Observations from a Hill

Today, the year finally seemed to be turning itself towards the sun again, with a tentativity of Spring somehow about its face: at least in this tiny Welsh corner of this meridian-fixed archipelago, anyway. I always think, about now, that those who seek out more temperate watering-holes in which to over-winter, only returning in Spring, somehow miss out on this magical transition out of the bleakness of Winter. Life is surely about contrast: seeking out a uniformity of climate ultimately denies one the fulfilment of a long-awaited need for warmth and comfort. On the other hand, unfortunately, I've just witnessed the appalling Trump/Vance/Zelensky press event from the Oval Office: all I can say is that Trump and Vance came over as the very worst kind of playground bullies in the most unseemly display of arrogance and hubris I've witnessed in my seventy years of existence. This was about as reasonable and diplomatic as a cage-fighting bout: an utter disgrace and deeply disturbin...

The great thing about getting human-readable copy out of my blog's XML backup dump file is that I can easily review some of the stuff I've written since I started the thing in March 2020; and what's even more satisfying is that I get to actually read loads of stuff I've no recollection of writing. OK, like with most of life and one's memories of it, I remember a few of the landmarks pieces I've scribbled; but they represent only a tiny fraction of the - to the date of the last backup, anyway - one thousand nine-hundred and twenty posts I've put out in the last five years. I've been manually going through [the first five or six months of 2020, thus far] the files and trying to curate them into categories for later assembly into longer form pieces, including a miscellany of my random musings on life, the universe and everything, and collecting together the poetry I've penned thus far [this will be heavily edited and revised, as most of it was written i...

I downloaded an AI app the other day, out of curiosity - I can't remember what prompted it - called Claude , of all things. I must have read or seen something about it on the net: possibly YouTube, but who knows. Anyhow, I decided to throw at it a project I'd set for myself some time back but not done a damned thing about: a bit of code to parse out the content from the XML file dump of this blog, so I can edit some of this stuff together in long form as I've hinted that I would like to do before [blog posts passim]. I have written an XML parser before, many moons ago, in PHP, but to be honest, as I said about the router lift project last night; life's too short, blah, blah, blah; so I gave Claude the task of writing an application, not in PHP, but in Java, that would run from the command line on Linux. In around fifteen seconds it returned a piece of code that worked straight off the bat.  Realising that the output still contained some inline formatting HTML in the con...

  Back on the 'maker' track tonight: I wrote a while ago about my purchase of the router plate in the picture above, and how I intended to make my own 'lift' for it, due to the high cost of the commercial items. However, I found one on Amazon - naturally:  and equally naturally, it's of Chinese manufacture - for just twenty-five quid, so I thought, why not? Life's too short to peel a grape or reinvent the wheel, so here it is, in situ on said plate with router attached. However, as usual, I can see some modifications in the offing to improve on the off-the-shelf items; and I need to manufacture a suitable table to house the thing. But here, I have a definite plan to use the T-tracks on my table saw to act as a support for the router surface, much as I did with my little bandsaw, so that the table-saw acts as the base for the router when it's in use, but the whole kit and kaboodle can be stored away when not needed. Keep you posted on progress. Also this Spri...

Such is the febrile nature of European politics in particular and world politics in general these days, that Jane saying she never thought she would ever be even remotely glad to see a conservative political party elected to office, came as no surprise this morning.That she was prepared to make an exception in the case of the German election results just shows you exactly how bad things have got in world politics. I have to say they represent a welcome but very tiny mote of sunlight in an otherwise forbidding, sepulchral political firmament: however, the fact that the AfD came in second having bettered their previous vote by some considerable margin is still cause for concern and should warn against any complacency on behalf of the upcoming governing coalition, not to mention the rest of Europe and the UK - can't speak for the US, they've got their own mountain to climb - over the coming months and years.

I was hoping to hit the ground running after our mini-break in the blue-remembered hills of Shropshire [I've always felt it somewhat strange and a little sad that A. E. Housman never actually lived or indeed spent much time at all in the County so feted by the poet in "A Shropshire Lad"], but the sight of Elon Musk wielding an enormous, bright red chainsaw in drumming up the mob's affirmation for his 'efficiency' drive has left me feeling kind of queasy and rather unbuckled me from what I imagined was actually the world I live in. This kind of stunt is what normally gets youthful protesters bad press - cf any number of environmental protesters locked up for 'stupid' stunts - but Musk is fifty-three-years-old, ferchrissakes, and the richest man in the world. And yet he still acts like a juvenile finding its feet in its strange new world of adolescence: a man-child who also takes horse tranquilliser on a regular basis. Classy. Maybe that goes some way t...

Got back from our break in Shropshire this afternoon, which despite both of us going down with the lurgy, was very pleasant indeed. We arrived to lovely blue skies and pleasantly warm sunshine in Fairview Heights, as pictured above. The Bishop's Castle market wasn't on, having been displaced by the craft fair for this week's arts festival, and as we'd already been around it earlier in the week, didn't linger long. A quick browse of the books at Yarborough House, and we duly made tracks for home. Apart from a couple of random and unnecessarily slow passages, the drive home was actually very pleasant, with a brief stop halfway for fuel and a sandwich. All in all, as prosaic as it all was, quite painless. Normal service to be resumed on the morrow: nos da for now...

Last day of our short Shropshire sojourn today and all other family members have returned to their respective homes. We leave tomorrow, but we'll head into Bishops Castle for the local market and a mooch through the books at Yarborough House in the morning, before heading back to North Wales and our mountain fastness in Eryri. The weather for travelling home tomorrow looks to be set fair for us, in stark contrast with today's blustery wind and rain, so I look forward to a nice leisurely drive back tomorrow afternoon. I'm not sure we'll repeat the experiment of coming this early in the year again: whilst April is the cruellest month according to T S Eliot, February around this neck of the woods gives it a damn good run for its money! 

A bit of blue sky this afternoon after some heavy showers, and overall the temperature has been quite warm for this time of year; a welcome break from the deathly cold of the previous few days. We've got the cottage to ourselves for the next two nights, and we head home on Saturday, so I guess we'll get a mooch around the local market and our favourite bookshops before we leave. As you've probably guessed, ranting is on the back-burner this week, despite the disturbing news emanating from the realm of the Trump: it's our holiday after all... 

We went to Bishop's Castle this morning to see what might be happening with the local arts festival, but were greeted by an empty High Street [pictured from the town hall] and a lone child thundering down the hill on an electric scooter at probably well more than the speed limit. Not a great deal of the festival seemed to be in evidence, so we did what we normally do and went for coffee, at The Castle Hotel, before a having a general mooch around and doing some shopping for the evening meal. We decided on going to The Postcard Cafe in Clun for a bite to eat at lunchtime, and were caught out by a surprise visit from Jane's sister and brother-in-law all the way down from Carnforth. I had a couple of pints in The White Horse with Kevin and then cooked a Chicken Dhansak back at Lower Down for the six of us. Weather slightly less cold, but markedly more damp than hitherto, but there you go...

Today we ventured over to the small market town of Church Stretton which sits beneath the magnificent ridge of The Long Mynd, one of Shropshire's geological gems; a drive over which can be as hairy as it is beautiful, even today. But this visit, as is usual for us, we skirted around the Mynd and into the town from the other side: less spectacular, but easier on the car's clutch and brakes. It has been yet another mind-and-body-numbingly cold day today, so we didn't linger outside for too long between visits to charity shops, the antiques emporium and the coffee shop; before getting ourselves some savouries from the excellent Saxton's delicatessen for a quick lunch before getting the shopping in from the local Co-op. The little coffee shop, Berry's is worthy of note and a visit, if you're ever in the town. The building dates back to 1703, and was known as Berry's Messuage for around two hundred years from the outset. Oh, and the coffee's good too! A very ...

Dusk here in Lower Down after a bone-crushingly cold day in what must rank as one of the coldest counties in England. I've no idea why this should be so, but in my experience it's a thing. Still, we went for a pub lunch at The White Horse, Clun; our most regular watering hole down here in a quarter of a century or so of holidaying down here. I've mentioned my family connection to the place before [blog posts passim], and as meeting up with recently-discovered cousin yesterday got us talking about things familial and how and where sundry folks fit into the family tree, it's apposite that I mention it in passing here. I was checking on my niece's progress on her version of the tree this afternoon, and note that she's made significant progress with it, including a side-branch of which I was hitherto unaware. Must look into that one at some point, but currently I'm trying to pick the bones out of the possible [probable?] Quaker connection. Given the size of the ...

A very successful lunch this afternoon at the Lion, Leintwardine, pictured above around 1950. I recognised instantly my cousin, who I'd only met previously just after he was born, standing at the bar with his wife, as I walked in. He looked as his father did fifty years ago, and every inch a Southall in appearance. We swapped family stories and details straight off the bat, and in just a couple of his answers to my questions, my mother's father's side of the family tree was pretty much confirmed, and by inference, the identities of some of the other people in my old family photographs. It's extraordinary meeting up with a close relative you never really met before: we'd spoken on the phone and exchanged emails and cards in the couple of years since I first made contact with him, but a face to face reunion makes it all real. Gaps in both our knowledge of the family history were pretty much instantly made clear, and common ground reaffirms details that until now were ...

Well, we're in South Shropshire at a slightly unusual time of the year for us: following on from our early Autumn visit of last year, we find ourselves here in the dead of Winter. Pictured above is the Lightning Tree in the field across the lane from here, and it really is that misty out there, as well as cold. However, the weather people seem to be in agreement that the temperature is going to get unseasonably warm over the next couple of days, which will be welcome indeed. We're down here for an arts' festival, but tomorrow we're heading just over the county border into my mother's family's county of Herefordshire to meet for lunch with a second cousin of mine, who I've never met before, but whose house I visited many times throughout my childhood, during holidays visiting and staying with family. It will good to catch up, as at my time of life, one's family dwindles rather than expands...

I sit down to write this thing every single day, as I made my pledge so to do at the very outset; some five years ago. And come hell or high water, tragedy or illness, thus far I've managed at least one post a day to the present. Some days, like today, I really have little to no idea what to say: the wash of events, both global and shall we say, more local, proving a bit too overwhelming to summarise or comment upon. Trump & Musk, Ukraine, the British economy; Christ knows there is so much to say. But today, I can't be arsed with any of this idiocy. So there we are. I was just reflecting on a friendship that I never cultivated, with one of the most interesting people I've ever met, who is the closest to a kindred spirit I can imagine. We met some thirty-odd years ago at a party here in Rachub, as young-ish blokes, and hit it off from the start. Our 'relationship' has been about as sporadic as could be imagined: we seldom cross paths, but when we do, our conversa...

  As Promised... I mentioned yesterday that I had an urge to write a plain, old-fashioned webpage in the simplest and oldest form of HyperText Markup Language, that would be recognisable to the pioneers of this now grossly inflated space we call 'The Internet', or as many would have it 'My internet', as in "My internet's not working...". So here it is. This piece is written in the most basic of HTML possible, and should render legibly in any browser; ancient, old, new, or bleeding edge. There is no CSS styling; no layout, no images, no tables; and certainly no bloody pop-ups: just plain text, structured in a human and machine-readable way. The only navigation possible is either to other parts of the document itself or to other web pages, via Hyperlinks, such as this one to last night's blog post, Where It All Began . The document and it's associated HTML file in the screenshot above is probably as basic as it can get, but given that my usual style ...

I was reading this month's Wired Magazine - I do like to get the paper editions of stuff, despite its ready and immediate availability online: I'm one of those who predict the self-immolation of the digital realm in the not-too-distant, after all, so let's keep print alive for as long as possible - and came across an article by Tim Carmody: "The Fabric of Reality", about HTML - HyperText Markup Language: the stuff that powers the face of the web experience, and something of which I would hazard that 99% of internet users are blithely unaware. Whilst the interactive functionality we take for granted on the internet these days is largely built on client-side Javascript and back-end server-side code written in a variety of higher-level languages, it is HTML that largely gives form to what you see and interact with when consuming your daily fix of click-bait tripe. The fact that I'm able to write this humble daily screed is down to so-called Web 2.0, when interact...

Elon Musk would like to think he can live forever. His vision of colonising Mars - because we've fucked up our own and only planet, feeling that the great and the good in his eyes should escape our self-inflicted armageddon - is the vision of a man with absolutely no vision. He is completely blind to the realities of human history. He is completely blind to our fragility and our inability as a species to look after what we've got, including ourselves. He is completely blind to the ultimate insignificance of humanity in geological, let alone cosmic terms. We've been around for just a few thousand years: that's it. The Earth is four-and-a-half billion years into its existence, and will itself cease to exist, long, long before the heat-death of the Universe itself. The Universe is some fourteen billion years old. The calendar of human existence is but a dust mote in the firmament of space-time. Measuring absolute value and worth in human terms is ultimately pointless and...

Sometimes the strangest conjunctions appear out of nowhere. This afternoon I was steered to a YouTube short by my feed from SF Jazz [Drop the Needle, with Howard Way], on my iPhone. He was talking about an African jazz musician I'd not previously been aware of: Doctor Mulatu Astatke, who is now in his eighties. The music intrigued me and so I did the natural thing and Googled the name to find out more. Born in Ethiopia in 1943, he ended up in North-East Wales, near Wrexham, a stone's throw from where my Rudge family line came, before moving to London to get a degree in music and thence to the States to study music at Berklee. It was just the Wrexham connection that floored me; a bit like the time Jane and I went for a drink in a dilapidated taverna in the south of Corfu, and found that the proprietor had returned from Wales, where he had run the first Greek restaurant down in the south. It was on this occasion that a phrase that has entered our lexicon was uttered by mine host ...

I've been finally getting to grips with Roland Barthes' last book, 'Camera Lucida', written just before his death in 1980. I've written about my relationship with Barthes' writing on photography before [blog posts passim], but I confess that although I've owned this last volume of his for some years, I've let it lie until now, except for the occasional dip into its pages. I was reading some of it earlier over a pint in the pub, and I was struck particularly by a couple of things. At one point he hits on something that has been at the back of my mind for ages: the fact that a photograph taken of oneself at any time in one's life, is at some indeterminate point in the future, effectively, one's death-mask. He phrased it as 'death in person'. It reminded me of a post I made on August 21st, 2021 : it shows me as a toddler, sitting on the front lawn of Fairview, surrounded by my Herefordshire family: four generations together, captured in a ti...

I started this afternoon, with the best of intentions, to assemble and install a further shelving unit in the studio, so that as mentioned the other day, I might clear the tool-well of my workbench of the sundry tut that infests it presently. Considering Jane & I had already spent a good couple of hours clearing away garden detritus for the first garden waste collection of 2025, and made excellent inroads into the mountain of dead and decaying winter foliage, I was frankly stilled in my storage-building efforts by the numbing effects of the bloody cold, and gave up an hour into the process. Clearing the garden at least generated some internal body heat: fiddling with steel shelving in an ice-cold outbuilding is, I'm afraid, a whole different kettle of fish. And then came the rugby. Both my teams lost. My national team, Wales, as yet an unformed unit, ignominiously. My second team, France, in a very close, imperfect, but exciting scrap, against England at Twickenham. There you ...

I don't know where to start sometimes. At the age of seventy I've lived through decades of political and social change; both to the good and to the bad, but mostly falling into a normal pattern of mediocrity, and as such, at least a vaguely balanced and understandable system of flux. That's because I grew up in the post-war era of the 50's 60's and 70's, when, although the Cold War was always a real and present danger, politics and economics sort of conformed to a set of vaguely agreed upon rules of engagement: a kind of controlling battle plan overseen by an unwritten equivalent of the Geneva convention. Few, at least in the Global North, stepped outside of these parameters for very long, and there was always some route back from any shit-storm created, if needed. Paraphrasing Churchill: 'Democracy is a pile of crap, but it's the best pile of crap we've got.' However, in the last fortnight or so, the new US administration has napalmed this imper...

In the face of the vacuum that now passes for sanity in the realm of current affairs, I'm taking a day's time-out from the crazies, the borderline psychotics and the Ketamine-addled billionaires who now seem to be in charge of the world. A very sage, very well qualified but still unfortunately marginal commentator, posted his thoughts on his YouTube channel over the last few hours or so: asking just where is the actual pushback to all of this effectively illegal shit, sanctioned by The Trump, from the rest of the world? A question well begged. It needs an answer. And we need some shouting and some actual action taken. But that's for those with actual power and influence to decide on. It's their watch and it's their call. We await it with bated breath. Instead, I offer the above image I took this evening here in Fairview Heights. Make of this what you will, but all I will say is that the world is not what you think it is, it's what you make of it. We live our liv...

I was hoping to get down the studio and start assembling the shelving I bought on Sunday, in a bid to clear the well of my workbench of jars of screws, pots of small tools and random accumulated shit. But although the sun came out and the skies turned a lovely shade of blue, the temperature plummeted and I thought the better of it. A recipe for frostbite, methinks. So, instead, I was trawling my feeds this morning and staying warm. The first thing I watched, of course, was Trump's barely coherent stream of consciousness[?] ramble on Gaza. They only people who seem to give his crazed ideas on the matter any credence are his own apologists and the Israelis. But unpick this mad idea, and you find the logical conclusion to the wholly disproportionate response of Israel to the attack that initiated this war: the dispossession of their homeland from the Palestinians, and their relocation 'elsewhere' in the Arab world. To be replaced by a Riviera of the Middle East wholly owned by...

I think my referencing the dystopias of Kafka, Orwell and Ogawa in yesterday's post was perhaps a little too close for comfort to actuality in the light of the ongoing attempt at  the closing down of USAID currently underway by Musk's team of youthful forensic software stormtroopers in his DOGE. The USAID website went offline over the weekend, its X profile deleted, and 600 email accounts locked from their users, many of whom were told not to bother coming in to work the following day [sources: Wired magazine and The Economist]. This is all borderline legal/illegal, with Congress supposedly holding the whip hand, but Musk and his DOGE, with full support of the President, have steamed in ahead of their sanction, with Musk saying '...it's time for it to die...'. As to the widespread summary dismissals, redundancies and sackings, no heed seems to have been paid to existing employment protection law, despite the protestations of those in the know. Musk's apparent, ...

It would seem that Elon Musk, in his newly-minted rôle of head of the nattily titled "Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE: obviously so-acronym-ed as a reference to the very first 'Meme Coin' of the same name], has installed a team of wet-behind-the-ears code-heads, including one member apparently still in college, to skim off the data of millions of US citizens, including social security data; and trawl the data of US businesses and foreign development projects. And in no great surprise, simultaneously this weekend, a large number of US government websites - many dealing with foreign aid and youth programs - have simply gone offline. At least one of my feeds is claiming that Musk is actively engaging in a soft coups d'etat, but I wouldn't go quite so far as to echo that sentiment at this early stage, but it does smell of groupthink at play: the rewriting of reality is Trump's modus operandi, after all, and he and Musk are simply greedy powerfreaks who wi...

The trade wars begin. Almost as soon as Donald Trump levied trade tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China, the immediate response from both Mexico and Canada has been to state that they will set their own tariffs on American goods. Meanwhile, China has said that it would file a case against the US with the World Trade Organisation, plus unspecified 'countermeasures' [source AP]. The net result of all of this is that consumers on all sides will be hit with price increases and that inflation is likely to rise as a result. Will what's left of American industry benefit? No. Will American consumers benefit? No. The irony is that MAGA voters probably understand this truth as little as their elected President appears to. If you add to this economic gaffe the reality of the impending bursting of the AI bubble - and  it will happen,  upon which the investors of the Western world have already bet the farm - and the inevitable technological and economic domination of China, on which we al...

It's always good to discover someone who holds the same opinions and views as you. On the one hand it can simply serve as reinforcement of those views, as in the echo chamber of the dreaded 'socials'; or it can serve as validation for what you might formerly have imagined as a complete outlier view of things. Now, I've long, long held the view that economies are damaged by the accumulation and concentration of wealth for its own sake. I've said many times before [blog posts passim] that an economy with no fluid money movement is a failing economy, and that the hoarding of the stuff by a tiny minority of the population is basically *very* bad for the majority of us. I recently became aware of an economic commentator who echoes my thoughts on the subject exactly: Richard Murphy, a professor of accounting practice and online commentator on all things economic. One of his central ideas is that the very rich are anything but the wealth creators that their political apolo...