June 29th;
Back in Budapest, the landlady's son kindly solves my fuse problem, and gives me a
key to the big fuse cupboard.
A week ago, slightly to my surprise, I used a modelling knife to cut a water jug with handle out
of an empty plastic mineral water bottle. Three days later I threw it away and made a better one.
This is working well at watering the herbs without sploshing too much water onto them. Unlike the
unaltered water bottle; in that, water sloshes the length of the bottle as I hold it horizontal
and its shifting weight overwhelms the hand trying to hold it steady. Now I'm
imagining Mark III water-bottle-into-jug.
Today I surprise myself again by finishing my homework for tomorrow's animation class with
Andras, the last before summer, doing some
simple little black and white drawings in each of what turns out to be almost 100 frames. Eight feet of
celluloid, rather than six, I find out. I take six hours, so that's roughly 16 frames an hour. A dark,
close day, where thunder murmurs a couple of times. No storm breaks though as afternoon turns
into dusk, me kneeling on a folded rug, using a board laid on the sofa as a workbench to
mark up each frame of celluloid, music playing in the background.
June 28th;
Up at 9am, but no-one else is except Elie, who I'm later told did not go to bed. Elie marches into
the guesthouse dining room as I finish my breakfast sharply demanding I tell him where everyone is, as
if I should know. Later, Elie, gripped by rage, orders Dallan, if he sees Neil in
Budapest, to tell Neil "You tell him to give me back my banjo,
give me back my industrial blender, and instruct those Gypsies to Bring Back All Of The
Other Things That They Took." Dallan agrees to do this.
Midday travel back to Budapest from Furstenfeld. We get to the train station at Szentgotthard
at the last minute despite me being packed & ready four hours in advance, so no time to
buy lunch since the station has no shop, and we have only 8 or 9 minutes, not enough time for
the restaurant across the road. There follows a hungry and thirsty hour or so before reaching
Szombathely with six minutes to change trains. Luckily, the train from Szombathely to Budapest
has a dining car. It is staffed by a seemingly retarded waiter who needs to repeat everything three
times and speaks strangely. However, he is courteous, prompt, and doesn't oversalt the food. He
does a better job than any MAV waiter on any previous buffet carriage. He brings me the first fresh
bread rolls I have ever touched on a Hungarian train. Dallan, who grew up in Utah, tells me about
the wife of the first transcriber of Mormon
Church prophet Joseph Smith as he translated aloud from
the golden tablets that no-one could look at, from behind a screen. Apparently, she slyly burned some
of the transcription, asking her husband if the translation sounded the same when Smith
was then forced to dictate that section again from behind his screen. Dallan says she
subsequently left her husband in disgust at him believing Smith's obviously cock-and-bull story.
June 27th;
Early morning train to Austria with lots of English teachers, including a contingent from Berlin.
An American girl called Kat who is having some short stories published explains her philosophy
towards her characters as "I'm not in favour of much happening -
sometimes I try to do mean stuff to them, and then I feel kinda guilty."
Almost at the Austrian border, Dallan glimpses three crop circles in a
field as we rush past in the train and he archly remarks that he thinks that
someone made them.
He adds that his three-year-old, as a kind of affirmation, says "Keep it gay," to adults at random.
A long day in Austria unfolds, with a guided tour round a winery, a meeting about the
English-teaching weeks at Austrian schools which inadvertently reveals that rather large amounts of money
are left over after paying us, and a tasty meal of roast pig at a cellar restaurant. I leave and go back
for some sleep before midnight just as a few people are starting to pair off and get seriously drunk.
June 26th;
Magdolna tells
me at dusk that her fortune teller has a distinct prediction about me.
It involves a brown-eyed brunette & a blonde. Well, that narrows it down, doesn't it?
We discuss going to see this supposedly remarkable soothsayer soon.
June 25th;
Astonishing piece of old Serbian typography.
June 24th;
Meet Mary at her regular cafe where the waiter does designs in the cream
on the coffee. Find design
school in Buda. Buy fish-oil, liver, & carrots.
June 23rd;
At lunchtime Esther comes round to see my herb garden. By night, join Gretchen & Nannette for an
animation class with Andras.
I mark up my six foot of celluloid so slowly I don't really get started.
June 22nd;
Soothing ditty from Wagon
Christ, with quietly clever conceit to the cartoon video. Less
soothing tune & video from Plaid,
a sort of Powerpoint presentation from the dark side.
June 21st;
Sunday. Afternoon snack with Gretchen. Dark, damp, cloudy day again. We talk about
Midsummer's
Night, and arrange to go to an animation class together next week.
June 20th;
Saturday. Visit the Buda
Garden Centre in drizzle. They have exactly 18 clay saucers
2.75" in diameter, no more. At the bus stop to come back, two women are waiting for
the bus. They look odd, somehow. Both perhaps late 20s, early 30s, one very plump,
the other very red-faced, both in jeans & old pullovers. Under the grey, cloudy sky in
these outfits they look British, in fact, and they could easily be English librarians or
academics in the dress-down uniform. However, this is Hungary so the question is why are
two women out dressed like this? Also, they are smirking at me as if there is some joke
I am not in on. They watch me get the clay saucers out of my bag and use sticky tape to tightly
wrap them in two stacks of nine against shifting and breakage. A strange instinct is creeping
up on me - I ask them if we are inside or outside the city limits. I know the edge is round
here somewhere, and I might be one bus stop outside the area my transport
pass covers. More smirking and twinkly-eyed looks are exchanged by the two bints as
they tell me no, we are just inside the city limits here. The bus pulls up, we all get on,
and they slip on their ticket-inspector armbands. Aha! That was their secret.
Out late with Olga to the
all-night
museum-opening event across Budapest. Lots of
attractive girls, most with boyfriends, many without, cruising crowded museums
looking for what, exactly? Foreign men? Hungarian men interested in art & antiques?
Most of us don't know what we're looking for, on reflection. Big queues. Inside the
Agricultural Museum in the 1897 Vajdahuyad mock castle couples are sitting all up the
marble staircase listening to a drum-based ethnic folk group. The drumming &
chanting sounds hair-raisingly authentic, nomadic, and Central Asian. The museum
seems to be as much about hunting & game as about farm animals. Lots of people
dancing with burning torches in various places. Olga succeeded in her exams
and is very happy. We find the photographic museum and watch a projected video of
washing going round in a washing machine. There we bump into Eszter & Mate.
June 19th;
Friday. Teeth descaled
by dentist. Forgot how much I dislike this. Struck by
this
song, though the voiced lyrics
are really quite bossy, American preachiness even in the midst of hedonism. In the official
video the visual message of the song seems to be "You're a leggy East European blonde,
so get off your bed, saunter over to the audition and cinch that modelling job. You know
you owe it to yourself." How are the rest of us supposed to react to being patronised
like this - those of us who aren't beautiful girls, for example? I recall mother once
dismissing a Talking Heads song as a "homily", and realising with surprise that she had
spotted something. As the lass on this track pontificates, with her slight trace of non-native
English, "If you're not trying, nothing will change. It's your choice, the
way you live your life." Wonderful how quickly people who
succeed, especially in the US, start telling other people they have only themselves to blame.
June 18th;
Thursday. Meet Magdolna on the rooftop bar of the Corvin building as the sun sets.
She lends me a book.
She is also puzzled that I wouldn't accept 3.5-inch saucers when I ordered
2.75-inch saucers. It's like everyone agrees here that customers are a nuisance, and
the onus is on the customer to prove that what he or she wants is an acceptable request.
All week I've been going to flower shops round town, humbly asking if they stock
flower pots or flower seeds. Some of them almost roll their eyes at the stupidity of
my request. We're a flower shop, dumbo. We sell flowers & plants.
Why would we sell flower pots or flower seeds? Duh.
June 17th;
Wednesday. Introduce Jeremy 2 to the dentist who remembers taking out my last
milk tooth
three years ago. Brief glimpse of the Menopausal Munchkin lady dentist in the
reception area.
June 16th;
Tuesday. Iran
appears to be kicking off, as some Brits would put it. I go to the local
flower shop to pick up the eighteen 2.75" clay saucers I ordered, having taken one in to show
her and confirmed my order by phone text {"Eighteen clay saucers, each 2.75 inches = 7
centimetres"}. Of course, she's bought eighteen 3.5" saucers, not 2.75", and
is surprised I don't want to buy them. She'd texted me confirmation they'd "arrived" - why
not text me a message saying "I can only get 3.5-inch/9-centimetre saucers - is that all right?"?
June 15th;
Mr Dentist e-mails me at around 4am. Early bird. In the sauna at the fitness gym five of us
have a discussion about the
Iranian elections.
June 14th;
Herb garden continues to push up little shoots in the different pots. A few very small flies
seem to be hovering around one or two pots. Are they pests or helpers, signs of life? I
think they might be the Stupid Square Flies that annoyed Nina so much. Could this
Maurer
be the Hungarian artist I saw with Magdolna? More bits of
visualrelief.
June 13th;
Dinner party at Martin's. I show him the cribbage board.
Music
in street below his window.
June 12th;
Yesterday checked Martin's list, found my local electronics hobbyist shop, and bought
something looking a lot like a cribbage board with grids of tiny holes in it. Today, find out
how to put transparent bits in a favicon thanks to
Tony Weeg, locate the
Media & Communications College, and visit my last dental clinic to meet a woman dentist
who is sulky even by Hungarian standards. She denies there is a list of dentists at that
clinic, so I just copy out the names on the document trays behind the unoccupied
receptionist's desk. Menopausal munchkin. Vital guide to
surviving a bear attack.
June 11th;
Lunch at a friend's place, where he tells a good tale of Customs & Excise before
it was absorbed into SOCA. He
mentions meeting a group of Romanian student policemen who on learning of their British
counterparts' powers said "So you live in a police state then?" On another occasion a group of German student
coppers were astonished to find how linked-up and extensive the Kent Police Computer
Database was, and bleakly reminded him "We know what happens
in a country where the police have powers like these."
June 10th;
Go to see Nicolas
talk about coaching at an informal gathering at an Indian restaurant.
Meet Sascha & other
interesting people, and chat quite late.
June 9th;
After breakfast with Agnes, we roam around looking at the big cranes near my flat.
Lunch on a very hot & sunny island with Mystery Friend 2 who is specifically trying to
improve his tan. Intriguingly, while
iStyle, Apple's Hungarian
resellers, told me that I
would need a component they refused to give me the name of, costing 240 euros,
a different firm said a cable was damaged and replaced it for 10 euros. Curiouser &
curiouser. My basil might have survived the weekend, and the other herbs continue
to grow. A third are still just soil, but each day another pot betrays one small loop
of intense green in its black dirt, like a single stitch which in a few days will untangle
into lots of shrill green strands above soil. On the tram finish a book by Joseph Campbell
called
'
The Hero With A Thousand
Faces' which is surprisingly dull. Campbell draws together
myths & epics from across the globe to illustrate a thesis about common themes & motifs
in all human legends. Each individual description of some Japanese or Eskimo or
African or Greek or Irish legend is charmingly colourful, but after about three pages I
stopped caring about any of them. His background idea of challenges to the hero, the
integration of the individual into the social fabric, the celebration of that society's vision
of the cosmos, all the rest of it....
is a tad pompous in places, hovers oddly unsupported by any given myth,
and just isn't very interesting. Reading three detailed mythological journeys into a big
fish's stomach in succession, for example, robs each one of its singular magic, without
reaching any really convincing psychological synthesis of all of them. A rather
overconfident late-1940s Freudian/Jungian handwaving about the 'psyche' and its
'archetypes' is the real background for this peculiarly unsatisfying book.
June 8th;
Robin drives me to Lakitelek railway station. We visit the seamstress on the way. I give
her my pullover where some stitching has gone but it is still in one piece, and she nods
approvingly: a simple task. Then Robin hands over two garments which are virtually in
shreds. She seems a bit nonplussed but promises to try her best. Over the door of her
shop are four red stencilled farm-animal silhouettes, which Robin points out to me,
having earlier suggested I make a
papier-mache
notice board shaped like an animal, though not quite like
this.
June 7th;
At Robin's. I
wake late. There are huge amounts of juicy black cherries around. Georgina ties a basket
to my waist, I climb on a stool and 3/4 strip two small trees in an hour and
a half, both gorging myself and putting at least 20 lbs of cherries into the basket. I can hardly
carry it back to the kitchen, where an enormous disc-shaped wickerwork pan
at least three feet in diameter {full of cherries yesterday} covers the small table.
This is where the haul is shaken until it is only one cherry deep and can then dry out.
June 6th;
Getting ready to take the afternoon train down to Robin's. Cloudy, then sunny. So much world, so
little time:
print,
pics,
&girls.
June 5th;
More work I don't need from
Google
& Twitter. Though my code is clean, I must make
"requests" through a byzantine set of online forms to ask if Google will unblacklist
this website pretty please? Of course no e-mail address I can contact - they'd have to
pay someone then, instead of getting me and other users to do their work for them
free. The whole experience is uncannily like trying to communicate with the gas board.
They can tell me what they want to tell me when they want, but I cannot find how to
talk back to them. Perhaps I am not actually allowed to speak to the mighty Google?
I must be humble, I must be humble...
June 4th;
Sunny weather returns. Like the pumpkin shoots before, 5 or 6 of the oregano seedlings
are still wearing the peppercorn-like seeds they grew down and out of, so that
pot looks like a set of small plants juggling & balancing balls on their heads.
Online, some soothing, meditative
stuff.
June 3rd;
A few more shoots in my miniature herb garden. I order more
seeds.
June 2nd;
Evening drink with Agnes. Tarot reading, and my 2 spreads about women
are a bit concerning. 4 pieces of elegant
type
design. Tune by Soulstice.
June 1st;
On John's way to the airport
back to Manchester, we stop off at Magdolna's for a
delicious lunch featuring her wonderful turmeric & potato soup. One of the cats refuses
to leave John's lap, and her son Mate, who recently won a prize in a nationwide business
team competition, seems a little the worse for wear after revelry last night.
Recent weblog entries
continued:
We do - otherlanguages.org is
gradually building a
reference resource for over five thousand
linguistic minorities and
stateless languages worldwide.
Thousands of unique language
communities are becoming extinct.
Out of the world's five to six thousand languages, we hardly know
what we're losing, what literatures, philosophies, ways of thinking, are disappearing right now.
So?
We may soon regret the
extinction of thousands of entire
linguistic cultures even more than we
regret the needless extinction
of many animals and plants.
The planet is increasingly dominated by
a handful of
major-language monocultures like Mandarin
Chinese,
Hindi, Arabic,
Indonesian, Urdu, Spanish, Portuguese,
English, Swahili, Russian, Cantonese Chinese, Japanese, Bengali - all
beautiful and fascinating
languages.
But so are the
5,000 others.
These are groups of
people?
Linguistic minorities are communities
of ordinary people whose
native tongue is not their country's main
official language. Swedish
speakers in Finland, French speakers in
Canada, Hungarian speakers
in Slovakia - and hundreds more - are
linguistic minorities.
And totally stateless languages are the
native languages of some
of the world's most intriguing,
little-known, cultures. Like the
Lapps inside the Arctic Circle, the Sards
in Sardinia, Ainus in Japan. Cherokee in the US, Scots
Gaelic in Britain, Friesian in the
Netherlands, Zulu in South Africa.
There are only a couple of hundred recognised sovereign states and
territories, so more than 5,000 languages are the native tongues of
linguistically stateless people.
How
could I help?
You don't need to learn an endangered
language - any more than go to live in the rainforest to help slow its
destruction.
A good start is to just tell friends
about websites like this.
Broader public interest makes it easier
for linguists to raise
funds and organise people to learn these
languages while there's
time.
That's right. There
are people who love
languages and are happy to learn them on
behalf of the rest of us, but they need support,
just like zoologists, botanists, or historians.
Fewer languages still
sounds good to
me
Depends what you think languages
are for. They're not just
a tool for business. We never said you
should learn three or four thousand
rare languages - or even one. And which
ones we make children learn in school, or whether we
should force children to learn languages
at all, is another question.
Typical scene in a European city;
Chances are, folk here speak some sort of foreign
language *5
A century ago - before we understood
ecology, and when we cared
less about wilderness, most educated
people would have laughed at
the idea of worrying about plants or
animals going extinct. Now we
understand how important species diversity
is for our own futures,
we are more humble, and more worried.
In the same way, linguistic
triumphalism by English-speakers who
hated studying foreign grammar at school
is dangerously ignorant as
well as arrogant. Few of us know what we
are losing, week by week.
How many people realise these languages
have scientific value?
Scientific value?
You can think of
these languages across
the planet as beautiful cathedrals or
precious archeological sites
we are watching being destroyed. That
should be motive enough.
But these five thousand languages may
also hold clues to the
structure of the human mind. Subtle
differences and similarities
Wireless radio can be a great comfort to those unable
to leave the
textbooks in which they live *6
between languages are helping
archeologists and anthropologists to
understand what happened in the hundreds
of centuries of human
history before written history. And
that is one of our best
chances of understanding how human brains
developed over the
thousands of centuries leading up to that.
Study of the mind and study of language
go hand in hand these
days. The world's most marginal languages
are actually precious
jigsaw pieces from an overall picture of
who we are and how our
species thinks and evolves. Every tiny
language adds another
brightly-coloured clue to this academic
detective story.
Yet researchers have hardly started
sifting through this
tantalising evidence, and language
extinction is washing it away
right in front of us.
And worst of all, most people have no
idea that there is this
fantastic profusion of cultures across our
world, let alone that
they are in danger of extinction. Even
just more people learning
that there are still five thousand living
languages in the world
today (most of us would answer five
hundred or fifty) is already a
huge help.
We
English-speakers hardly notice
English - it's like air for us. But every
other language is also an
atmosphere for an entire cultural world,
and each of these worlds
has people whose home it is. Each language
encapsulates a unique
way of talking and thinking about life.
Just try some time in a
foreign prison, being forced to cope in
another language, and you'll
realise how much your own language is your
identity. That's true for
everyone.
Minority languages are a
human-rights
issue?
One of the most basic.
Dozens of millions of people worldwide
suffer persecution from
national governments for speaking their
mother tongue - in their own
motherland.
Many 'ethnic' feuds puzzling to
outsiders had as their basis an
attempt to destroy a linguistic community.
Would the Northern
Ireland dispute be quite so bitter if we
English had not so nearly
stamped out the Irish Gaelic language, for
example? Almost nowhere
in the world does a language community as
small as the few thousand
Rheto-Romanic speakers - the fourth
official language of Switzerland
- get the protection of a national
government. Next time you see some Swiss Francs, check both sides of the
banknote.
But outside exceptional countries like
Switzerland or the Netherlands, speakers of non-official
languages have a much less
protected experience.
Speakers of minority languages are
often seen as a threat by both
the governments and the other residents of
the countries where they
were born, grew up, and try to live
ordinary lives.
They experience discrimination in the
job and education markets
of their homelands, often having no choice
but to pursue education
in the major language of the host state -
a deliberate government
policy usually aimed at gradually
absorbing them into the majority
culture of that country.
Most governments are privately gleeful
each time another small
separate culture within their borders is
snuffed out by a dwindling
population or a deliberately centralising
education system.
The United Nations is no help. It is an
association of a couple
of hundred sovereign states based on
exclusive control of territory,
almost all of them anxious to smother any
distinct group or
tradition that in any way might blur or
smudge the hard-won borders
around those pieces of territory.
The usual approach by sovereign states
is to deny their
linguistic minorities even exist.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact at
otherlanguages.org
May 31st;
John & I see a film: 'State
of Play' at the shopping centre. The characters are 2-dimensional, {a foul-mouthed
posh British newspaper editrix seems to be the latest American movie cliche} but the plotting
is reasonably convincing. There are some surprises and tension in a couple of places.
May 30th;
Visual
gorgeousness
at ffffound.com still. Latest seeds camomile & chrysanthemum.
May 29th;
Out clubbing
with John's friends, including Gareth, Anthony, Craig, & Ken.
May 28th;
Pick John up from airport, briefly meet his friends. Spending more time on
ffffound.
May 27th;
Long, cloudy day. The puppies follow me around like ducklings, curious what interesting
games we might play. Robin
gives me an excellent low, flat fired brick for heating things
up on. The Great Plain cools off and plump, rippling rain clouds carpet the sky from horizon
to horizon. Robin drives Zeno & me into Budapest after dark, cool breeze blowing through
the open windows into the still hot car, Zeno smoking his pipe quietly in the back seat,
scattered rain drops plopping into the windscreen. Recall one friend telling me in
the last few weeks that "women are like weeds - they'll grow
wherever you let them - through any crack in the pavement if you don't prune them
or pull them up." Hmm.
Photographer Poppy de
Villeneuve says that "you can work out who you are in
NYC.".
May 26th;
Wake late. Zeno tells me about the forest of saplings and I set off to see the seamstress
in the next village. Selecting from one of Robin's range of bicycles I choose one with
no gears, no brakes, but good tyres, while the puppies, still delightfully puppy-like a
month on, patter out from the shade under a pile of logs to watch me test the bike. Making
small squeaking sounds, they crowd round my feet, bottoms wiggling with curiosity. Under
quite a hot sun, I cycle to
Tiszakurt,
find the seamstress, pay for my green cords, and give
her some new work. As I get back into Tiszainoka a bit over an hour later I find the first
shop [there are three] has a delivery truck outside. The woman who owns the shop is just
finishing with the delivery driver. As it is hot in the sun while I am tired & sweaty, I politely
ask if I can go into her shop for some shade [I should have just walked in]. She shakes her
head and says no, quite matter-of-factly. I stand in the heat another minute, then when she's
ready she lets me in. I look round, decide not to buy anything, go back out into the sun and
walk on with the brakeless bike. Just how bright do you need to be to realise how not to treat
a customer? Is it really so mysterious for her? The village bar with
brown-and-cream
rubber strips covering the walls is also empty, but the woman there takes a different view.
She says hello, tells the person on the phone to wait, and cheerfully gets me two
cold drinks. Back at Robin's, he & Zeno are off somewhere buying bricks.
I do some editing, then doze through a hot afternoon, feeling both a bit feeble
yet also oddly empowered.
May 25th;
Finally myself, as it were. Move the herb garden to a shadier part of the main room in
preparation for a couple of days at
Robin's.
Buy more gigabytes for laptop, catch train.
On the tram to the train at half past 5 in the afternoon, the streets still oven warm, and I
look at my phone. 2 messages on my phone reveal that I completely forgot
a work appointment at noon today. Oh Lord. Once out on the Great Plain, I give the 1st
pair of silver ear studs to Georgina, then Robin, Zeno, & I retire to the kitchen for a
candlelit dinner. Eerily quiet out here. Once darkness falls, you can hear
mobile-phone buttons or cash-dispenser keyboards beeping at fifty yards.
May 24th;
Adjusting to heat, seemingly. I usually adore it - perhaps because it came late this year,
and suddenly. Sleeping a lot.
Vivid dreams.
May 23rd;
Still feel a bit peculiar from yesterday. Mild heat stroke? In the cool of the small hours
I do some new graphics for a game of 'Concentration' I find the
Javascript code for online,
turning it into a vocabulary game.
May 22nd;
Wake up at 2am, and start on craft stuff. Round dawn have a near miss heating up an ear-ring with
the blow torch. A loud bang. I cannot see where the metal star {which was hot enough to
be glowing yellow} jumped when the dried-clay block under it exploded. I imagine it 1. down my shirt about
to brand my skin any second now, or 2. sizzling quietly somewhere in my room fallen to the bottom of a box
waiting hours to start a plastics fire while I'm out of the flat. Luckily, I find it doing neither. I shall be
using a brick to heat things up on in future, silly me.
Very hot day. Hungarians are using that word 'kanikula' that Austrians use. Someone told me once
it comes from the Latin phrase for bakingly hot summer's days that gets anglicised as "dog days". Does it?
Says here
yes - from an era, the ancient world, when Sirius the Dog Star rose at sunrise in July & August,
so an astronomically outdated expression for high summer. In the morning pick up bigger terracotta
pots from gardening shop for pumpkin & cornflower seedlings, and fetch rose-cross photo print from
the digital printers.
Lunch with Martin. Just before we choose our table, I bump into Imola {Martin likes her
restaurant} looking a bit subdued,
then we tell the waitress what a shandy is, chat about adverts
a bit, and finally Martin starts on
electronics.
May 21st;
Afternoon drink with Mystery Friend 2, back from exotic travels. He is slightly bemused by
my proud talk of herb
garden & bookcase-building experiments.
May 20th;
The strudels {why am I surprised?} will not
accept the A4 piece of paper they gave me in December as proof I bought a new Apple hard drive
off them {though, since I reported the original hard drive going wrong first in July while still
under guarantee they should really have given, not sold, me a new one}. It says in big red letters
in the centre of the page 'PAID', and lists the price, model number, my name, and the date. No,
says Balazs the maintenance strudel, that is only the "work sheet". I must give them the cash-register
receipt, the small 2-square-inch piece of paper that came out of their till when I paid. Otherwise, no
valid guarantee on the 2nd hard drive that they sold me, even though they should have given it to me.
Really, you have to admire the stubbornness of these people in the the face of their own stupidity. I
spend an hour registering online with websites like
Apple Quality
Complaints,
Ripoff Report,
Consumer Affairs, &
Apple Insider. Round off by
expanding my Twitter lists to include a few self-styled Apple gurus who might appreciate tips
about how some iStyle
Hungary staff make extra cash on the side.
May 19th;
Tea at home with the Roffers. One
astutely remarks "You're one of those guys who never left college, aren't you?" Fair point. I am, really.
May 18th;
2 Roffers reach town, on their
romantic train ride to The East.
May 17th;
After an afternoon doze yesterday I'm up all night getting a great deal done. Trying to
sleep between 6am and 7am unsuccessful so I get up and finish off
this stage of the silver work instead.
Working with silver clay has some of that drug-movie dynamic as you crawl around on the
floor trying to save every little fragment of the expensive pale-brown putty-like substance.
It dries fast too, as a couple of websites warned me. Keeping it with something wet in the
fridge 3 days since unsealing didn't stop it getting very crumbly by today. Moral: use all the
next batch within an hour of unwrapping. Out in already hot sunshine at 10am to get cash
from the cash machine and for a few seconds I'm walking behind a slim Gypsy man in his
20s, about 5'4" or 5'5" in height. Tempting to use a police term like 'young male'. He is built
like a flyweight boxer, walking quietly, quickly, and with a very slight swagger - in a brown
sweatshirt top covered in alchemical symbols printed in gold. Not just a few
in a repeating design of six or ten symbols, but in half a block's walk I see at least 20 or 30 different
symbols: moon, phosphorus, Jupiter, arsenic, sun, tin, woman, iron, Scorpio, potassium.
Each about 2 inches high, they're spaced out in regular polka-dot formation across the fabric.
The sweatshirt hood, though down to reveal slicked black hair in a crew cut, adds to the
wizard mood. Still feel alert at 11.30am, when I meet
Eva at a cafe
on the leafy street that meets the City Park. Sleep in afternoon - now to finish reading the
71-page .pdf tutorial on gluing techniques the Nigel of Darkness sent me.
May 16th;
Starting to feel tenderly protective of my little herb garden - nine tiny terracotta pots and
saucers arranged in a row just inside the French window door onto the balcony. I now
realise that the outside of each pot feels different if the soil is dry or wet. If there is enough
water the terracotta is cool and slightly tacky to the touch. The pumpkin seeds have grown
almost comically fast. One bud on a tall stalk still has its half-open seedcase
wedged on top of the top leaf, carried five inches vertically out of the soil it was buried
in 3 or 4 days ago. It's as if a complete bishop had burst downwards out of his own
mitre, body and legs growing out of the bottom of an enlarging head. I plant some more
seeds, and now there are 15 pots of soil & seeds, 5 of which are showing green shoots.
Tunes from Justice, rather
rockist
for a French Christian synth duo, even when sounding like MGMT.
Forgive them their pompous graphic, they know not what they do:
12345.
For those who must have moving pictures, 2nd & 3rd clip to Phantom Pt 2 - a
worship-raw-power video and a
something-nasty-in-the-cafeteria video.
Tad Triumph-of-the-Will in places, but some good bass lines. Doubtless
under the influence of this stuff, up all night finishing rosy-cross clip-art project.
May 15th;
Pathetically proud of the two
favicons I made a couple
of days ago, I find they sometimes don't show. Perhaps filtered out by the Vodafone
wireless dongle? Finally, I buy some transparent 20mm board from the
plastic-roofing firm out past
Sashalom. Give up on trying to finesse direction of air channels for
different pieces in my cutting diagram and wait quite a long time as they
slice it up for me.
May 14th;
More work in silver, more work on book.
May 13th;
Three pointless trips to three different self-important specialist wholesalers all in one day.
I'm getting to know how public transport works out in the 20th district though, so
that's all right. At one point, I'm on a tram and I make the mistake of checking
the name of the terminus with another passenger, a parcel-shaped man in a dark-grey
suit bearing an uncanny resemblance to a giant basset hound. He turns out to be a
lonely Transylvanian architect who has lived more than half his life in Hungary, is
very much into striking up conversations on trams, is sure he knows where I and he must
get off, and won't shut up. I keep trying to check the names of tramstops on the placard
next to his seat while he tells me there is no problem and Amsterdam Ajax is a great team.
I suggest several times that we have gone past the terminus on a big loop while he insists
we have not reached it yet. What a surprise: he is wrong and I am right. I walk back down
the tram track rather crossly not even saying goodbye to the basset hound, who is earnestly
asking directions to the tramstop for the reverse direction {of course on a different street},
and I spend the next 20 minutes walking back to where I originally wanted to get off. A few
large drops of summery rain fall on me, but no shower arrives. On this walk, I pass a
building so curious, I have to cross the road to look at it. On the
southernmost corner of
Jokai Mor street and Ilona street, the facade of a one-storey building on Jokai Mor has some
strange grey pillars in bas relief that look strangely Aztec, like squared-off human figures holding
up the roof. The flat stone or plaster pillars are only two inches proud of the render at most, and
as I go close and see how much of it has crumbled away, I realise it is all polystyrene,
painted a quite convincing dull grey, glued to the flat surface of the cottage, and very persuasive
because battered & aged. Most odd. About an hour and a half later, in the leafier area of the 16th
district, I see a boy of about fifteen in a black tee-shirt and black shorts on the rather suburban
Erkel street practising on a matt
black Segway.
He silently rolls the stand-up scooter thing around, doing three-point turns, and slow figures of
eight under the trees in the middle of his empty road.
May 12th;
Lunch with Martin. Evening lesson with Olga. Take my Apple Mac in to see
the strudels,
now that the second hard drive is dying and the keyboard gives me electric shocks.
Ever since I shouted at him in the autumn, the maintenance strudel has looked at
me like a loyal dog I once kicked who still loves me and is still prepared to forgive me.
May 11th;
Hot sticky bus journey out to meet the
transparent
plastic people, who decide to go home half
an hour early, ten minutes before I find their address. Drink in evening with Agnes.
Use blowtorch on first run of earrings. Partial success.
May 6th;
Martin lends me a blowtorch. At lunch we discuss sailing,
Sartre,
& 'She
Came to Stay'.
May 5th;
In morning finish Jeremy 2's copy of the 1916 novel
'Greenmantle'
by what
some critics point out
was not such a jingoistic John Buchan as we remember. This
strikes me too. Buchan repeatedly refers to enemies with
respect, occasionally even admiration. In one oddly convincing moment the hero is
disguised as a German official and, having forgotten his own real identity
to an extent, becomes indignant at the attempt of a
Turk to involve him in a crooked deal. This is though England's enemy Germany
would be the one losing the funds. He actually gets himself into trouble by
refusing to connive in the mishandling of German munitions. Behind Buchan's
dated slang, the caricatures are actually quite fair-minded. He often
says things like "I must say I took a fancy
to the Turkish fighting man : I remembered the testimonial our fellows
gave him as a clean fighter, and I felt very bitter that Germany should
have lugged him into this dirty business." Yet, far
from depicting the Teutons in their turn as thoroughly evil, his
arch-enemy, Stumm, is 'impressive', and Hannay, the hero, praises
Stumm's unabashedly patriotic belief in the greatness of Germany. Perhaps the most
curious aspect of the book is the awkwardness Hannay admits to feeling
with women {as against the way he comments on his male friends' lean
physiques, soft eyes, and open faces in a way that for modern readers
verges on the homoerotic}. A villainous woman is referred to with awe as
demonically powerful, attractive, and brilliant.
When he finally meets this terrifying femme fatale, he's taken by surprise
and must accept a lift in her limousine to her house. "Women
had never come much my way, and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew
about the Chinese language. All my life I had lived with men only, and rather
a rough crowd at that. .... I had never been in a motor car with a lady before,
and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank. The soft cushions and the subtle
scents filled me with acute uneasiness. .... This slim woman, poised exquisitely
like some statue between the pillared lights, with her fair cloud of hair, and
her pale bright eyes, had the glamour of a wild dream. I hated her instinctively,
hated her intensely, but I longed to arouse her interest."
Fascinating
as a sample of its time, and for surprisingly acute insights into Islam, Germany,
and, through the American character, the United States. More than that, we're now
in another world crisis where one or two semi-mythical prophet characters - like the
mysterious 'Greenmantle' - have been reviving militant Islam. Buchan's
broad-brushstroke generalisations about national character and culture now look
more perceptive and less comical than they did for most of the 90 years
between then and now.
Sunny afternoon. Trek out to the 20th district see
these
people, who prove to be
complete dolts. I phone ahead, then get there at 3pm {closing hour 4pm} to find
the front door of their house locked. I buzz, and am reluctantly allowed into a
dusty front room with tired-looking 1970s sofas, frilly 1950s net curtains
halfway down the windows {it's a corner house facing onto two pavements -
why not curtain the whole of each window?}, scraps of samples scattered over
furniture and floor, and a general air of tragic failure.
A girl with quite an attractive body lets me in, glaring. Her face wears
an expression of Neanderthal suspicion. She is being bothered in her cave
yet again by an interfering customer. I ask about transparent sheeting, she
shows me one. I ask about sheeting that is transparent & blue and she shows me the
blue opaque sheeting, almost immediately seething with rage that yet
another person has to ask her a hard question. Why can't I just give her
my money and bugger off? Why must her life always be so d-i-f-f-i-c-u-l-t? I say I
am hoping to find sheeting that is both transparent & blue, and she angrily
points to the opaque blue and the colourless transparent in rapid succession, her
mouth actually hanging open at this point, her bovine face twisted with pain at
my sheer unreasonableness. I ask if the transparent sheet comes any
thicker? She mutters that this is number 6, and they have number 8. Unable to bear
me any longer she lopes out of the sun-drenched room, still filled with the spirit of
some old person now dead. A small, youngish, pear-shaped man appears bearing a swatch
of plastic films, proffering the number 8. He repeats they have nothing that is
see-through and blue, and does not suggest they could try to get any for me. I ask
what glues stick this stuff together, and the two of them laugh bitterly at my
stupidity, explaining that only a plastic welding machine can bond sheets of this
material together. I ask about the price of the tools for doing that, and he gloats
triumphantly as he tells me the equipment costs hundreds of thousands of euros.
Idiot customer may leave now.
May 4th;
Meet Mary for cappuccino, chat about editing, literacy, & children. Finish
'Alchemy
& Alchemists' by Sean Martin, a snappy little
history of the subject and some of the colourful characters
drawn to it. Includes a mention of Ibn al Haytam, the first writer to describe
the camera obscura, and speculates that he and - much later - da Vinci made
early photographs fixed with egg whites. Martin repeats the interesting suggestion
that the Turin Shroud is an egg-fixed photographic image made by da Vinci. Nice
account of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, adding that they were
"reported to have been seen" at the Paris
Opera in 1761, supposedly aged around 400 at that point, having completed the Great
Work at "around noon on Friday 17th January, 1382".
How do you recognise someone like that? «I've just seen a couple who look the
spitting image of a 350-year-old engraving I once glanced at in a book of made-up
stuff» ? Yep, must be them.
May 3rd;
Swim & sunbathe at
pool on island with Magdolna.
May 2nd;
Where am I going to borrow a blow torch from? The cutely named Hess is More
with 'Yes Boss'.
Germanic? Involves model trains.
May 1st;
Two bits of music with videos 40 years apart, both in monochrome or almost,
both by geezers on the up, and both using the slightly macabre
trick of wall-mounting girls' heads like hunting trophies:
The Animals;
The Audio Bullies.