Observations from a Hill

I often have cascaded, lucid dreams; usually after my first, deep sleep and when I return to dreamtime in the early hours. Last night I had a pair of dreams that kind of confirmed some suspicions/notions I've held about the dream world we inhabit as we sleep, for some considerable time now. However, the difference last night was that the analysis of the first, key dream and the insights it gave me, was done by me in the second dream, which followed the first after returning to sleep. On finally waking properly in the morning, the form and structure of the first dream kind of made sense in the light of the second, and shed a good deal of light on the many recurring themes and structures of my dreamtime over my entire life, some of which have been very weird, but utterly, magnificently, cinematic in nature, particularly when I was very young. In last night's first dream, I was sea-kayaking [at least the vessel was a sea-kayak, anyway] on some very still, very shallow, waters in s...

  Pictured is a book I thought lost until this afternoon. Purchased in 1988, The Complete Chess Addict is a wonderfully entertaining miscellany of chess lore and trivia, and one of those great dipping books that you keep coming back to for more random facts, figures and anecdotes. It turns out that it had randomly been deposited in a storage box in the spare room with a lot of unrelated [non]bookish] stuff: the last place I would have thought of looking. Anyhow, thumbing through the thing, I came to the last section, entitled The End? which surveys the then state of computer chess play and what it might portend for the future of the game. The roots of computer chess began truly in earnest with a program created for the IBM 704 mainframe back in 1957, which although taking several minutes per move, was capable of playing a full game of chess, unlike previous engines. By 1988, standalone chess engines were being marketed that could give all but the strongest players a good game, wi...

  So, here we are again with another Sunday evening post of food at Fairview. I've been dog-sitting for the boys: my son and his husband, who were off up Ogwen and beyond, filming today. Jane was at work and so it was just me and Lady [Lady Day to me and Jane, privately, as jazz fans], for the day, so to speak. Lady is a lovely Lab/Collie cross, with the temperament - and appetite - of a Labrador, and with the intelligence and speed of a Collie, a great mix, if a little difficult to keep up with at my age. Still, we've got a decent-enough-sized garden for her to charge around like a loon when she needs to stretch her legs, in between bribes of buttered toast to get her back into the house and into her bed whilst I get on with stuff. All good. She's a good dog and great company. As to the nosh pictured, it's one of my staple go-to's these days, as I've written about quite a few [probably too many] times thus far: roasted belly pork strips and Greek-style lemon an...