might say. But the problem with nuclear is a two-fold one: any reactor system yet devised inherently sows the seeds of its own destruction vi...

Following on from last night's scribble, I was reading a piece in the TLS [18/10/24] over a pint in the Anglesey Arms by Menai Bridge this afternoon, by Boyd Tonkin, about The Warburg Institute in London. The Institute was founded by Aby Warburg, who had amassed a massive collection - sixty-thousand books and a vast stock of photographs and sundry archive material - in his home city of Hamburg. He escaped Germany with his collection in December 1933, just before Joseph Goebbels would commence wreaking havoc on what the Nazis would term 'decadent culture'. With sponsorship - and not inconsiderable family money, the Institute was founded. The thing that stuck out of the piece for me was the modus operandi of the Institute's classification system, which conformed to what became known as "Warburg's Law of the Good Neighbour": whereby, to quote the TLS piece, '... the arrangement "meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the sh...

Been over to Waunfawr for a couple of hours this evening to join our old mate John Latham at the place he's rented for an extended 80th birthday this week: a pleasant two hours spent in convivial company with members of the Brummie diaspora, many of us unknown to each other but with friends in common - a complex Venn diagram mostly centred on the Kings Heath and Moseley areas of Birmingham in the late 60s and early 70s, of student flats and parties, piss-ups and communism. It never ceases to amaze me how an individual life's influence fans out exponentially into the world: butterfly-wingbeat ripples that touch and influence different and often mutually unaware social groupings that each take with them their own memories of that person into their personal histories. Tonight I met a small group of people who all knew a once good friend of mine, Neil Burr;  now sadly gone these last few years, and who all were taken aback that I too knew the man; back when I was a teenager and a ...

  Made the first 'amendments' to the bastardised Little Dorrit I mentioned yesterday: I make no apologies for the blatant Tom Phillips conceptual rip-off - c.f his "A Humument - A Treated Victorian Novel" 1970-2016 - he wasn't the first to piss around with stuff like this, anyway. In this case, the document being disfigured/transformed is not anything of physical significance anyway: Amazon basically ripped me off with this strangled computer output:- no original documents, animals or children will be harmed in the production of this piece; and I will endeavour to create something anew out of the mangled shreds of the Dickens work, by using the emphases created by the islands of text outputted by Amazon's faulty software to create new narratives, and adding handwritten, drawn and painted stuff to suit the moment. BTW: also pictured is my latest bottle of ink; a tiny tester of brown which is actually a very fine sepia colour and makes a good compliment to my ot...

A word to the wise: don't buy this 'edition' of "Little Dorrit" by Charles Dickens off Amazon if you actually want to read the novel: it's incomplete and unusable: it's text ends abruptly mid-sentence on page 275 - pictured right: note the vast tract of white space - and the typographical layout is surreal at best, with huge swathes of white space and a confusing mixture of centre and occasionally standard justification to the text. In the Amazon listing it is claimed to be an imprint by an independent publisher, but it turns out to be an apparently print-on-demand rendition of the text - or at least some of it - by Amazon itself. Anyway, I've left a stinker of a review and reported it to Amazon through their 'review' process, but I'm not holding my breath: it was only six quid anyway. So I've just ordered a used Penguin edition from World of Books for four quid, to actually read. I've a mind to turn this surreal volume into an artw...

Further to last night's post re. my take on Eno's Oblique Strategies methodology. Like the twisted, self-authored version I use of the Zettelkasten - "The Twenty" - it is simply a way of extending the range of one's thought processes. In the case of the The Twenty, just like any form of physical note-taking, cataloguing and ordering of information, it helps to fix thoughts and ideas a little bit more firmly in the mind: attending lectures without taking notes is not really attending, after all. But Oblique Strategies is simply a way of chucking in a bit of noise, anarchy and pseudo-randomness into the thinking pot: it is not a recipe nor an instruction manual nor a self-help cult: it's just grit for the oyster of creativity. The functional point is that it gets in the way of and interrupts a stagnant thought process and branches the consciousness out to somewhere else for just long enough for better stuff to emerge from the subconscious mind to the front of ho...

  Pictured, my current work in progress: a personal variant on Eno's Oblique Strategies: the creative block unstopper created by him and the artist Peter Schmidt in the mid-late 1970's, and which is still around in many forms to this day; either the original, very rare card sets, the current edition of the that physical set, or various software and online variations on the idea for hardware platforms various. Me being me, of course, I've come up with my own minor twist on the thing, grouping the 100 deliberately obtuse and terse instructions into four differently-coloured, ring-bound sets of record cards, to add one extra dimension to the idea. A random decision in itself, with the grouping of four sets of twenty-five dictated simply by the fact that my supply of record cards only comes in the usual four colours of green, blue, yellow and pink. The colours and groupings have no intrinsic significance, but serve only to introduce a further layer to the 'random' proce...

Forty thousand: an interesting number. On the one hand the words make up 66% of the title of "Forty Thousand Headmen" a song by the band Traffic, released in 1968, and which featured on one of those musical staples of the era - the sampler album [vinyl record] - "Nice Enough To Eat", released on Chris Blackwell's Island Records in 1969 at the pocket-friendly price of 15/6d [old money - look it up] here in the UK, and which is still one of my favourite listens to this day. On the other hand, forty thousand years ago or thereabouts, Homo Sapiens was finally left to its own devices as the apex of mammalian development thus far, as most of the other early human species had died out, save a possible few Neanderthal stragglers, who lasted a few thousand years longer. Anyhow, I say this to put into perspective the fate of two other rather more famous record albums, physically essentially similar in nature to Nice Enough To Eat, that are currently deep in interstellar s...

Before I consider writing anything at all tonight, I must give a shout out to the great British instrumentalist Mike Dawes, who is not only technically phenomenally talented, but who also understands music and the arts of melody and harmony applied to instrumental guitar utterly instinctively. Here he is, once again interviewed and playing on Rick Beato's channel - again a shout out to one of my favourite YouTubers for producing serious and seriously entertaining material for those of us out here with an actual attention span and a love of music. Check 'em both out. On with the post... All I want to do tonight is voice how staggeringly pissed off I am about the daily, relentless, hysterical criticism of the new government; including from the natural Labour press constituency of the likes of The Guardian & The New Statesman. The bollocks spouted by the right-wing press is as predictable as it is lamentable; but I'm afraid the commentariat of The New Left [look it up] th...

Car issues now thankfully resolved. I had both bottom arms replaced for the MOT test the other day [not cheap] and drove home secure in the knowledge - or so I thought -  that that would be that for the next few months. I fuelled the thing up to the brim ready to go and meet Jane at The Stretton Fox Inn just off the M56 Friday lunchtime, went home and parked up for the night. Friday morning came and I made a nice early start, intending to take my time over the journey and have a decent food break at Holywell on the way. On pulling out over the lip of our slightly sunken car park, a very unpleasant metal on metal clunk resounded throughout the vehicle. On driving down the High St towards Rachub Square - a road whose surface quality is more Greek island than North Welsh in nature - I was greeted with more grating and clanking at each hole and speed bump I encountered. So instead of heading onto the A55 East I made straight for my garage in Bangor again. Turns out that I had sh...

Sorry to burden you with yet another - sort of - cooking post, but it's been a couple of days of getting the car sorted - still alas not quite resolved - which has involved a good deal of physical exercise on my part [not a bad thing] as while I'm waiting for the garage to get stuff done, I simply walk: a habit that I've had since childhood. While living through my youth and college days, I walked. Around Birmingham city centre, along the canals and out to the suburbs; or, as a hungover student, out as far as Dudley along the canal, to ease the pain of overindulgence with a great Madras curry and three chappati at the Shah Bagh restaurant [blog posts passim]: worshipping at one of my temples of spice and flavour and bringing salve to the ailing fool that I was. Walking. The best and least invasive and injurious form of exercise there is outside of swimming. Taking life a step at a time, at the pace most suited to appreciating the world around you. At a pace that suits intro...

Done a lot of walking today, courtesy of my motor being in dock for repairs necessary to pass its MOT. I literally flâneur-ed my way around Bangor for three hours, stopping for coffee at Kyffin - my customary double-espresso - and a read of the newspaper; calling in at Greggs for a sausage roll, and buying a book on Charles Babbage from Pete the Hat, who sadly has recently lost his brother. A decent few kilometres covered in pursuit of absolutely nowt in particular: good physical exercise and a fair amount of introspection to boot. Loads of new University students milling around: doesn't seem five minutes to me since I was a fresher here myself - albeit a mature-student MA fresher - forty-four years ago. Bangor has changed so much in the interim, and mostly not to its benefit; but there are glimpses of hope that there are positive moves to revive the High Street, with a good number of property refurbishments ongoing and small businesses taking up residence again. We just need some...

The consequences of mankind's ingenuity and endeavour are truly manifold: we are, after all at the apex - so far as we are aware - of the pecking order on the small blue-green marble we call home: the Earth. What we have succeeded in doing to that marble is, however far from optimal, both to the marble itself, but also to the various sentient inhabitants of said marble, at the apex of which we imagine ourselves as a species, speciously, to be [forgive the split infinitive: you know what I mean, and anyhow, I cares not a jot for the nicety itself]. That we were invested with the capacity to invent beyond ourselves and communicate and disseminate that invention amongst ourselves is of course not unique to us: plenty of other species, mammalian and otherwise do similarly. Where we have taken our ingenuity of course is writ large in the climate chaos that unfolds before us with ever-increasing ferocity. That we are constantly fighting wars of attrition with others of our species - our...

I read with interest in today's i newspaper of the discovery of unseen film footage of the Thunderbirds TV series from sixty-odd years ago, which had been languishing in the shed of a former editor on the show, after his death. Also, I note the death of the actor who voiced Lady Penelope's butler and chauffeur Parker the other day: David Graham. The show aired for two years, between 1964 and 1966 and was staple weekly viewing for those of us boomers born in the mid-fifties; I remember the rush to get back into the house to see the very first episode air: all of us abandoning whatever games were playing in the street outside for the TV - 18" Black & White screen, two channels only. Those were the days, eh? That lack of choice and general noise made innocent stuff like Thunderbirds a big deal then, though: nothing was available on demand [as if!], so scheduling your week was a thing if you weren't to miss out on your favourite stuff. It focussed the mind rather, and...

Taken delivery today of the October issue of Artforum magazine: a publication that I read assiduously when I was at art college back in the seventies. My subscription is to the original US edition, which is still produced in its original [ten-and-half inch] square format, unlike the European edition, which sadly shoehorns the content into A4. In my live online Artforum feed today was a reprint of a 1983 article on Eikoe Hosoe, whose death I mentioned the other day, which event must have been after the print deadline for the journal. The image which features at the head of the article is "Kamaitachi #8", 1965, as seen on the printout above. I've mentioned this image before as it was lodged in my memory from college days, but without reference: an enigma and indeed an enigmatic image in itself, dreamlike in its [un]familiarity.  The reality of its production is steeped in Japanese legend: the Kamaitachi of the series' title being a demon that haunted the rice fields. Th...

Extra lazy post tonight as I got double-jabbed yesterday for 'flu and pneumonia: one in each shoulder, no less; and have been feeling decidedly sore and generally sub-par all day. So, a Sunday supper post it is, and no prizes for guessing what's on the plate. Sirloin steak, chunky chips, token bit of green stuff and my usual style of meat sauce. One thing that struck us both tonight, though, is that neither of us could finish the entire lump of meat: half of one steak each would have sufficed to sate the appetite. Makes sense though: as we age, the need for huge slabs of protein recedes; indeed, the need for large quantities of food per se is no longer present. Very nice meal all the same, and I'll probably stir-fry the leftover meat tomorrow...

Last month marked the death of Eikoh Hosoe, the Japanese photographer [blog posts passim], who departed this earth at the age of  ninety-one on September 16th. A belated acknowledgement on my part, I know, but there you go; I was preoccupied with the Arnhem anniversary at the time, and missed the news of his death until his obituary popped up in my newsfeed. I urge anyone unfamiliar with his work to delve into his output, and a good starting point would be the Könemann imprint pictured above. Check it out...

Been mulling over the idea of building a variant of the classic loudspeaker, the Klipsch La Scala: a [sort of] folded-horn speaker with short horn-loaded midrange and top-end drivers. Except that I don't possess any appropriate speakers or drivers at present and don't have the budget to support suitable purchases. So far, so bad; and one might ask, why bother, considering I already own perfectly good loudspeakers that provide - for the most part - adequately good sound reproduction to my ageing ears. Which is a good question. I think the motivation for this notion is one of nostalgia for a sound from my youth: coloured and colourful - musical in nature - rather than crystal. The irony is that the Klipsch Horn speakers were one of many designs of the post-war era designed to further the cause of what was then called "High Fidelity", the doctrinal [and, it has to be said dogmatic] approach to accurately reproducing music with what was, after all,  technically compromise...

  Weirdly sad - for someone who grew up in the fifties, sixties and seventies - was the news the other day of the demise of Tupperware, or at least of the Tupperware company. Founded in 1942 by the eponymous Earl Tupper, their products were to define food storage habits for the next eighty-plus years; their airtight seals [still!] keeping crackers, biscuits, cookies and sundry other perishables fresh after opening. The offspring of Tupper's vision can be seen in countless knock-off products and food packaging the world over. His marketing genius dreamt up the idea of 'The Tupperware Party' - a kind of franchise system - where someone, pretty much always a housewife [God that sounds so archaic] would take on the rôle of host in their own home, to sell Tup's products to their friends and family over drinks nibbles and banter, in the evening, while the men were either out doing whatever 'men' did in those days, or else banished for the duration to their shed or den...

Yesterday at the Post Office Scandal Inquiry, the former Chief Financial Officer,  Alasdair Cameron, gave further evidence that  Post Office Limited simply gave up trying to recover shortfalls from Sub-Postmasters and just wrote them off in the profit and loss accounts. Cameron told the inquiry: “ … [POL was] bust. It’s been bust for years. It has £700m of net liabilities and we’ve disclosed this in excruciating detail for ARA  [Annual Report and Accounts]  after ARA…you could see the scale of that very quickly through the P&L, and it had been, I think, £2m a year when I joined, it went up to £5m a year, and suddenly it was £12m a year – it was a million pounds a month!” Unpacking that: ultimately a million pounds a month was being written off, effectively as bad debt; where in reality, only a small proportion of those losses actually existed: the majority of the shortfalls having been created by the faulty software itself. Surely these “missing” funds should h...

Pictured, some classic examples of Italian mid-twentieth-century cast aluminium design and manufacture: two Bialetti Moka Express coffee makers and a Bencini Koroll 24S camera, all constructed out of solid cast aluminium, just like the classic radiator grille of the original Alfa Romeo Spider. There's a beautiful echo of Art Deco about these designs, and the Bialetti coffee makers are still in production, decades on. The fact though, is that both designs do hail from the 1930s and the rise of Mussolini's Fascists, whose triumphal design aesthetic can be seen, writ large in railway stations of the era, such as Firenze [Florence]. Fascism and WWII notwithstanding, the thirties design aesthetic still stands proud in my eyes: a modernist, cinematic vision of the future present: Vorticism and Futurism embodied in the mundane artefacts of daily life...