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July 23rd; Wonderful photograph of nature meeting man.

July 22nd; Sacci on the lawyers' talkboard has a dream about sheep with telephone heads, then finds these photographs. Lovely dinner at Franc's. We talk about Facebook.
July 21st; Curry with Nathalie. We chat about Andrea, among other people, now apparently living in Nice. Over a cup of the fiery herbal tea I play her the seemingly ironic Laibach cover of 'Life is Life', somewhat undercut by this creepy early interview. Not to mention this interesting but equally unsettling documentary: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8.

July 20th; Early to Montelimar to catch 9am train to Lyon, then Geneva, then Milan, to connect with flight to Budapest. Bit of a long day, with a tight connection at Milan between the train and the airport. Eat a "croissant" in Geneva, and there is immediately apparent a Protestant Pastry Problem. Just a few miles from Lyon, and the item was more like a British Rail Cornish Pastie, hard, stale and salty, than any French croissant. Why is this? Perhaps once among the watch-assembling burghers of the Swiss Alps no talented craftsman will take up the pastry-making trade - too much else is well paid in an advanced economy? The Swiss French ticket inspector speaks to us in a sing-song dialect that at first sounds like a funny voice from a comedy skit. Gradually we grasp that he is speaking a dialect, but is also playing it up, and rather enjoying our embarrassed bafflement. Kind Federica on the train assures me that I can get a bus to the airport from Milan station, but once there I find no information desk, just vast halls of chaotic, wrongly signposted chaos. I run around and the driver kindly lets me onto the right bus out to the airport, just as he is pulling away from the car park. As we weave through traffic, I take off my jacket and prepare to sit down, overwhelmed with relief. My shirt is soaked with dark patches of sweat. Two very pretty girls three seats back look at me with well-groomed disgust and pointedly move right to the back of the bus. I collapse into my seat and become aware over the next hour that the driver has the coach tuned into an Italian radio station that plays exclusively British pop music. My flight back to Budapest crackles with lightning on all sides, and heaves with thundery turbulance, so the stewardesses never get to sell me any crisps or fruit juice. Back in my flat close to 1am.
July 19th; To Jean-Claude & Mette's rocky fastness in a former Cathar village built on a mountain ridge, where we look at the photos of doorways Sasha & Jean-Claude are making into a book, and eat wonderful quiche in the shade on their roof garden looking at the hills around. Then coffee & cakes with Sasha in the small but chic town of Buis, with its enormous old trees lining the streets, hot sun obviously and later another swim with Jean-Claude & Mette in their pool.

July 18th; Breakfast to the sound of the bells on the neighbour's EU-grant-earning sheep just under the balcony. In the afternoon Sasha & I go swimming in the pool up the hill belonging to Jean-Claude & Mette, who join us later for dinner. Jean-Claude mentions the richness of the Occitan language. Sasha tells me that black & green olives are not different types, but the same type picked at different stages, something I had never heard. Excellent views - lots of fields here are devoted to lavender farming. The precisely planted clumps fuse into fuzzy rows like giant lilac caterpillars. A large wheeling bird in the sky might be one of the local eagles, or perhaps one of the vultures reintroduced by biologists who toured the valley in helicopters dropping [dead?] snakes to help get the carrion-eaters restarted.
July 17th; Go to the Paris Apple centre and they are charming, but have not had time to replace the sickly hard drive, so I take away the laptop as is. I make it to the station and catch my fast, air-conditioned train south to Lyon. On the journey, I try to put my impressions of Paris in order: the city's wide range of pouting, leggy brunettes waiting, even if a bit irritably, to be kissed, sticks in the mind. So does the halfwitted habit of putting separate ticket-operated turnstiles on each platform on the metro, thereby costing twice as much as if they put one machine down the corridor before both platforms, and inconveniencing passengers who go down to the wrong platform and so have to pay again to change train direction. Even London transport planners can work that one out. Also noticeable is the habit in France of always stressing the feminine even in sound: television advert breaks, PA systems in transport centres, radio call signs repeatedly use high, soft, girlish sighs or giggly gasps in light rising notes to ask for attention, instead of the blunter, instrumental notes or bells of most airports or broadcasts. At the cluttered, 70s-ish station complex of Part Dieu in Lyon, I change trains for Montelimar, home town, apparently, of a distinct kind of nougat-based sweetie. Sasha kindly drives out from near Nyons in the afternoon heat to pick me up from Montelimar station. This is Provence: hot, dry, with cloudless blue skies, intense sun, noisy crickets, and scrubby but vigorous vegetation in a range of olive greens. For an hour or two it seems as if Isabel & her friend Marta, driving across France to return to Spain might drop by this evening, but they stay the night in Lyon instead. Sasha & I talk until late - she tells eerie stories of the peasants in the valley, and their dark outlook on life. These include the peasants whose ramshackle electric fence around a vegetable patch was trashed by a wild boar who ate all their veg because they were too mean to switch the electricity on. Two brothers who share a double bed in their seventies, and used to tie their strong mother into a chair by day and a bed by night [right under a light bulb always left on, which they failed to connect with her habit of not sleeping]. Another fence, about 20 feet long, which took 12 years to build, despite the fence-builder owning a tractor with a fence-post/pile-driver fitting. This fence keeps a handful of mangy, partly-bald sheep in merciless sunshine all day only yards away from some shade. A seller of an outhouse who frantically demanded payment weeks ahead again and again and couldn't even wait on the morning of the legal transfer at the notary without repeatedly demanding his money before the meeting, like a stuck record. A goatshed with a decades-old mound of fossilised excrement so high that goats inside had to tilt their heads to fit under the ceiling. A large and sinister villager, who disliked his sister-in-law until she was found floating down the Rhone, minus her head. Sasha's charming former etching tutor from art school, Richard, and his apposite phrase "early men". Two sisters who refused to speak for the decades until their death because one had moved a fence several inches into the other's territory. What Sasha describes as "the most beautiful girl in the world", serenely making jam with her glossy tresses of hair held in place by a pencil. Another neighbour who has been going into the mayor's office week after week for many years to demand action on Sasha's unauthorised window that looks onto a foot-wide strip of his land. He is now sueing the mayor for negligently giving permission for the window. Her troubled brother, who died a few weeks ago, who was a copywriter for J. Walter Thompson in the 1960s and 70s, so might have worked with or for Cressida's father. A lively community of people in Derbyshire living in the world's first workers' housing. Sasha's time in the West Indies in the 1980s, noting the incredible racism between islands, and the frank corruption and broken families. The jumbo jets full of white Canadian women who used to fly out for holidays of having sex with black men. A striking beach scene on a Caribbean island, when her son and her late husband spot a man swimming out into the bay straight towards the boat they've hired to get there [and get back]. In a Bondesque moment, Sasha swims out, beats him to the boat, and stands on the prow in her swimsuit with a machete. Whereupon he turns around and swims away.

July 16th; On my way back from Gare de Lyon at midnight last night I am wandering through floodlit tiled metro-station hallways and corridors. A slightly rough young couple with two dogs are hanging around the deserted electronic gates that only open if you put a ticket into a machine. I head for a gate, and behind me I can sense the girl scooping the pale brown dog into her arms and suddenly coming up right behind me. The three of us shuffle through the fierce electronically-operated sliding gates as one organism. She thanks me. I wander on through the complex. Somehow the man with the larger dog got through a different gate, although I saw no-one else about. Suddenly, another set of gates ahead and they are by my side again. I find myself sighing dramatically as I approach the new gate, ticket in hand. Behind me she says "Thanks again in advance" and we shuffle through again as one. Somehow I can feel I am becoming pompous & bourgeois, as if I might give her a little lecture about getting her life in order. I don't do this, not least because my spoken French isn't up to it.
Today I return to the station complex to buy my tickets for Lyon tomorrow. A blonde woman pushes in front of me in the general queries queue, and demands in accented English where she can recharge her phone. I offer to help and start telling her where I recharged my phone last night. I say she should go three blocks and she interrupts me, snapping "What does that mean?" I say 7 or 8 minutes' walk, and she sneers "Impossible" and struts off while I'm still talking, without even thanking me. Russian nouveau riche is my guess - but undoubtably an East European.
July 15th; After a salady lunch, Mateus takes us, the rump of the weekend group (Selma, Kate, & me), to another esoteric bookshop where he knows the owner. The bookshop has an emphasis on astrology and geomancy, though the range is broad. Paris turns warm & sticky. My Apple Mac is definitely sick. I take her to a maintenance shop behind the unpleasant-looking Pompidou Centre (it really isn't ageing well close up). Sounds like my Apple's hard drive is dying. Finally locate an internet cafe near the Gare de Lyon.

July 14th; Bastille Day. Refreshed, get up and wander around in bright morning sunshine. Up and down the Boulevard Saint Germain are parked military vehicles, with good-looking young officers in uniform leaning against them with studied casualness. At the junction of Rue de Sevres and Boulevard Raspail I count five jeeps and one small truck, all in sandy olive, yellow and brown camouflage colours (to blend in with the 19th-century buildings & fashion shops obviously) and eleven soldiers, all immaculately dressed in freshly laundered camouflage fatigues to match their vehicles, white elbow-length gloves, medals, criss-cross white strap and sash things, pillbox peaked caps, and a kind of flush, tight white shirt that goes right up to the throat with no buttons or openings. One man is in a cement-coloured suit, white shirt & black tie, though also with medals, ribbons, pillbox cap - so he must be in charge. All the men look smart, relaxed, alert, and ready to slot me at fifty yards if I shout something seditious like "Vive le roi!" My feeling that modern France still has a vaguely fascistic undernote lingers through the day. Afternoon drinks with Selma & her Moroccan friends - it is her birthday today, so she could pose for La France. After dark I doze and wake to the sound of helicopters above the hotel, disturbing the quiet. After over an hour of this, I go outside. Despite being too far out to see the fireworks (though one does land in the street with a fizzing noise) there is a helicopter overhead watching the non-existant traffic just in case for a total of two hours. Back in my room, I switch on television and the news is taken up with some big military parade involving tanks, fighter jets, and nine different kinds of uniformed men marching in central Paris.
July 13th; Breakfast with Thomas, Giane, and Stephanie - all of whom are heading off home via airports and railway stations. I promise to contact Gaia, who came by train from Milan with her poodle, had lunch with Mateus & Stephanie on Friday and when her poodle vomited in the restaurant explained that she did not seek mediumistic powers but had them thrust on her. She then disappeared. I then sleep much of the rest of the day, starting to read my recommended texts between dozes.

July 12th; Mateus takes us to an esoteric bookshop, and urges me to buy three titles. I do. We are looking at the gargoyles outside Notre Dame when a remarkable wind, strong, gusting, dark with promises of storminess almost sweeps us off our feet. Laetitia & Selma join us for a leisurely lunch. Thomas leads a breakaway group (Stephanie, Giane, and me) on an afternoon cycling tour of central Paris. Renting the bikes involves lengthy negotiations with a machine that takes handsome deposits off our bank cards before liberating the bicycles from electronic locks. Apart from a couple of slightly chunky moments mixing with traffic on the Place de la Concorde, an excellent cycle. Dinner at a restaurant reminiscent of Eastern Europe: Mateus remarks on the waitresses looking tarty, the waiters make fun of us, and the decor involves giant shapes painted gold. My main course turns out to be a shepherd's pie, albeit a very good one. Absolutely superb pudding, quite different to what I expected, but divine. The cosy (though no-nonsense) hotel Stephanie & I are staying in just off Saint Germain is wonderfully quiet, though it is odd to hear seagulls all the time. Obviously Paris is a port in 13th-century terms, but why do I never hear these birds in London?
July 11th; Morning flight to Paris. Paris turns out be rainy. Manage to meet up with Stephanie & Mateus, the two organisers: both very jolly people. At dinner meet Giane, Jaime, Evelyn, Katrin, Kate, Thomas. Katrin is very enthusiastic about Continental butter, and I urge her to open a specialist butter shop in London.

July 10th; Afternoon drinks with Martin - he tells me Scott McLellan has written about how Washington's anti-Iraq-War whistleblowers were punished. We move on to what makes cities vibrant: eg. Barcelona in the mid-1990s. Briefly meet Piera & Robin at Istvan's where he is making dinner as I rush through. Sadly, no report back yet from Tamas about the alchemists' conference in Szeged earlier this week.
July 9th; Last visit for a few weeks to gym with Jim & Gordon. Jim mentions to me that Max Mosely's interest in masochism, according to something he saw in the news, began in some oblique way while training with the Serbian fitness coach who prefers his fruit & veg raw. Tea and then evening feast with Franc.

July 8th; More weight-training with Jim. The two counter girls in the local roast-chicken place greet me like an old friend. Someone has parked a circa-1900 tram carriage on two short strips of rail almost outside the meat shop, on the Square of the 32nds. Cool breezes relieve the heavy heat of the last few days.
July 7th; After gym, Jim & I drink coffee with Gordon & Rodney in hot sunshine. When I grumble about storage space for books in Manchester (for example, these people charging four times per cubic foot what Pablo pays for storage in Zurich), Rodney gamely offers to put a postcard up for me in a post office in Hale the day after tomorrow. He also suggests I advertise for storage space on gumtree and craigslist, so I do. A hundred yards away as I leave, I bump into Michael, who tells me that Saturday's Gay Pride march in Budapest was heavily attacked by stone-throwers. Later, during an impressive, pounding downpour at dusk, we all meet again for beers on the same street, joined by Tim.

July 6th; Wake up at Robin's and get ready for our afternoon drive to the Fot Ball, Fot being a town with an attractive country house. Tamas cannot come with us because he is going to Szeged to attend a conference of alchemists. Out on the lawn at Fot, Zita P points out I am wearing a woman's straw hat, so I put it on her, which forces me to flee for the shade with Eva B, who used to be a film journalist. Politics Judit, bubbly as ever, introduces me to Szilvia, her classmate studying agricultural tradition in Hungarian ideology, and Isabel introduces me to Eva P, another dramatic Spaniard. Jose, a Basque, generously answers my daft questions about Basque verbs. Laszlo the Count joins us, puffing on his pipe, and slips into what Isabel says is flawless Spanish to match his flawless English. She kindly takes Eva P and me back to Budapest at dusk. During the drive after dark we talk about crowds in financial markets and how the moon affects women.
July 5th; Get morning train to Robin's for Zsuzsi & Bela's joint birthday party. Piera is there in the hot sun, and we photograph each other rather manically in a field of enormous, triffid-like sunflowers. The conjuror is back for this party, better than ever. It is still the ripping-newspaper and the interlocking-steel-ring tricks which impress me most. Afterwards, Rita tells me how she and her horse fell together some weeks earlier, concussing her badly for an afternoon. This is while her boyfriend plays music on the turntables for children's games like musical chairs. I meet Piera's writer friend Genevre from Rome. Film-maker Peter is there, and I can chat to his girlfriend Agi at last, hearing about her Phd on Spencer's Faerie Queen. Istvan, Tamas and two friends of his turn up later, and the company drinks late while I sneak off to sleep in Robin's studio.

July 4th; Curious morning working at the Internet cafe. I get there early, and the soft-spoken French-speaking Arab chap, more doltish than the others, is in charge. He is driven to a quiet, helpless despair by the fact that, despite today's sticky heat, I still wish him to scan some drawings for me. He and his sweet-natured but also not-very-quick-off-the-mark Algerian friend struggle together to operate the scanner that - he tells me - he uses about ten times a week. Of course, it has never crossed his mind to download or print out the instruction manual for this machine. He simply waits as the hours and days pass, hoping to somehow avoid or ride through the next wearying ordeal of having to do this hard thing, like a lazy child surviving school a lesson at a time. I know I annoy him because I make him repeat what he says to me (he mumbles badly in all of Hungarian, French, and English) and because I point out he shouldn't close an hour early at night and open 20 minutes late in the morning. He squirms when I reveal that last night I came and saw he had closed two hours early: he obviously hoped no-one regular would know. He is slim, anxious, and perhaps in his late 20s or early 30s. His whole mood is one of being overwhelmed by the difficultness of everyday life. I've seen him unable to help a customer attach a document to an e-mail, unable to transfer a document between two terminals, unable to locate an incoming fax, unable to remember to write down the time a customer comes in and starts using the internet. I've had to translate for him between his confused Hungarian and the Hungarian of a local trying to communicate with him. Everything is a struggle. He and his Algerian friend (I redid his English-language CV as a goodwill gesture so I know he's from Algeria) simply cannot understand in either Hungarian or English what I mean by "picture resolution". When I carefully spell out I mean how much information there is in a given area of picture, they think I mean the physical size of the picture. The dolt steps aside, in a silent agony of humiliation, while I take over the cash desk to work out how to operate the scanner for myself. Thinking I cannot understand, he speaks to his friend, using the word 'Wahabi', while facing me with a simpering smile of submission so I won't realise he is talking about me. Giving the Wahabist reputation as flinty puritans, sticklers for the letter of the law, I would roughly translate his remark as "Humourless workaholic zealot". This is fair enough, really. It describes pretty accurately how I feel whenever I'm in his presence. Later, he gives me a reduction in my bill. It would be nice to take this as a sign he graciously concedes his own inability to do his job, but it is more likely to be his shrewd knowledge I'm friends with his boss. Like many of the quasi-dim, he has enough village wisdom to stay out of trouble, stay in circulation, and so carry on being a nuisance to all around for several more decades. Cunning and thick, interfering and lazy, all at the same time. So where do all these hard-of-thinking people come from? Much as I like the sound of having several beautiful brides at the same time, there is a worrying side to polygyny or polygamy. For many years I've wondered if cultures pay some kind of long-term genetic cost if a few rich men have several wives each. Might 20 or 30 generations of stable polygyny make a society somehow rich in sly dullards?
In the afternoon, a vivid "relative" peak experience lasting about fifteen minutes. The sky has an intense blue. I feel the curious romance of living in a language textbook, full of archetypal families entering comfortingly dated shops. Vast sense of power and cheerful calm.
July 3rd; I bake my two letters of the alphabet on Franc's suggestion, and the flat fills with the aroma of savoury biscuits, cooking. Visiting a hardware shop in search of rubber glue, I am leaving because I cannot find any and the woman is busy with other customers. She calls me back, asking what I wanted. I answer clearly and she at once transfers her attention to another customer, like a harassed mother punch drunk with distraction. I wait another minute. Then she looks at me, blank-faced, puzzled I am still in her shop. I repeat my request and she snaps that of course they don't have any, acting as if the assistant who asked me what I wanted two minutes earlier was a completely different person from her, someone she has no memory of. For a lot of Hungarians, even minding a small shop with two customers in it at the same time is beyond them intellectually. Round the corner, I pass a greengrocers and see some passable cherries. The assistant is dealing with a previous customer, so I wait. Then she asks what I want. I say the amounts I'd like, and she tells me to wait a minute longer as she walks out past me and potters round some other boxes of fruit a few yards away, clearly doing nothing but adjusting the positions of some peaches. I've seen this before: as a Hungarian she is ashamed to have to do a job. So she asserts her superiority over the customer to reclaim some of the dignity she feels she loses by serving others instead of having them serve her. I wait thirty seconds and walk on. She yaps after me that I should come back, indignantly adding she just had to do something else. They're like a society of broken former slaveowners, who've never recovered from losing the people who did all their work for them.
Later on, a lovely dinner with Pablo, in excellent spirits. He is over from Zurich, visiting Hungary for a wedding, and we meet some Italian and French friends of his who happen to be in the restaurant.

July 2nd; Meet a jetlagged Mystery Friend 2 for afternoon coffee. In a strange mix-up, we arrive late on a river boat with rude bartenders for an event involving Zita P just as it finishes, then meet Edit at Iguana, and twice fail to cross paths with Robin or Piera. Mystery Friend tells some anecdotes about Gloucestershire in the 80s and 90s. He is sure that 'chav' comes from the Gypsy word 'csavo' (geezer/lad/bloke). He cites how Gloucestershire farm labourers 20 years ago, long before the word 'chav' came into use in Britain, used to dismiss some people as "mali chavvers", a Slavic-sounding expression they probably picked up from Travellers or Gypsies. When he criticised a local labourer's slightly run-down car, the man indignantly replied "He goes, dun'im?", sounding wonderfully Hardyesque for the rather late 20th century. Then came some stories of a time working at a dressage yard in the mid 1990s, sharing a cottage with an ex-gamekeeper called Sean. Sean had a Lurcher dog called Piper. He would whisper in the dog's ear after breakfast "Come on Piper, catch me something nice for lunch" and when they came back from work at midday, there would be a dead hare or two outside at the door with the dog resting inside. Sean had apparently been disqualified for five years from gamekeeping after getting a little too enthusiastic at the job. Determined to nab some Pakistani poachers who used to drive down from Birmingham in a transit van to shoot in the woods on a big scale, Sean used his tracking skills to find where the van treads used to go in the forest. Then he built an elaborate, Ninja-style hide in a pit, equipped himself with ten double-barrelled shotguns in case he was outgunned, and waited three or four days in his hole in the ground until the Pakistanis turned up. Then he "slotted them", filling their buttocks with birdshot, and causing the local magistrates to hand down his ban. Since Sean had free board & breakfast along with his 80-pound-a-week cash-in-hand salary, three battered unlicensed cars, some growing lamps to assist his indoor herbal crop, and bartered some of his crop for food and drink at a local hostelry, he lived entirely outside the formal economy. Britain clearly needs more people like him.
July 1st; Dinner at Franc's, back with intriguing stories from Belfast.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?

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June 30th; During morning gym, Jim points out that, if the paint is cracking, the papier mache surface might be unstable. Last few days with the thick mix has been like learning to paint with clotted cream or even cottage cheese. Rather sensual. Strange to stumble into the shady flat from the hot balcony, sunblinded by the bright white paint, dazzled by two white, glistening letters of the alphabet in the summer glare outside.
Startling claim that news manipulation brought down Bear Sterns.
June 29th; Cold beer and pear schnapps at Heikki's office in the early evening, talking about Finland in the 1940s. Late at night, I finish Martin's copy of the intriguing 'Ponder on This' by written by Alice Bailey, or rather, dictated to her during the 1920s, 30s, and 40s by an entity on another plane of existence called 'The Tibetan'. Interesting quality to these "channelled" texts - they often seem urgently sincere and clear in tone, sometimes using some archaic or curious phrasing to package an essentially simple & heartening message. This book has the everyday earnestness of some Anglicans. Though framed in terms of Blavatsky-style spiritualism, the notion of a group of supernatural volunteers guiding others is used to introduce a quite boy-scoutish vision of world co-operation. To be part of the project we should work on being selfless, humble, and patient. Both Christ and Buddha seem to be helping out in this work of decades. A word I didn't know, 'anent' (regarding), is used a lot, and Bailey persistently uses 'vision' as a verb, and 'glamour' as a negative term, somewhat worse than 'illusion'. Apparently Bailey was an heiress who was disinherited on medical grounds when she started receiving instructions from beyond the visible world. So then she cheerfully went to work for years in a sardine factory while compiling texts that became a number of books. This is an anthology of excerpts from several of them, including the wonderfully named 'Glamour: a World Problem'. From a few days ago, some nifty language-learning communities recommended by Adjo & Francesco. These are italki, mango, livemocha, palabea, & a handy list.

June 28th; Meet Ibolya, then chat to Marion over cool lemonades. Hot outside.
June 27th; Find way to make white matt paint thick and sticky, as I realise I must redo some of the work on the papier mache. Delicious dinner at Terri's with Peter. We watch as Terri's robot vacuum cleaner happily glides around the room looking like a thick frisbee, or a giant draughts counter, bouncing slowly off walls tracing a random path round the room. At one point it gets stuck under a table, I feel sorry for it and have to set it free. What is odd is that I remember seeing prototypes of this in operation on the Tomorrow's World programme in the early 1970s, in other words 35 years ago. I still have the annual book of the show with the device pictured in it. Looks almost unchanged. What took them so long?

June 26th; Attend Drupal meeting on top of the Corvin department store building in sticky heat. They cannot help me reinstal Drupal because we find XAMPP was wrongly installed the first time. I have to leave them and spend an hour reinstalling XAMPP by myself, losing my once-in-a-summer chance to get the help I really needed with Drupal.
June 25th; I meet Robin with some friends at some bar where they are watching a football game and the TV transmission keeps getting cut. Afterwards, on the internet, minnie.minx from the lawyers' talkboard again suggests something for me. Two books by Simon Baron-Cohen about his autism research: 1 2.

June 24th; Workout with Jim. We meet Michael over coffee in the sun later. Drinks during thundery rain in the late afternoon with Robin, Mystery Friend 2, Zita P, Istvan. I am nursing my still-warm just-roasted chicken in a plastic carrier bag through the evening. Eva leaves us and Andrea joins us for a Mexican meal involving those beers with bits of lime in them and salt round the rim. In the restaurant, Mystery Friend 2 confesses a desire to become an architect. Walking separately between the restaurant and some bar by the Opera, Robin & I bump into Boo Boo on a back street, just emerging from a cellar where he has been teaching capoeiro. He enthuses about country life, with his new stallion, his silly sheep, his wilful goat, and the golden soup made out of his huge, healthy hens, which love the clean rustic air but also remind him of miniature dinosaurs. At the bar we regroup, to be joined by others, including Tamas, who claims there are family links between members of today's SZDSZ party (the free-market liberals) and the Stalinist 1950s Rakosi regime, while the family links for prominent members of today's MSZP party (the Socialists), he says, are with the post-1956 communist Kadar regime. More drinks later somewhere else with just Robin, Zita P., and Mystery Friend, where I suggest the Czech Republic should change its official name to 'Bohemia & Moravia'.
June 23rd; Sunny & hot. Morning gym with Jim, who tells me that Culloden was more a battle fought between Scots Highlanders & Scots Lowlanders than between Scots & English. Then sandwich and decaff coffee near the gym with Zsanna. She dislikes the heat and will spend July & August working on a theatre piece with another actress in a cellar studio under the Siraly bar. Later meet a sporty, glowing Nora, carrying her rollerblade skates. We have some drinks and I hear about her exam successes and forthcoming trip to Greece. Then see Terri at the revamped Muvesz for non-alcoholic cocktails, and hear about the clever people at Elmu (Budapest's power distributor). They refused to modify their records showing her flat as having three electricity meters (all totting up bills). Though an Elmu employee visited her flat and testified in writing that she has only one meter, Elmu showroom staff refused to look at the meter reader's paper because another of Terri's documents was one month old. No surprise the Budapest distributor's two German owners want to buy more than 90 per cent of its shares so they can delist it. Probably a prerequisite under Hungarian law to sacking the 90 per cent of Elmu staff who subtract value from the company - just my cruel guess of course. As we wander down Andrassy street by night, musing about what Ryan is up to, we pass a poster for some exhibition about dead bodies. Terri says a friend of hers has looked into the show. It seems the preserving process in 'Bodies: the Exhibition' was copied from a more ethical German rival (exhibitors of 'Body Worlds'). More ethical because, unlike the Germans, the exhibitors of this one, 'Bodies: The Exhibition' (Premier Exhibitions) are unsure where their bodies come from: they "think" from a hospital or a prison in China sharing the same name. The Burke-&-Hare-style cadaver sourcing of this travelling exhibition caused anger in several p l a c e s. However, in Hungary there seem to be no concerns: several local firms gladly endorse this show of Chinese corpses obtained without consent.

June 22nd; Last night, late in the internet cafe, a couple came in with a large pink rat. The Hungarian girl had it on her arm, she was stroking it, she told me it was called Szotyi ('Sunflower Seed'), and said it had no fur because of a genetic mistake. I stroked it too, and it was soft, smooth, and worried. I started to watch a video lecture by an American woman brain scientist recounting what it was like for her to have a stroke. At one bit she describes struggling to phone for help (because she has forgotten how to read phone numbers). The scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, finally gets through and hears her colleague making muffled noises on the phone. She realises that because of her stroke-impaired brain both he and she "sound like golden retrievers". I laughed out loud in the cafe, but the rat wasn't alarmed because it had gone home by then. I did find myself getting irritated for an instant when this middle-aged woman screeches in a nasal Boston accent "I thought 'Wow! This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?!'", but her talk has a very interesting conclusion. (Loud, shrill intro music of course.) Bolte Taylor's crowning idea, that we need to live more in the moment, with our parallel-processing, holistic, experiental right brains, is striking. She seems have found her stroke a mystical experience. As minnie.minx from the lawyers' talkboard said when showing me the link, it very much chimes with Eckhart Tolle's idea we should live in the present instant and silence our chattering left-brain monologues as much as we can.
Wake up today and the day is already hot & bright. Eat a bowl of chilled cherries from my fridge, like idealised spherical bruises. Strange how cherries are pleasant cold, yet have less taste like that. More painting of papier mache and watching the paint dry out on my hot balcony in the sun. Bits of painting alternate with starting the first few pages of Casanova's 'Story of My Life', and finishing Tolle's book 'The Power of Now'. Tolle opens, interestingly, with an account of what sounds like a very serious, even physical, nervous breakdown he had that gave him his new perspective on life - another link with Jill Bolte Taylor. Compelling and practical spiritual teaching. Breaking off at intervals to fiddle with my bits of papier mache, I try observing each moment the way Tolle suggests, and watching the substance of time open up. After dark, pizza & white-wine spritzers with Mystery Friend 2, along with his friends Edit & Eszter. Mystery Friend makes it clear he doesn't loathe himself because "as they say in New York, I have other people to do that for me."
June 21st; Secret Nazi Moon Base. Can this film fail?

June 20th; Reserve hotel room. Tidy flat.
June 19th; Lunch with Pauline. Buy cheese grater later. In fitness club finish 'Warped Passages' by Lisa Randall, another one of those books about there being extra dimensions, hiding just round the corner of normal space. As so often, a frustrating read, because you know you are understanding such a small part of it you are not really understanding it at all. She mixes clear prose and a refreshing willingness to state more of the problem than you usually get in a popular account, with unhelpfully confusing passages at the front of each chapter about some story loosely modelled on Alice in Wonderland. Her diagrams are excellent most of the time, and she does a good job of narrating all the successive extra-dimension theories (curled up really teeny, surprisingly large but hidden, huge but almost impossible to notice, different in different bits of the universe...). Only at the end does the obvious question come up of what - given all these surprising qualities - dimensions might really be. A humbling index gives a light taste of the maths the text leaves out. The huge array of particles sounds even more of a mess than the last time I read one of these books.

June 18th; Inspiring Serb fitness nutter.
June 17th; In warm, sticky, close weather, Robin drives me to Lakitelek station for my mid-afternoon train to Budapest. As we drive away from Tiszainoka, Robin relates how last week he tried to organise a fox terrier mating for Chloe. A male fox terrier called Szikra ('Spark') was let loose on Chloe in the courtyard of a manor house now a home for handicapped people in wheelchairs. Wheelchairs, some motorised, some manual, pass us on the road between Inoka and the next village as he tells the story: at last week's event a small group of handicapped people wheel their chairs into the courtyard of the manor house so they can watch the dogs mating. Chloe seems uninterested, and keeps fighting off Szikra. One of the handicapped women in her 20s says to Robin's 8-year-old son Bela in Hungarian "Well {if I was her}, I'd let him do it!". Bela finds this rather startling. Robin & I stop off at Tractor Man, who has a field of weeds dotted with about fifteen tractors he has in various stages of repair. He shows us a David Brown tractor with a good engine he has almost restored that spent its last forty years chugging around Austrian vineyards. A good salesman, he praises the robustness and simplicity of British engineering. He shows us a Bedford truck that has done several decades' work in Afghanistan and Pakistan - only its electrics remain to be fixed. He affectionately pats a newish Japanese tractor he has restored to health. As we drive on to the honey makers, Robin suggests that some of the classic English vehicles are trying to return from India and the East, perhaps silently appealing only to buyers who will move them westwards. Robin & I buy some honey, while Jozsi says that the mystery bee disease affecting Germany and the USA seems to have not touched Hungary much, apart from some hive-owners in Debrecen working with imported strains. As we leave the honey makers, they ask us to identify some plant called 'mahonia' in their front garden, not looking quite like this example. We reach Lakitelek railway station with not too many minutes to spare, and as usual, the ticket window has a curtain drawn across it. I go round the back, into the signalmen's office. Three Hungarians sit silently around the instrument panel in various stages of gloom.
I : Good afternoon. Excuse me, is there a train at half past?
(Short pause)
Woman : Yes.
I : Does it go to Kecskemet?
(Short pause)
Woman : Yes.
I : So... may I buy a ticket, please?
(Short pause)
Woman : I'll see you round the other side.
I go back round to the ticket window. After about half a minute the curtain whisks aside, and she is standing there, looking at me through the glass. She seems utterly desolate. We do the transaction. Then Robin & I enter the pizzeria to buy some drinks. Instead of the usual one or two serving maids, there is a batch of four adolescent girls working behind the bar, of assorted sizes between about 4'10" and 5'8", like a set of Russian nesting dolls, 17 to 20. All four look at us blankly, checking us out in unison. Their expressionless eyes scan us up and down to assess who we are, where we're from, where we stand, with that wearily-wary, pretty-yet-hostile look working-class girls do so well. Given their critical scrutiny, I suggest to Robin it might be more relaxing to have our drinks outside on their terrace. This is an area of wooden chairs and tables creosoted an intense red, as if marinaded in barbecue sauce. I cut short my mineral water as my train pulls in. Train officials in hats, coloured sticks, training shoes, deep in shame because of having to work, amble out of the building to sullenly shoo my train away almost on time. Robin is back inside the empty restaurant, negotiating pizzas with the hard-eyed teenagers. I get on quickly as the two carriages pull out into the thirty miles of high green grass & wild flowers separating Lakitelek from the nearest town.

June 16th; Throughout the day & night, Lupus is either barking or whining or pulling at his chain, desperate to reach his irresistable love locked away in her inaccessible fastness. Chloe, the bitch, seems less heartbroken, but is still vaguely keen to get closer to him. Finish Robin's copy of Nicholas Ostler's book 'Empires of the Word', a world history told through the rise and fall of some major languages. While there are some lovely anecdotes and interesting sections, disappointing that there is not a basic summary of each language's grammar and not enough details to read each script. It's such a fat book, that an extra ten pages doing those things for each of the 6 or 7 main languages discussed wouldn't have hurt. There is also some repetition in the less edited closing chapters. Congratulations to Ostler for warning that English's global conquest is no more secure than that of previous world civilisations. However, in what is quite a long book, it never occurs to him once that electronic eavesdropping might lead to a completely new value for small languages: as informal confidentiality filters for wealthy, privacy-conscious groups. Police organisations worldwide are already reporting big problems infiltrating and intercepting Albanian criminal gangs because Albanian is hard to learn, and trusted Albanian speakers hard to find.
June 15th; Drive with Robin out into the cloudy countryside after a quick cup of tea at my flat. His two dogs are causing some concern. Chloe the fox terrier is on heat, and Lupus, the large fluffy white male komondor is in despair with lust, suddenly aware, as never before, of the bewitching charms of his little doggy companion.

June 14th; Lovely lunch at Rob's with Eti & Mali, followed by leisurely afternoon drinks in Pest. I say something about Voltaire sounding like a juvenile smart-alec, and Rob suggests 'Candide' was the 18th-century version of 'That Was The Week That Was'. Both thought tremendously daring & witty in their time, both offered nothing to replace what they mocked.
June 13th; In morning at the gym, finish 'How German is it' by Walter Abish, a 1980 novel. Clinical, eerie humour. Tricks like the missing question mark in the title & avoidance of quote marks throughout help him hint at some unmentioned menace. Here is the distinctive, insinuating prose style in a typical paragraph. "Daphne's apartment like his own overlooked the small park across the street. Standing at her window she could observe people, mostly single men, walking their dogs at night. Frequently the men would stop to speak to each other. Most likely they by now recognised each other's dogs. Sie haben einen scho:nen Hund, one of the men might say. The other, in all likelihood, will respond with a simple Danke. It was extremely harmless. Nothing sinister about it. Whenever he had trouble sleeping he would take a turn or two around the park. On several occasions he had briefly conversed with one of the men walking a dog on a leash. Once he had caught sight of Daphne at the window. But she quickly ducked out of sight as soon as she caught him looking up." Intriguing, clever story. Definitely worth reading. Later on, curry with Mihaela, drinks with Heikki and his friends from Geneva Olivier & TV documentary-maker Virginie. Some kind of hen party is in progress in the restaurant and a waif-like blonde in a white veil and white jeans (perhaps the bride to be) comes over to our table. She explains to me she has a dare from her girlfriends, to cut the washing-instructions tab out of the underpants of a certain number of men. Feeling honoured but not wanting the scratching sensation from the strip of cut nylon left behind, I save her some time & intimacy and rip the whole tab free of the stitching for her. Last thing round midnight at Deak square, with Robin I briefly meet Pauline, Istvan, Tamas & Krisztian.

June 12th; More active on some new forums.
June 11th; Text Eugenia to ask about that book.

June 10th; Retry guarana. Start to paint papier mache.