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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 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 25th;
Astonishing piece of old Serbian typography.
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 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 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 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 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 13th;
Dinner party at Martin's. I show him the cribbage board.
Music
in street below his window.
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 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 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 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 3rd;
A few more shoots in my miniature herb garden. I order more
seeds.
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.
Who can translate the next 300 words into
Korean or
Hindi?
Contact
me and there will be revelry.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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?
But these five thousand languages may
also hold clues to the
structure of the human mind. Subtle
differences and similarities
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.
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 /
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....................................................................................................................................
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
g
o
r
g
e
o
u
s
n
e
s
s
at ffffound.com still. Latest seeds camomile & chrysanthemum.
May 28th;
Pick John up from airport, briefly meet his friends. Spending more time on
f
f
f
f
o
u
n
d.
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 24th;
Adjusting to heat, seemingly. I usually adore it - perhaps because it came late this year,
and suddenly. Sleeping a lot.
Vivid dreams.
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 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 18th;
2 Roffers reach town, on their
romantic train ride to The East.
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.
May 14th;
More work in silver, more work on book.
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 10th;
Swim & sunbathe at
pool on island with Magdolna.
May 8th;
2nd established author joins
book.
May 6th;
Martin lends me a blowtorch. At lunch we discuss sailing,
Sartre,
& 'She
Came to Stay'.
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 2nd;
Where am I going to borrow a blow torch from? The cutely named Hess is More
with 'Yes Boss'.
Germanic? Involves model trains.
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