Observations from a Hill

Yet another mini-project that has surfaced from our shuffling stuff around in the house: Jane's grandfather's occasional table, which has been in our possession for God knows how many years. It has suffered a bit over time and had been relegated to a dank corner of the dining room as a place for the teapot and spare plates and sundry other items with no place else to go. A bit of a shame really, as it's a bit of genuine - if unspectacular - Art Deco era furniture, already getting on a bit itself when Pop died in 1981; so my guess is that it's knocking on a century old by now. It's made of solid wood, rather than veneered, and although not of great quality in itself, the bent-wood frame [just visible in the picture] and the age and patina of the thing - let alone the connection with the old man, who served as a medic in Alexandria in the First World War, make it well worth salvaging; as is the long case clock case that will take its place in the dining room [no movem...

  Just a very brief note tonight as I'm frankly buggered from shifting stuff from A to B to C and am also full of Cajun-style lamb [served with flatbread and a very garlicky salad], so I'm not much disposed to discursive-ness on any particular topic at all. Add to the mix that I managed to spill beer all over my chair, so am unable to sit down to type this post, and you get the picture. It's been a lovely day here, though: 23-24 Celsius and generally gorgeous: see above...

There seems to be a prevailing attitude amongst [particularly 18-24 year-old ] adventure seekers - according to a piece in today's Guardian newspaper - that all risk is these days entirely mediated by tech, and that adrenaline seeking or box-ticking in whatever form you choose can be entirely risk and danger free; that any such activity can be participated in as if by proxy: you get the rush, but no-one gets hurt if things go wrong. Even in the rather gentler realm of mountain walking in the UK, there seems to be some vague consensus amongst the inexperienced that anyone can just blithely set out and get to the top of a mountain with little to no regard for preparation or awareness and understanding of their environment. That their tech alone will guide them to their goal. Not so. Very not so. Real life and the mountain environment are not quite the same as those portrayed in a video game; if you walk off a 500-foot cliff in a game, you simply lose a life, or points, or something ...

As this is indeed Dydd Sul - Sunday - and my customary food posting day, I was going to share with you tonight's repast of Sharwarma Chicken with flatbreads and salad; but good as it was, I give you the above pictured; cinio fi, heddiw - my lunch, today - a rather fine crispy bacon and cheese toastie on three-cheese bread. To say it was a tasty toastie somewhat understates the issue, and I think it worth the sharing. The three-cheese loaf was one of Tesco's standard fare; the bacon, again from Tesco, a rare appearance of streaky on their shelves: I still can't understand why people prefer back bacon to the far superior streaky: so unctuous in its fattiness, as opposed to what is often a bland offering of lean but frankly pallid meat. The best bits of the pig are always the ones surrounded by fat or gelatin: the belly, the trotters, etc. etc. Anyhow, I'm now a full convert to cooking bacon - and much else - in an air-fryer. There simply is no better way to cook bacon,...

Is advanced age a necessary condition for philosophical introspection? Probably - certainly - not. But what it does bring to the party is its implicit urgency, as time's wing-ed chariot thrusts us ever more swiftly toward the event horizon surrounding the unknown singularity of our nullification beyond it. That same, exacting, precise and dividing singularity which awaits us all, and about which we know absolutely - and cannot know whilst still this side of the Great Divide - no-thing. If one's mentality is suitably, religiously constructed, however, there might just be the salve of dogma or even true [or, at the very least, blind] faith to alleviate the inherent fear of the simple fact of ceasing to exist, as we all do, at least corporeally . As to any conception of an eternal soul, therein lies the rub: our perpetual, singular, human quest for certainty as to one's identity and purpose in this universe has never been tested from beyond the grave. We simply have nothing ...

I've referenced Stephen Poliakoff's film "Shooting the Past" before, and have written about the enigmatic power of 'orphaned' images; those whose context is unknown to the observer: also, how the narrative underlying an image can be known directly, indirectly, or in the case of the 'orphan', supposed. Pictured above is an image which falls into the first two categories, with a hint of the third thrown in. The young girl to the left of the image is Gladys Roberts, Jane's grandmother, pictured in Ruthin, North Wales. The Roberts resemblance in Jane has always been clear as day - still to this day - but although the known in this picture is of the directly known , as is the family's having had a butchers shop in Ruthin at the time [confirmed in the gazetteer of the day, and various local press cuttings of the time], the less known is the reason for the name above the business in the photograph: J&P Williams. However, the one factor preventin...

  Pictured [foreground] my expedient, proof of concept router table thing: the project mentioned before with more U-turns and delays than is frankly desirable [blog posts passim]; with attached jury-rigged dust extraction 'system'. All a bit Heath Robinson, I know, but I needed to do a bit of profiling to some bits of timber for the bathroom [yesterday's post], to help stabilise the rather light modern bath we possess. It's also given me the idea of how to make the modular router table so as to fit in with the rest of the machine tools in the workshop. Anyhow, the new plumbing went in pretty smoothly, but as is normal with anything involving uPVC compression fittings, there is always - always - one fitting that isn't 100% watertight. In this instance, the tiny drip is quite unfathomable in that it exists at a point in the system where there is zero water-pressure or any head of water to precipitate it: anywhere else in the pipework, it might be expected, but not th...

  Today has been almost entirely taken up with bathroom plumbing enhancements: exciting, eh? Not. However, a job that has been on the to-do list for far too long has finally been tackled. The convolution of pipework laid out on top of my table saw - not, I hasten to add, a tool used in its construction(!) - has been much thought over and measured thrice, and so I'm hoping that tomorrow's commissioning will be relatively stress and pain free. I've had to raise the bath up by around 18mm, as the clearance under the tub was always woefully inadequate; and in so doing, I've put in some measures to stop the bathtub 'creeping' from its set position [being a modern bath, it is relatively light in weight and prone to moving around: not exactly ideal]. I've also binned the [in retrospect, enormously stupid] flexi-downpipe from the basin, as it would seem that this is a major source of unpleasant, trapped gunk; which I'm replacing with proper rigid piping. Rivetin...

This June marks the 100th anniversary of Quantum Theory, as trailed by this week's New Scientist magazine, wherein we find a piece that posits that the 19th Century notion that space and time are separate and distinct from one another - refuted by the current post Einstein-ian four-dimensional world view - might well be in for a bit of a renaissance: that space is subservient to time which indeed precedes it: flying in the face of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity; which has been accepted as axiomatic across the last century. What to make of it? For most people, not much: the abstruse arguments of these rarefied disciplines really don't directly impact on most people's everyday lives; but for some of us, the ramifications of such debate impact deeply on our introspective lines of philosophical thought. In the absence of religious belief, the curious - a human trait, curiosity, much under-employed these days - seek to gain understanding from such debate. Is time as...

  Pictured, our Easter lamb - albeit on Monday, rather than Sunday, as we are a day adrift for various reasons - cutlets roasted  with garlic, lemon and herbs, including fresh rosemary from the garden; Greek-style potatoes with lemon and oregano [blog-posts passim], steamed vegetables, and of course, freshly-made mint sauce: the very thing that my late friend Jean-Charles could simply not understand, along with the concept of eating cheese on crackers. OK, we begged to differ on these cultural culinary dissonances, and it made little difference to our friendship, curtailed as it was by his too early demise.  And the Pope died today, also. Not that I am a Catholic, or indeed a practicing Christian of any stripe whatsoever; but rather, as I have said before, a Zen Buddhist of a singularly secular bent. But the synchronicity of a Holy Father dying on Easter Monday is really quite something. But is it any more significant than David Bowie releasing his final album the day [be...

Today I caught a YouTube short - caveat, I normally hate short-form video chaff, but as this was Professor Brian Cox, I gave it my attention - on black holes. He talked about the now famous Hawking Radiation, posited by Stephen Hawking, and the equation for which is carved into Hawking's tombstone in Westminster Abbey, where he lies alongside Sir Isaac Newton, among other such luminaries. The thing about Hawking Radiation is that, because it represents an emission of energy in the form of heat, it indicates that, ultimately, a black hole will deplete to nothing, losing the the enormous amount of 'information', in the form of matter, that the gravitational 'beast' has hitherto attracted to itself, beyond the event horizon that glows in the very radiation that Hawking's equation exposes. As Cox pointed out, this is the only place in the physical universe that allows the annihilation of 'information'. I imagine that as our universe came from nothing - no-th...

I've always cleaved to the principle of Occam's Razor: K.I.S.S in more modern parlance, but sometimes - not often, I admit - an idea breaks the surface, that while on the surface complex in nature, has at its heart a reductive quality that chimes with dear old William's precepts. I offer the above pictured loudspeaker system as an example in point [left channel!]. The concept behind this system is disarmingly simple, unlike its execution, which is alarmingly complex. The basic principle of the system is to use Fast Fourier Transformation in real time to break down the audio source signal and split it into radically smaller and simpler outputs, each assigned to individual loudspeaker units that each only has to deal with a small subset of pure sinusoidal waves, allowing a clean separation of all the components of the original signal, rather than taxing one, two or three more conventional drivers with the entire task, usually an enormous set of compromises. I like the idea im...

In the light of yesterday's post about the old Mac Classic, I was reminded of a job we did in around 1992, to update and replace an existing audio-visual show in the Eagle Tower at Caernarfon Castle. The central controlling device was a Mac Classic. But neither Joe nor I can remember exactly the configuration that we used to effect the show presentation system. We can remember what kit came out of the old show - much of which was repurposed in later projects, but neither of us can remember the specifics of the replacement gear, apart from the fact that the Mac had several SCSI CD[!] drives as the delivery system of both audio and control tracks. I seem to remember at least four drives, but I really don't recall much apart from the ball-ache of dealing with the SCSI [Small Computer System Interface] daisy chain itself: suffice to say it was a nightmare, as anyone in the tech field of that era will testify. Anyhow, in the absence of any real coherent shared memory of that one, ou...

  Pictured is the Mac Classic that I inherited from my late friend, Jean-Charles, which was still working well until a couple of years ago, when the video circuitry decided to go south on me. At the time I put it to one side and kind of forgot about it; until today, when I decided to crack it open and have a look at the thing to see if anything obvious leapt out at me as the cause of its ailing. Unfortunately no. The thing's spectacularly clean inside, given its age [made in 1988], and I've come to the conclusion that the problem is, as usual with old circuits, capacitor breakdown. As this is without doubt within the realms of the CRT circuitry, I ain't touching it: I'm happy with tinkering with mains voltage - even three-phase - but HT circuits running in multiple kilovolt territory; no thanks. There's only one man left in my orbit that can even begin to tackle this job, so I'm going to have to seek his opinion on the viability of repairing this venerable old t...

I was born in an era - just - when the only satellite orbiting the Earth was the Moon itself. When I was just twenty days short of my third birthday, all of that changed with the launch into orbit around our planet of Sputnik 1 on October 4th. 1957, heralding the start of mankind's attempts at the exploration of space, and the last time that near-Earth orbit would be free of our influence. Today, according to NASA, some forty-five-thousand-plus human-made objects are rattling around in near-Earth orbit - and that's just the number that they can actually track - including approximately ten thousand physically active devices serving some purpose other than merely polluting their environment, unlike the other thirty-five thousand or so bits of space junk. Which reminds me that the very few people left born in the pre-nuclear age are doubly privileged, if they think about the matter at all. And now, Jeff Bezos is planning to get into competition with Elon Musk in space, by launchi...

Wherefore 'reality'? It is a damned good question much debated by philosopher and doubtful lay-person alike: the unconcerned themselves content to consider it a simple non sequitur flying in the face of an apparent empirical truth. But therein lies the rub. We all 'experience' reality, and much of it is shared with others, so affirming our personal and collective histories: no argument there. But the fundamental [philosophical] question remains: wherein does reality subsist? As our perception of reality is simply that: perception, filtered via our senses to the centre of our consciousness, our brain; we have no other reference by which to frame our 'reality': it is unique and personal to us alone. Save of course, the shared knowledge that forms the commonality of experience that results in our [intertwined] histories. Culture and art form the basis of our innate need for community. To share those indivisible personal realities amongst ourselves as if in cultural...

Just watching with interest a BBC TV documentary about the final stages of the rebuilding of Notre-Dame de Paris; the monumental exercise in heritage conservation started in the wake of the fire that nearly destroyed the cathedral in 2019. The attention to detail, the craftsmanship and the fidelity to the original medieval construction techniques the various teams of conservators and artisans are bringing to the project is immensely impressive, and serves to emphasise the phenomenal skills that the original builders themselves possessed and brought to the original construction of the cathedral in the twelfth century. The first time I visited Notre-Dame was back on our first holiday in France in 1983; we were blown away by the place then, and I look forward to a revisit when the building's renovations are complete.

I've written about 'time' and 'narrative' in photographs before [blog posts passim], and I would like to offer this picture in illustration of the ambiguity of the photographic image if unanchored from immediate or known contextual experience on behalf of the observer. Dapper young man in a suit sat casually on a monument to  Queen Victoria [where?]; two women in conversation pass by in front of him. Who in this picture is the subject? Is there any relationship between those featured? Is there a story? Who made the image in the first place? Is this just random street photography? The fact that I know part of the background to this picture gives me partial knowledge of the 'reality' of the image. I know who the young man in the background is, which grounds the narrative perhaps a little. I suspect with reasonable certainty that the two women in the foreground are simply 'there' by accident of happenstance. But what I don't know is who took the ph...

"We will; we shall; we intend to; it is projected that; etc., etc."; the tired old mantra of the Tories in power [the clue to their actual success rate on any of the issues so to referred is in their customary use of the future tense], has become "We would have, given sufficient time, had the election result not turfed us out on our ineffectual backsides." In today's extraordinary sitting of the Commons to debate the emergency legislation over the future of UK steelmaking, specifically British Steel's Scunthorpe plant, all one heard from the opposition benches was the kind of whining better suited to the playground: "Sir, Sir! I would have done it better than them!". The fact is that the Tories, over the last several decades, sold off practically all of British industry to the most convenient foreign bidders - undoubtedly with mighty favourable reciprocal kickback deals in return - leaving the country at the mercy of a succession of gigantic corpor...

  I read with some sadness this evening of the death of Max Kozloff, art critic, art historian and photographer, on April 6th. He was ninety-one and had been suffering from Parkinson's for the last decade. He wrote for the magazine Artforum, to which I still subscribe [blog posts passim]. I suppose my principal connection with his writings - aside from the copy of his collected essays: "Renderings" that I bought the year before starting my degree course, and which I still have - is that in 1963 he championed the work of Robert Rauschenberg in the face of the then current view that he was somehow a 'lightweight' in the American art scene: an arriviste with no substance. Like Kozloff, I thought otherwise, and history I think has borne out the truth that, far from that description, Rauschenberg was a true leading light in post-war American abstract art, combining Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism in a wholly unique way: the Rauschenberg way. RIP Max. You knew what y...

Nothing much tonight as I'm a touch knackered. We had a great journey back from Aberystwyth in glorious sunshine, stopping off in the historic township of Machynlleth, seat of Owain Glyndwr's parliament in 1404. Bizarrely, it is twinned with Belleville, Michigan. As to whether this confers any immunity from Trump's mad tariffs is moot, but no less daft a proposition than the the tariffs themselves. I bought a book from a charity shop there: John Gribbin's "In Search of Schrödinger's Cat". When we got back to the house, among all the post and parcels in the conservatory was the spring issue of The New Statesman - never mind the fact that last week's issue was a no-show - and flicking through it I lit upon a reference to CP Snow, a writer we studied at school: "The New Men" etc. On reading the acknowledgements to the book, what do I find a reference to? CP Snow, as if on cue. Quantum entanglement, anyone? The story of my frustrated attempts to...

Before Sandra's funeral this afternoon, we took a trip into Aberystwyth town itself - pictured, the pier on the front, looking out over Bae Ceredigion and a beautiful stretch of the Welsh coastline - and had a coffee in Caffè Nero, decent enough as usual; only to discover a genuine Italian coffee shop fifteen minutes later on our way back to the car: maybe next time we visit, methinks. Sandra's send-off was lovely, including music and poetry she chose herself: and the crematorium is situated in the loveliest possible location imaginable. During the celebration, her white, cardboard, coffin lay in front of a glorious landscape, framed by the full-gable windows, through which could be seen small birds feeding and an opportunist squirrel taking advantage of their food supply. What piqued the interest of several of our number was the glorious sight of a Red Kite circling to gain altitude in the middle distance, as if in tribute to our late friend. Perfect.  

A funeral is always time for introspection, and Sandra's tomorrow makes no exception. Although the four of us: John & Sandra, Jane & I, have lived at distance for many years, with occasional contact and visits, we have remained friends, and in recent years rekindled contact through an annual lunch out at The Cross Foxes, near Dolgellau; about halfway between our homes, during which time Sandra's health was deteriorating, until her recent death. Back in the early days of their relationship, they bought the house that John still lives in, after we had, in turn, bought John's old house in Gerlan, North Wales, some forty-three years ago. The following year, the four of us travelled to France for a holiday, staying at a gîte in St. Jean-Le-Vieux, which seems simultaneously like yesterday and a million years ago. So many of the memories of that time are as fresh as if they had just been made. As Sandy Denny had it: 'Across the evening sky - All the birds are leaving -...

  As the sun sets here at Fairview Heights, the chill in the air reminds me that it's still early days, and that high spring is yet to arrive; but I'll take it for what it is: it's been a lovely day, and the Bass Ale at The Bull in Biwmaris was on top form this lunchtime. Loads of people, kids and dogs around the town: a generally vibrant and optimistic start to the new tourist season. We're off to Aberystwyth tomorrow for an old friend's funeral: Sandra, who we've known for over forty years, although our contact with her and her now widower John, who we've known somewhat longer, has been intermittent but at least frequent enough over that period, given the geographical distance between us. Her funeral's on Wednesday, so we've booked a place for a couple of nights close to their home. In consequence, politics and such is backgrounded until we get back: diary posts for a couple more days. I'm sure Trump's shenanigans will yield plenty more mat...

Not content with napalming the US economy and destabilising the world markets whilst conning his electorate into believing his [narcissistic and deluded] fantasies of being the world's best 'deal-maker' - ['it's all going to be great, folks'] - he and his administration are currently embroiled in a deeply sinister argument over one American whose human rights not only have been torn up by them, but whose eventual fate they have entirely washed their hands of: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an entirely innocent Maryland citizen, who had fled El Salvador as a teenager in fear of his life, who picked up by agents and shipped off to El Salvador, where he now languishes in a high security penal institution along with many of the very people he ran to the US from in the first place. On Friday last, Maryland judge Paula Xinis declared that this was an illegal act on behalf of the Federal Government and demanded that he be extracted from his incarceration and returned to the US ...

OK, these 'here is tonight's dinner' posts are getting a bit frequent, but I don't do socials of any sort so I guess this is kind of my outlet for such gastronomic introspection. Anyway, the ongoing Trump-crashing-the-stock market is wearing me out: today's FT shows yesterday's closing as, basically, everything down, including Brent crude and the dollar. I'd hazard a guess that nowt will change much for a while, but we'll see. Anyhow, pictured is a recipe which is actually new to us, despite our age and catholic tastes and experience in food; Chicken Laab: which is a Thai minced-chicken salad, served here with boiled basmati rice and garnished with crispy fried onions. Truly quite scrummy, although the quality of the chicken meat we dragged out the freezer was pretty ropey, and not having [yet] a proper hand-mincer, I couldn't create proper mince without blitzing it to pulp: food processors do have, like me, their limitations. However, meat texture a...

Trump throws the markets into freefall, just as his fangirl Truss did a while back, and still doubles down on how clever a strategy it is he's employed. The big difference here is the one between our two political systems: Truss was defenestrated by her own party almost immediately; Trump can't so easily be gotten rid of: he's survived impeachment, felony convictions and election defeat, so just who is this guy? Don Corleone or Al Capone weren't as Teflon as this egregious excuse for a human being. But gangster he is, and extortion and protection is his game. The last time tariffs of this scale were imposed by the US on the many other countries it trades with, was in 1930, and that didn't pan out so well, did it? All we have now is a nascent trade war, after seventy years of the closest approximation to a stable world market as there has ever been; even during the wind-up years to our current parlous position - the 1980s - when Neoliberalism took centre stage and p...

Out of all of the stupid raft of trade tariffs that the stupid Trump administration have announced this week, perhaps the stupidest is the one on foreign vehicle imports. Two things. Number one, America is the land of the automobile. It's intrinsic to the American psyche and to it's modern mythology: the automobile is one of the symbols of American freedom. Screw with that and people will get mighty pissed [off] in short order. Second is the fact that the domestic US automobile industry is a very pale version of itself as it was in its heyday of the 1920s through '70s. Detroit ain't what it used to be for a very large basket of economic reasons. Truth is that imported automobiles are now pretty much the backbone of the US market, with many dealers turning most of their profit from the incomers: tariffs on foreign vehicles will only damage US dealerships, not the countries selling into the States. To quote Steve Gates, of 'Gates Auto Family' in Kentucky, referri...

Another lovely if slightly cool - at least early on - day here in Fairview Heights, and a largely domestic set of activities have been at the fore: we had a bonfire a day or two ago of the three years or so accumulation of garden cuttings, which amounted to two or three cubic metres of stuff, and which, after the fire had burnt down, left us with a significant quantity of ash to deal with. Six sacks later, we're into  no more than the first quarter of it all, so I guess it will take us another two or three sessions to bag up the rest for disposal. Time was when I would have been able to have gone through the whole lot in a single push, but tempus and stamina fugit concomitantly, so there we are. Also, I've got the next set of shelving up in the studio this afternoon, and so have relieved the workbench of the mountain of stuff that hitherto had no home of its own [pictured]. All good, and as the sun sets over The Heights, I'm going to pour myself another glass of wine and re...

  OK - it's not Sunday - but here is a lazy suppertime post nevertheless: leftover chicken curry and naan: not bad, but not earth-shattering. I was going to plunge back into the morass of politics and economics and the slo-mo train wreck of the Trump's latest fuckwit pronouncements, but I'm tired and can't be arsed and need to rest my brain for a few hours [sub-text; drink more red wine]. However, it has been the most beautiful day here, and it looks set fair for at least a few days more. In this neck of the woods it never pays to exhibit meteorological optimism at any time of the year, but a modicum of solar warmth and a change in the air have lifted my spirits immeasurably from the death-knoll of current affairs. Normal grouchy service will be resumed henceforth. I'm going to veg out now, folks, so nos da 'chi gyd...