2013
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December 31st; Tuesday. Soon to be another even-numbered year. Just after noon I eat again for first time since Sunday evening, feeling much fresher for a short sharp fast. Robin & I drive to Cserkeszolo in brief winter sun. I stick up another poster advert on another of the public noticeboards each village round here has: rather student-common-room but really very useful. Out along the exit road, the man who sold Robin a Christmas tree a week ago has one last net bag of fine potatoes. We enter one of the outhouses in his cluttered but entrepreneurial little garden so we can look at it. They seem mildly surprised we turn down a seasonal drink with them indoors. Carry the potatoes over and around small stacks of bricks, flower pots, sacks of cement powder, and pass a genial customer being handed bags of vegetables by the vendor's wife through the back kitchen window.
Too-neat-to-be-true radio-telescope news. The claim is that 47-year-old television broadcasts from earth - including lost early episodes of Dr Who - are being picked up by astronomers in Puerto Rico. Presumably bouncing off something 23 and a half light years away. If it's true. Oh yes - note date.
December 30th; Monday. No food, coffee or alcohol today, only water. Robin & I drive to nearby market town Kunszentmarton to do some shopping. The sky is cloudy, there is a mild chill in the air. Two men in the butcher's greet Robin with gentle courtesy and a discussion about meat ensues. We find airtight jars to store tallow. I locate an outdoor noticeboard and put up two adverts. Down a side street, we find a kind, sleepy-mannered man with a thick head of white hair stained nicotine yellow who ushers us into his garage. He has a work bench with an always-on soldering iron and a huge widescreen TV almost bigger than the bench showing American daytime crypto-porn soap-opera dubbed into Hungarian. This is the kind of television drama where every single character is slim, 20, and has a vaguely bogus dancing/acting/singing career making it seemingly reasonable for them to strip down to lingerie every 3 minutes. As Robin & I try to keep our eyes from straying towards the trim, pert bodies almost life-size on the giant screen, our man quietly probes my Apple-branded step-down transformer with his multi-meter, chats away cheerfully in Hungarian about people he knows from the next village who have found work in New Zealand or Australia, and repeatedly solders and tests how my recharge cable is behaving. Murmuring holiday wishes, he lets us go with the transformer mended at a very reasonable price indeed, and we drive out of Kunszentmarton at dusk, crossing the tiny single-lane girder bridge heading straight into a molten pool of gold on the dusty horizon. Back at the house I go to sleep in the studio around 4pm.

December 29th; Sunday. Having inadvertently snapped the recharge cable for my laptop, today is an internet holiday, and I roll most of the post-suet pastry from Christmas Eve Eve into an apple & quince tart, while Zsuzsi makes mince pies out of different, sweeter dough. I occasionally pop outdoors to tend to The Stove of Fat. Throughout night, feel somehow ill - probably the sour cabbage compounded with eating raw pastry dough as I rolled it. Miss quite a lot of sleep.
December 28th; Saturday. The drive down to visit Balla, Robin's artist friend who lives just outside Csongrad. We set out late, certain that the bridge we have to use to cross the Tisza river is operating, only to find the bridge has been dismantled again and the car ferry is already approaching the far bank as we reach the riverside around quarter past noon. A lean winter sun casts sharp shadows and surprisingly soft warm winds blow through the trees behind us. I shout across the river to ask the time for the next ferry crossing and the ferry men unenthusiastically shout back "One o'clock" (forty five minutes into the future). We realise neither of us has Balla's phone number, so Robin phones back to the house to get young Bela Grant to open my laptop and contact him with our apologies through my Facebook account. From what he said yesterday, Balla must be getting the lunch he's cooked for all of us - wild rabbit - out of his stove around now. Behind us in the woods a small queue (three cars, two motorbikes, and a woman with a bicycle) slowly accumulates and then patiently waits for 1pm to approach. A small puzzled-looking black dog trots up and down canvassing the motorists for a new owner, quite possibly having been abandoned near there as an unwanted Christmas gift. We all only just fit onto the craft, one of the Michelin-Man-shaped ferry workers in blue overalls insisting that I must step out of the car for the duration of the crossing while Robin stays at the wheel. Neither of us can be bothered to ask the reason for this arbitrary rule, probably some obscure Habsburg regulation lost in the misty history of marine insurance. The ferry is in fact a small raft clipped by three wires to a rust-browned cable that hangs the breadth of the river. The ferry raft is shunted by a little tug. Robin is ecstatic as we chug across seeing both ways up and down the sunlit Tisza through the gap left by the dismantled central section of bridge, the raft's cable runners making modest squeaking and scraping noises. Our slow little journey across of six or seven minutes is liberating, like a kind of renewal. All my concern and irritation at having kept Balla waiting evaporates. We reach his house ten minutes later and all is calm. He shows Robin & me his new paper-making machinery, to be assembled in April, as well as his big kiln, capable of firing clay or glass. He has been busy as always, and has been working with rubber latex moulds to contour the surfaces of some of his thick congealed abstract paintings. On one of these in the main room of his house he's moulded something into the surface of his paint. At the bottom of a howling night-time storm of wild dark blues a deep aura of rippling wavelets encloses a tiny silhouette of a seated bodhisattva. I hadn't previously absorbed or remembered that Balla follows a quite disciplined Tibetan Buddhist practice - perhaps what keeps him sane out here in this empty corner of the already fairly empty Great Plain. After about half an hour of drinks and looking around, a friend of his from Budapest, interior designer Renata, arrives, and the tasty rabbit is now ready to take out of the oven. Another thing I had not heard or recalled was that slightly over a decade ago when Robin was looking for a house, both painters, not yet knowing each other, considered buying the other house. Robin looked over the house Balla later bought and Balla thought about buying the house in Inoka that Robin ended up purchasing.

December 27th; Friday. Continue battle with The Stove of Fat. Two svelte lady guests, Timea & Orsi, drop by to admire Robin's studio and Christmas tree.
December 26th; Boxing Day, a Thursday. By chance we unwrap the presents only today (not Christmas Eve as usual in Hungary), unwittingly reviving a tradition. I finish off the last of the nougat sweets Attila gave me in the adorable gold ingot box.

December 25th; Christmas Day. I finish 'The File on the Tsar', a mid-1970s book that convincingly debunks the official account that the Bolsheviks shot all their Russian royal hostages dead in Ekaterinburg in the summer of 1918. Summers & Mangold tentatively conclude that Tsar Nicholas II was executed there and then, but that the women of the family were moved to the town of Perm for several more months to use as bargaining counters with Germany or perhaps the Whites in the Red/White civil war, then vanished. In Perm the trail of carefully weighed-up evidence dries up: all the women might have been killed there, some might have escaped. One chapter discusses the alleged 'Anastasia' or Anna Anderson. She was a seemingly unwilling claimant to be one of the Tsar's daughters who surfaced in Germany in 1920 and was put in several mental hospitals, her identity attacked over subsequent decades by many of Europe's royal families (but recognised as legitimate by several royals and other people who knew the Tsar's family when they met her). The book persuasively dismantles the still widely believed story that the whole immediate Romanov family was murdered on one day.
Almost all of us watch on the television in the sitting room 'In Time', a surprisingly Marxist Hollywood sci-fi flick from 2011 about a future world in which eternally young elite members rich in time are rich solely because an underclass is poor in time. As in Marx's conception of a fixed amount of capital, the poor in this Logan's Rerun are locked into a zero-sum game. They eke out their existence in a state of constant desperation, often with only hours of allowed life on their personal clock at any one time. A very American way of discussing disparity since it replaces the ugliness of ageing and poverty with a world of 25-year-olds who all look good, whether rich or poor. A clumsy pass at a genuine social problem (perpetual youth for the rich) soon to arrive. Not much thought's gone on this since Wyndham's 'Trouble With Lichen'.
Plus: a rhythm-driven track that at least earns its keep.
December 24th; Tuesday. What one Lutheran landlord of mine in the 1990s called 'The Holy Night'. Robin & young Bela Grant help me render the perishable suet into longer-lasting tallow in the afternoon. Bela & I get the small rusty wood stove burning outside next to the summer kitchen. After an initial hour of me getting a bit kippered in thick white smoke, Robin & Bela capably improvise a chimney so I can carry on chopping the chilled white chunks of fat from the two sheep into small flakes on a work board while cutting out stringy bits of connective tissue and tossing them to the sheepdogs that worried the ewes to death in the first place. I've almost finished chopping the first sheep's suet by the time an extraordinary sky-wide sunset turns the horizon of fields turquoise, lilac, salmon pink, and finally ink blue. We do this outdoors because the smell (both of the fresh suet, and especially the suet being rendered over the hot stove) is fairly vile. The air chills but the stove grows hotter to compensate. As if reacting instinctively to the mediaeval scene the shaggy white sheepdogs curl up nearby, one dozing between my legs while I chop. Easy to imagine some kind of canine race-memory of a smoky Benedictine kitchen in the time of the Norsemen, or something like the dark labyrinthine castle in the opening pages of the Gormenghast trilogy. During some periods chopping and stirring alone, Zsuzsi sends out fruit and biscuits from the house. Robin does lots of stirring, and around midnight I have a hot bath and change of clothes, enjoying the luxury of washing the smoke and suet smell out of my hair, trousers, pullover, shirt.

December 23rd; Monday. Chop and mix some of the suet (hardened fat from inside the bodies of the two dead ewes) into pastry dough. I slightly oversalt, but blend enough extra flour and water into the mix to bring it back. At one moment just after dusk, I am sitting under a lamp reading, while radio choral music lightly wafts from the kitchen behind me, the quiet sound of muffled machine-gun fire follows Bela's killing spree through some video game in the next room to my left, and quite loud snoring of a white sheepdog comes through the window to my right.
December 22nd; Sunday. I finish my copy of Hinduism by K.M. Sen, presumably no relation of the Nobel-prize-winning economist. This is a slim book which proceeds briskly through the main ideas and traditions of India's oldest major religion, importantly - at least for me - clarifying the distinctions between the Upanishads and the Vedic scriptures. Hinduism outside India (for example in Cambodia, Burma, or Indonesia) gets a separate chapter, as does the egalitarian Baul cult, the philosophical schools, Bhakti devotion, and some other topics. The tone is cool and mildly dispassionate. Faint tinges of donnish humour, as on page 82: "And there are of course those, including some from Europe, who have been attracted by its [Yoga's] promise of prompt development of supernatural powers, a promise that, surprisingly, seems to have just as much appeal in this age as in any previous period in history." The shadow of a gently regretful smile.

December 21st; Saturday is the shortest day of 2013. Robin most of the day is out in the former ping-pong room next to the stables working alongside a man from the village to slaughter and gut two of his eight sheep. In fact, harassment and ankle-biting by the sheepdogs has cost him not two, but six, sheep, since it turns out both ewes were pregnant with twins.
December 20th; Friday. A quiet day in The Village with young Bela Grant, bracingly chilly weather, and slightly overexcited sheep dogs that discovered last week how much fun it is to worry Robin's pregnant ewes. Exciting news developments from the outside world include: Cows with holes cut in their stomachs, complaints about tattoos, and what kinds of portrait photos make people get in touch.

December 19th; Thursday. After dark Robin, Zsuzsi, and Bela appear after their mid-evening skate in the City Park and we drive together to the countryside through light mist. Famous minimum-wage-campaigning newspaper The Guardian discovers the joy of paying zero wages.
December 18th; Wednesday. Changes to the office-block-in-progress. For a couple of months it's been a five-storey shell with empty window holes, looking appropriately enough a bit like a prison. Then a strange wooden stage was built about ten feet out of one third-storey window, like a fat gangplank. That stayed there for a few weeks, then moved to another position on the fifth floor. Now it's moved again and from one week to the next wooden-plank walkways have appeared outside every floor the width of the building, all covered by green netting.

December 17th; Tuesday. Research finds mothers' bodies give different milk to their babies depending on whether they're boys or girls. Sexists!
December 16th; Monday. Back in town in time to teach Rheumatology Kata. She giggles quite fetchingly when I ask her how I can lengthen my telomeres.

December 15th; Sunday. Extraordinary day on the Great Plain. I actually tick off every chore on my list. All of them. Already a keen young student of the avant-garde, young Bela shows me this video.
December 14th; Saturday. Take the train to Robin's in the country. Article patronisingly titles itself 'Clearing Up Misconceptions About...' uploading minds into machines. Nice how smugly the writer pinpoints others' unwarranted assumptions, himself failing to notice the single biggest snag with mind transfer.

December 13th; Friday. New Age Travellers go full-on Gypsy.
December 12th; Thursday. Finish Robin's or perhaps his friend Mike's copy of 'A Short History of the Russian Revolution' by Joel Carmichael. A day-by-day account of events through 1917, the book leans a little heavily on long extracts from a book by an eyewitness participant, Sukhanov, who is quoted perhaps 20 times. Nonetheless, the account is very lucid and careful. Carmichael stresses the decisive role of the Saint Petersburg working classes, quoting Lenin as saying they were ten times to the left of even the Bolsheviks. Carmichael credits the masses of Saint Petersburg for being the real force behind the various revolutions up to and including the seal of the revolutions - the Bolshevik seizure of power, after which no-one else got a chance to rule Russia for 70 years.
Two things come out clearly - Lenin's gut instincts that ending war with Germany and a land settlement favourable to the peasants were the two vital things that had to be promised to win power, and Lenin's shrewd sense of exactly when the Bolsheviks had to push for an insurrection, July being too early, and October almost being too late but giving the only real window to try for a takeover. Carmichael doesn't mention that the Bolsheviks, despite their name {Majoritists}, were actually the minority group, finally overtaking the until-then-much-larger Mensheviks {Minoritists} in size as late as August 1917. Nor does he mention how this split was engineered several years earlier by Lenin astutely calling a meeting of their magazine editorial team at short notice but not inviting many of his opponents within the party, the Mensheviks-to-be, thereby ensuring that his smaller group could give themselves the name of Majority from that vote and that day on. Lenin's improvisation, ruthlessness, and sense for how and when to consolidate, build up to, and finally seize the state, have doubtless gripped the imaginations of power-hungry left-wing schoolboys ever since. Reading this book, it is fascinating to see how mesmerised everyone except Lenin was by Marx's crank theory, dogmatically assuming they could not attempt a putsch because there had to be a bourgeois revolution first. The idea that Marx comprehensively misunderstood economics, politics, and history seems to have occurred to no-one. Not even after Russia was plunged into a new war under Lenin and promises to the peasants were broken under Stalin - completely reversing within ten years the only two ideas that gave the Bolsheviks their unique selling proposition (Peace and Land) to hijack the Russian revolution in the first place. Every time I review the 1917 Bolshevik victory, I'm left with a sense of Lenin's breathtakingly unembarrassed opportunism: the sense that if the crowds had wanted war and collectivisation of land (the two things they soon got) or indeed any other mass desires, Lenin would have passionately promised them those instead. As Machiavelli says: whatever it takes.

December 11th; Wednesday. In the supermarket in the basement of the indoor shopping centre, I notice for the first time that the floor tiles in the shampoo/toothpaste/soap section are high-gloss sheen and set at 45 degrees to the tile grid of the rest of the supermarket. This is to give that section the feel of a pharmacy, where shininess is de rigeur for the "scientific/medical" pharmacy look. (There is another model in Hungary - the historical pharmacy, where there are lots of little wooden cabinets, 1890s-style shopfronts, and quaint lettering.) In every other respect the floor tiles are the identical size and off-white colour as the semi-gloss flooring in the rest of the shop. Operatic Zita shows me the lightbulb in the bathroom that came back on after five years not working, and the clock in the kitchen area we discussed last week that is an hour out for half of each year because it is too high up the wall to change. Yesterday the lightbulb came back on, and also yesterday the clock on the wall stopped. It stopped for an hour, exactly the right amount of time (give about three minutes) needed to reset it to the right time for winter, and then came back on. As I munch on her delicious coconut flakes, we both ponder what this mysterious omen augurs.
And here, that rarest of things: good writing on the internet. Someone has looked closely at those print adverts for Philippe Patek watches, the mechanical kind that the Dalai Llama is allowed to mend himself. The enigma is who will be murdered.
December 10th; Tuesday. An article which says the obvious, finally. Creativity is not only disregarded in the real world - it's hated. Despite decades of management articles and books yakking about how valuable it is. Ignore the bogus happy ending, which says creative people benefit (Ha!) from how deeply everyone else resents us. Just celebrate truth being told.

December 9th; Monday. Read a novel I got for 300 forints at a surprisingly good 2nd-hand bookshop near the school last week while triumphantly returning their long-overborrowed copy of 'Godel, Escher, Bach'. 'The Green Man', by Kingsley Amis, is a novel about a misanthropic publican in the Home Counties at the end of the 1960s. His centuries-old tavern is called 'The Green Man', and the story is a comedy about sex, ghosts, and spiritual redemption - ambitious stuff. The main thing that strikes me is how much better a writer he is/was than his son, how much less laboured and less false his literary devices, dialogue, characters are than Martin's. Laughed out loud in several places.
December 8th; Sunday. Read a book borrowed from Jacqueline 'Encounters With Nationalism', a set of essays by Ernest Gellner published together in the mid-1990s. These all revolve around nationalism, but far from relentlessly evangelising Gellner's own superior theory (that nationalism is a correlate of industrialism, where a newly-general-purpose labour force needs the former tools of High Culture, thus literacy, thus a national language, thus a sovereign state to secure that language's status) he spends much of the time discussing the books and theories of others. His insights are stimulating, and his wit is quick but not too flashily on show. Occasional clever parallels (that Turkish Kemalists are like successful Decembrists, that Sartre's cultural imperialism could be called The Left Bank's Burden, that 1620's Battle of White Mountain was a kind of mirror Battle of the Boyne where the Catholic side won) are not raised above the level of offhand jokes in the way that shallower thinkers celebrate every adroit remark they make. There is a very interesting chapter on Czech political change, a sensitive review of memoirs by Soviet physicist, patriot, and dissident Andrei Sakharov, a review on Turkish politics, and a thoughtful analysis of a book by Roman Szporluk. This last, the first essay in the book, Gellner sums up as arguing that Friedrich List was right and Karl Marx was wrong. Apparently Szporluk goes as far as to say that Marx's Communist Manifesto in the 1840s was, without admitting it, a conscious rebuttal of List's ideas on national development. Very interesting compilation, finished all too quick.

December 7th; Saturday. Finished the slightly quaint mid-50s reprint of the 1940s book 'Hypnotism' by G.H. Estabrooks. Some earnest reassurances to the concerned reader to the effect that (the USA's) police forces fully understand the criminal uses of hypnotism. The writer gives nothing direct away, but creating a split personality in the hypnotic subject is recommended during 2 or 3 casually dropped-in discussions of how hypnosis for covert military uses might hypothetically work. A few good anecdotes, and a great deal on that period's new scientific spirit in psychology. A hardback, this volume's yellow rough-cut pages have the attractive Old Book Aroma that supposedly shares notes with vanilla.
December 6th; Friday. First time I find an Adam Curtis film in text form. Notice how short it is, and how - once set out in writing - we can much more easily see how tenuous & convoluted his reasoning is. He loosely links 1960s newspaper reporting (a long anecdote on Doris Day), circa-1900 investigative journalism (interestingly, that pioneering three-article magazine he praises shares the aims of our imprint), and phone hacking by Murdoch's tabloid writers a couple of years ago. The whole thing is a very persuasive piece of insinuation, its topics repeatedly linked together by insistent soft suggestion. Too subtle to say it out loud, Curtis seems to appeal for a return to Marxism as the overarching explanation for history. Further, I might be wrong, but I sense a muted undernote of distaste in the Murdoch phone-hacking-hacks section that private firms dare trespass on the natural prerogative of the state and only the state to spy on people.

December 5th; Thursday. A composer working between jazz and classical with wonderful notation. I'm afraid for my money his musical notation is far prettier than the actual music. Witty tourism ad campaign makes good use of British xenophobia about Romanian migrant workers. More on the vexed question of whether parasites living inside cats & mice manipulate the minds of millions of people. Remote-controlled robot finds strange black slime on the inside walls of the still-dangerous Chernobyl reactor and IT IS ALIVE.
December 4th; Wednesday. Someone with an oddly compelling voice reads out a lecture Rudolf Steiner gave in late 1908 about Egypt & his esoteric ideas to a nicely-done slideshow. Curious how matter-of-fact mentions of Atlantis are, and the rather overconfident division of history into broad, grand epochs. For anyone who can see past everything that dates the material to before the Great War, there is still a lot here. Notice the occasional sound of a turning page.

December 3rd; Tuesday. Say goodbye to Robin, and catch a midday train back from Lakitelek. I sit not in the overheated inner space where the locals sweat in their heavy coats, but in the cooler antechamber at one end of the carriage: a space hosting the train doors, 5 or 6 empty seats, and the cupboard with the guards' dials and buttons. The cupboard doors keep swinging open, so I use some sticky tape to hold them closed. From the windows I see two crisp-edged shadows - one of my carriage, and one of the carriage in front - racing across the long grass beside the track on my right. Between the carriage shadows, a slit of acid sunshine flickers weirdly through the weeds like a blade of light from the low winter sun. The scrubby wild flowers' sun-caught outlines on the dark right side of the track spring up out of the shadow of the carriage in front and vanish a quarter of a second later into the shadow of my carriage. The effect is pale yellow line sketches of clumps of tall reeds being continually scribbled and erased in the shade cast by the moving train every second we trundle towards the market town of Kecskemet.
December 2nd; Monday. Read Tarot for Gio from Rio.

December 1st; Sunday. Grey clouds over Great Plain.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com