Observations from a Hill

I wrote a short piece on May 11th 2020 about the Birmingham Workhouse in Winson Green and its infamous Arch of Tears as it was locally known, where my Great-Great Grandfather, Godfrey Rudge died, a pauper, having moved from his birthplace in Rhiwabon [Ruabon] in Denbighshire to the Midlands to find work in the late 19th century. I've latterly found the Workhouse record of his stay there, and interestingly he is listed, alongside all the other non-English inmates, as 'Irish'. Godfrey spoke only Welsh and so I guess they just lumped him in with all the others as a matter of convenience. I bought the book pictured a while back to try and shed some light on the conditions the poor could expect to experience in the various lodgings in which they might find themselves forced to inhabit.  Mary Higgs was writing about her researches - including using incognito voluntary stays in various types of lodgings to garner objective observations - about vagrancy and the effects of The Poor ...

Teaching isn't just about facts. To take a rather hackneyed and frankly strained analogy of building a house; the finished edifice is something approximating to a body of knowledge, the bricks are the 'facts' that are bound together to form that edifice. However, the real knowledge that has to be gained through being taught lies in the understanding of how those bricks are made and the process by which they are bound together to form the whole. Without that background understanding we have no edifice at all. We can't build if we don't know how to make bricks [substitute your construction materials of choice: I prefer bricks; see blog posts passim on this topic], and even if there is a Desert Island Discs Luxury endless supply of magic bricks, if you don't understand mortar, how to make it and how to apply it; you still haven't got knowledge: you merely have facts. Teaching is about showing both the gaps between, and the relationships between, facts. Teaching...

I just want to briefly revisit some ideas I posted about in 2020. At the centre of my admittedly nebulous thoughts on the the matter is the question of the authenticity of the photographic record. As I've mentioned before, I wrote my degree dissertation on this very topic, asserting a counter argument to Roland Barthe's essay, "The Rhetoric of The Image", where he argued for the notion that a photograph has an innate, non-symbolic truth, due to its direct one-to-one analogue relationship to the subject photographed. My thesis was that there were already ample historical examples of 'tampering' with or enhancing images that stretched way back into the history of the practice. He alludes in his essay to the cultural connotations - he was using advertising imagery as his example - afforded by the various elements assembled in the advert he featured: the signification of colour, language, assemblage, etc., arguing that the photographic element within the advert so...

We really have moved solidly into an era of the politics of petulance and impatience. Here in the UK we used to at least give a government the chance of serving the four-year term out [barring wars or some other major factor] before deciding which way to vote the next time. Now it seems that waiting that long is just too much for the playground politicking that now prevails in this fragile archipelago's febrile atmosphere. Being invited to join political petitions these days is as routine as opening one's emails or making the morning tea. Most are unremarkable and for the most part worthy of at least some attention. But being asked to lobby for a general election just four months into the new government is surely political short-termism of the basest kind and which stretches the credibility of this [rapidly becoming populist] democratic service to its very limits. But here we are. There's one out there and it's caught fire. The fact that as I write this, some 2.8 milli...

OK - I was in my usual quandary about what to write about tonight, up until about forty seconds ago, when I put some more chicken - cf. last night's post - into the air-fryer. The thing I want to pass on, for what it's worth, is that I started this faintly odd exercise four-and-a-bit years ago for no reason in particular; but in retrospect might have been as a result of the pandemic's reality kicking in, and my subconscious telling me that I had almost never recorded anything that I had ever thought or done. To that date, I had only succeeded in keeping a diary for a few months, when I first fell in love, aged sixteen. Prior and subsequently to that period I tried, and failed, on numerous occasions to record my life and experience in written form. I guess that part of this failure was due to that singular characteristic of youth; particularly of our generation: invulnerability. We none of us felt at that stage in our lives that anything would ever alter; that we would alway...

  Been over to pick Jane up from the Stretton Fox at Warrington, just off the M56, this afternoon, so a lazy food post today. Pictured, tonight's repast of chicken drumsticks, marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic paste, salt, pepper and chilli flakes, air-fried with the lemon shell for around thirty-five minutes. Nice...

Further to last night's post. We are not born with the ability to 'see' as we imagine it from the standpoint of a fully-grown human, and despite the exquisite construction of our two organs of sight, they are optically fairly rudimentary, consisting of a sole - albeit focusable - [optically] simple lens, an attendant variable aperture to compensate for changes in light level, and a hemispherical 'focussing screen' onto which the light entering the eye is focussed. A sort of highly developed biological camera obscura , if you will: a [spherical in this case] box or room with a small aperture equipped with a lens with which to realise an image of the outside world on the screen behind. So far, so simple, even given the millions of years of evolution that led to the development of our eyes from the prototype cluster of light-sensitive cells in a shallow depression in the skins of creatures long since extinct. But the fact of the matter is that we have to learn to see. ...

I was pondering earlier - before Wales' inevitable defeat to South Africa this afternoon [Rugby Union Autumn Internationals] - on the nature of visual perception, at least in relation to photography, as it largely is today, on the smartphone: in this case the iPhone 16 Pro. The compound camera on the latter is an optical wonder in and of itself, but what the phone's firmware and software do with its input beggars belief to be frank. At the very simplest level, you can actually set the f-stop of a given lens without there being any physical form of f-stop: it's all calculated by the AI engine built into the hardware of the phone. It allows you to isolate foreground objects against their background with differential focus: all at the soft/firm/hardware level. Coupled with an actual and astonishingly good 5x optical zoom, a choice of lens focal lengths, and a heinously good macro setting, and you've got a very strong contender for an actual, proper tool camera here. What ...

So, what to make of the current escalations in the Ukraine war? Will Putin's Russia deploy their much-threatened nuclear arsenal at the 'wider West'? The temperature of the conflict is undoubtedly rising, and the election victory in the US of Donald Trump can do little to allay fears of the destabilisation of NATO: after all Trump is a fanböi of Putin and is currently shaping up to withdraw US support from the alliance. He sees everything through the lens of business [I might add badly as he's more crook than entrepreneur] and wants to ally himself with the money rather than engage with international politics or even his own people. His self-interest is glaringly obvious to those from whose eyes the scales have fallen, or indeed the rest of us who already see clearly what he represents. But what of the threat of nuclear war by Russia? In a world dominated by zero-game mentality one would think that this pointless winner-takes-all mindset would inevitably prevail, no mat...

I was going to try and pick the bones out of the current situation in the Ukraine war, the Trump/Putin axis, and that damned ballistic missile attack, but I'll leave it for now as I'm knackered. I'll be back on that one. Pictured is the curry sauce I knocked up yesterday to use up the meat from the night before's meal, now extended with fresh chicken and the sauce let down a bit with a little more water to loosen it up a bit. I first thought that I had overdone the tomato to onion ratio, but now I'm not so sure. I'd hazard a guess that this is the closest I've got yet to my Holy Grail of a Brummagem/Black Country/Anglo-Indian curry in forty-four years of experimentation: the clean bowl by the pot is testimony to my opinion of it! Just a few spice notes to  discover and add, maybe up the quantity of onion to tomato; tweak, tweak, tweak: one spoon at a time. It's like the quest for a perfect beach-found pebble: it's the seeking that is the point, not ...

In her review of "Tracks On The Ocean" by Sara Caputo - Times Literary Supplement, November 15th. 2024 - Christina Thompson alludes to the imprecision of precision itself, which is fair comment. We can achieve extraordinary levels of precision within a given context, as anyone who has had access to a metrology lab and metrologists - myself included - can attest. However, it really is all relative: one person's exactitude is another's ballpark, depending on the terms of reference applied. Context is everything. A woodworker will need precision down to no more than a few hundredths of an inch at the very most, whereas a few thousands of an inch may be too large a margin of error for a an engineer working in metal. To a physicist, nanometre tolerances and measurement will be the order of the day; but even then, the subdivisions of nicety will continue down the rabbit hole into the realms of the subatomic. The fact is that absolute exactitude can never be attained: as wi...

OK - here's my take on things business/economic, and I'll go all in and say off the bat, that the problem with capitalism as it stands today is not that there's too much profit, but rather that there's too little. Capitalism is not just the sole fiefdom of the corporate world, or the wealth management bubble, or of the landowning gentry 'farming' classes. It is business, first and foremost. That includes the corner shop in my tiny village square and the myriad micro-businesses plying their trade in home-made clothes, jewellery, cakes, fancies and any number of other perfectly good, worthwhile and saleable goods, offered by individual and family traders throughout the world. A small business, which by definition will have a small turnover, needs to earn a decent profit on its sales, over and above its costs and overheads, in order to make a living and ensure its survival. In any normal market on the scale that small businesses would have traditionally operated, ...

Here's a thing. We have a US President-elect vowing to tariff the beejesus out of the rest of the world in his quest for US trade autonomy [in itself a pretty economically weird concept]; the UK government vacillating about our country's trade relationship with the EU; UK landowners [Big Farmer] bitching about the removal of a tax bung they've actually only had for forty years [and they'll still be better off than they were before Thatcher's 1984 gift, only paying half the rate of inheritance tax that every other bugger has to pay]; yet another COP, yet again held in a petrostate, going nowhere for the 29th time. And then we have China. In contrast to the Indian subcontinent, that erstwhile emergent tiger economy of tech, which is currently suffocating under the clouds of its own industrial pollution; China seems, on the surface of it, and despite its former reputation as a global mega-polluter, to be turning a corner and to offer somewhat of an example to the rest ...

If you Google pre-natal nostalgia, all you get in return is stuff relating to one's experience in the womb; but I came across a reference to what I would recognise the term to signify in this week's Times Literary Supplement, in a review of Darren Coffield's new book "Queen's of Bohemia", by Libby Purves. My understanding and experience of the concept of pre-natal nostalgia, is a sensation of harking back to a time and culture that predates one's own birth. A nostalgia for a time, place and context one couldn't rationally say one actually knew. But here's the thing. I actually believe in collective, innate memory: call it folk memory, ancestral or cellular memory; whatever. We are, like all other species, programmed by the experiences of our forebears well into the distant past, and we react to triggers afforded by our environment, so deeply embedded as to be completely innate and subconscious: we react to external threat completely instinctively, ...

What have the Church of England - and for that matter The Church of Rome - the upcoming Trump government and the Mafia have in common? Loyalty and Omertà is what. Swearing fealty to one's chosen overlord - be it/they/she/he corporeal or divine - no matter what, and keeping one's counsel over transgression as a matter of duty. The Church of Rome and Anglicanism have a sorry track record over - usually sexual and often deeply institutionalised - transgressions against the most vulnerable of their respective flocks, something that is currently in the full face of public scrutiny at present. What this actually means to the ordinary person of these faiths I don't know, as Christians seldom intersect my orbit, and those that occasionally do tend to be of an evangelical leaning anyway, and that's another kettle of rotting fish in my book. The Mafia - pick your flavour from the many varieties available - demand absolute loyalty from favours lent: with interest and on pain of s...

  As mentioned last night, here's last night's repast. Lamb steak and potatoes: note token vegetable matter. The potatoes were peeled and sliced into 1/4" rounds, just like my mom's homemade chips used to be, which gives a good volume to surface area ratio for cooking, looks different and well, is frankly easier than cutting batons out of ellipsoid solids. They were dried off, well salted with sea salt, and blanched in freshly-boiled water for about ten minutes, dried again and marinated in olive oil, lemon juice and garlic paste before being cooked in the air fryer for about twenty-five minutes. Meanwhile, the lamb was seasoned, and marinated in Sharwarma kebab paste and the leftover potato marinade until the potatoes were done. About eight minutes per side in the air-fryer for the lamb, and Bob's yer dad's brother [as usual, don't forget to rest the meat for at least half the cooking time before serving, preferably longer]. Lovely juicy spiced meat and go...

  I would have written about tonight's jazz cuisine: Jane was at work today, and I had, as would be usual on a Sunday , a kind of Ready, Steady, Cook hour, where I just go with whatever produce and spicing is in front of me and invent a meal out of it. Tonight's turned out pretty well, considering I only had four spuds and a couple of lamb steaks to go on: the veg was a microwave mixed bag from M&S this afternoon, and so was kind of peripheral. I'll relate the recipe maybe tomorrow, but I have to give a shout out to the pizza pictured above from yesterday evening. After our glass of Bass at The Black Boy [see yesterday's post] we called at Morrison's in Caernarfon for a few bits and pieces. Jane already had something to eat at home, so I just thought "...pizza for me, then..." I found the above in the frozen foods aisle, stuck it in the basket on the basis that I love 'Nduja sausage anyway, and we drove home. Come around seven PM, I put the thing i...

We went to Caernarfon today for a wander about, as we'd not done so for a while. The county town of Caernarfonshire as was and of the larger Gwynedd today - so renamed after the much older independent region of North Wales, used to be, frankly, a bit of a dump with little to commend it apart from the castle, the town walls and some fine late georgian and early Victorian town houses; riven in two as it was [blog posts passim] by the pointless 1960s elevated road system which achieved precisely zero in traffic congestion alleviation terms at great civic expense, to the profit of a select few in the know and also in cahoots: cf. Birmingham, Stourbridge, and many others. However, these days and for the most part, this is a place that's starting to show itself off anew, to its best, whilst keeping improvements subtle, and not denying its long and storied part in Wales' history [Hanes Cymru]. What is particularly pleasing about the place is that it is still very much a working t...

I refer tonight to the head and sub lines of a byline in The Daily Telegraph ten days ago by the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng: he of the Trussonomics mini-budget that sent the world markets into a flat spin within minutes of its reading: Kwasi Kwarteng My Budget was not perfect – but Labour’s is a Marxist nightmare I fear higher taxes, fewer incentives and greater state control will be the inevitable result of the process Reeves has set in motion Apart from his obvious, complete ignorance of the history of socialist thinking [let alone economics itself] - Marx having moved on after the Communist Manifesto of 1848, changing his interpretation of economics consistently over time as circumstances and history itself altered: surely a pre-requisite of progressive thought? - Kwarteng simply falls into the trap of following blindly the tropes that the Tories have feebly relied on for generations, now. Except that he just isn’t listening to or watching what is actuall...

  Armistice: we all know the familiar litany of 'the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month'. We all know and preserve the memory of family members who fought and died in conflict before and since the institution of this annual mark of collective respect for the dead of all wars. We all know that 'The War to End All Wars' was no such thing. What relatively few know, are the realities of war and death in combat. Today, I remember in particular, someone who died forty years before I was born, on December 22nd, 1914: my distant cousin, Tom Rudge [blog posts passim], who was killed shortly after his twenty-first birthday, on the last day of the first Battle of Ypres. Tom, like so, so many of the quarter of a million dead and wounded of both sides of the battle, has no grave, his whereabouts unknown; merely a dignified mention on the roll-call of the dead at Le Touret Memorial in France. I'll leave it to the words of Wilfred Owen from his "Anthem to...

  Tonight's repast - it's Sunday after all - pork belly strips, lemon and garlic potatoes and - off camera - honey-roast carrots, with my usual wine and stock sauce. Very nice too. I'm not posting a Remembrance Day piece until tomorrow: the actual anniversary of the Armistice. I've never understood why such a day would be aligned for some convenience to the Christian day of worship rather than the actual day itself, given the simple fact that not all of the combatants in any of the conflicts we remember at this time of year are in fact Christian. I'd much rather that the day itself was marked, and bugger the inconvenience to the mundanities of daily life, and probably more pertinently, commerce. Stopping everything no matter what the day of the week would seem to carry a much greater weight of respect than cow-towing to the grosser needs of the economy and the 'dominant' religion...

I took the photos above - as you might guess - in 1984 [the composite image/text is much more recent, on rediscovery of the print]. It was meant originally as a contact sheet for the guys in the photo, who were locally-based musicians: The Carriers, a name which carried much freight during the AIDS era of the 1980's. I've no idea what happened to them subsequently as my life moved on to other things, and as they lived out at the Old Rectory in Llanfaelog in the west of Anglesey, and having no car in those days, it was a bit of a faff to get to and from. Anyhow, I've always liked the end result of the shoot, simple as it was, and I think it works as a composite image. I shot the pictures in 6x9 on Ilford HP5, using an MPP 5x4 view camera with a roll-film back, for the technically-minded. It's strange to think how long ago it was though. I was just shy of thirty at the time and the guys a bit younger than that. Sad to say, at forty years distance in time, I just don't...

  Finally, my new iPhone [box foreground of picture] got from Kinmel Bay to Rachub: it only took five days, which would have been a tad tardy in the days of the stagecoach, but there you go: that's modern logistics for you: AI in its current form really isn't up to much. However, two failed deliveries, two escalations and we're finally there. The transfer of my existing stuff from the old phone to the new was as always, Apple-slick: no problem. Apart from the fact that connecting to the internet was no longer possible. Googling the issue found shedloads of complainants offering all manner of groans and possible solutions to the issue. The one thing that was pretty common to all was the issue of VPNs. I have been using a third-party VPN for some years now with no major issues, but now something in that department seemed to be throwing a spanner in the works. So, seventy-year-old geek that I am, as usual, worked it out from first principles. Internet connection: OK. All other...

Much is spoken about how we should consider and value education, what subjects are valuable and what standards we should apply to them. The previous UK Prime Minister set great store by the extended teaching of mathematics, arguing that all should be compulsorily taught until the age of eighteen, an idea both impractical and frankly pointless to the lives of most people, as I think I've pointed out before in these [virtual] pages. To be honest, for a good general education and a healthy and informed populace, a wide variety of subjects, across both the sciences and the arts & humanities - including politics and economics - need to be taught to some degree. Where one goes on to from secondary education can build upon this solid base in increasingly specialised, focussed fields. Those on the right politically in this country tend to view anything other than STEM subjects as unnecessary trinkets that are best avoided, with the arts at the bottom of their list of educational priori...

At last: a truly uplifting customer service experience. I gave up wrestling with DHL's robots yesterday after the second consecutive failure on their part to deliver my replacement iPhone to my home; and so I phoned the Apple helpline in desperation. After an initial struggle with an AI bot - just swear at the damned things in a Brummie accent [other strong accents will do fine, but the key thing is to pile on the expletives] for long enough and the system reverts to contacting a real human. Thankfully, in this instance, not an anonymous call centre, but an actual, rather lovely woman - originally from Fife in Scotland - living on a mountainside overlooking the Corinth Canal, in Greece; would you believe. From her mountain fastness she could see from Apple Maps our very own mountain sanctuary here in Caellwyngrydd quite plainly. What on earth DHL can see on their system is obviously another thing altogether. All I can hope is that her escalation via Apple to the courier will have ...

On this day of November fifth, which marks, depending on your viewpoint, either the triumph of the State in the suppression of a Catholic plot to assassinate James I and his Parliament in 1605, or on the other hand to celebrate the attempt itself. You pays your money, you takes your choice. I'm minded of another date, four or five days hence, much earlier, in 1277, marking the The Treaty of Aberconwy, where Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Wales, was forced to cede to Edward I; entering into an accord with the English king and effectively ending Welsh self-rule. Of course it didn't actually end quite there, but in the early 1400s; despite rebellion after rebellion on behalf of the Welsh, and ending with the defeat of Owain Glyndwr, modern Welsh history began, with the Welsh in servitude to the English Crown. I find it more than slightly depressing that such power relationships still effectively obtain throughout the world to this day. There you go...

A simple reflection on the avoidance of complication tonight. So many of what pass these days as aids to facilitate our daily activities and enhance our lives seem to serve the polar opposite in effect, erecting barriers where none existed before. What prompted this latest meditation on the loss of consensual common sense was the abject failure of one of the world's largest courier networks to deliver my replacement mobile phone to my house today, from a depot less than thirty miles from here. I know this is a crashingly first-world problem, but it exemplifies my point; the over-application of technology to achieve a relatively simple end: the delivery of a parcel to an address in a timely fashion, something that in all fairness, the old-school mail service has been capable of for centuries. In these frantically modern days of - too be frank - trying to take human initiative, and indeed as many humans as possible, out of the 'efficiency' equation, we have completely lost th...

  Well here we are again on a Sunday evening, and once again I'm taking the line of least resistance and offering you a picture of tonight's repast: duck legs, Greek lemon potatoes and roasted carrots with my customary meat sauce of - in this case - red onion, white wine and chicken stock: a sauce not a gravy, as it's reduced rather than thickened. The meat and carrots were both cooked in our recently-purchased air-fryer, with the spuds roasted in the normal oven to ease the logistics. All I can say is that if you ain't tried an air-fryer, they're a culinary revelation. Really. Another string to the epicurean bow, and not expensive either to buy or run. Next stop, some serious tandoori chicken...

So, the Conservatives have elected a new leader. Woop-de-doo. And who have they chosen, but yet another mildly unhinged small-state right-winger, in the shape of Kemi Badenoch. This lot are either simply arrogant, blind or stupid, or any combination of the above. They haven't learned a single lesson from their almost total annihilation at the General Election. More of the same, ad nauseam: I just wish they'd curl up and bloody wither once and for all. Anyway, let's just get on. We took our weekly lunch at The Bull in Biwmares today, rather than on Monday, as I need to sign for a parcel then. It had the benefit of a fresh barrel of Bass on offer - at least after I'd had a good pint of Welsh Pride and a bite to eat - which will, in all truth be better tomorrow as it still tasted a little 'young'. But that's real living ale for you: it's organic and responds to its environment and handling. Whilst there, I overheard the young barman regaling a couple who we...