2015
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May 31st; Sunday. Put seeds into eight miniature pots. Early-1970s Japanese funk.
May 30th; Saturday. Erudite Kerrie shows me a fine Louis MacNiece poem about Heraclitus in the 1930s sitting room. It starts:
- Even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling,
   Nor only in terms of physics; the pictures
Bob on each picture rail like floats on a line
   While the books on the shelves keep reeling...
Meanwhile, here is a short list of Twitter accounts that follow you (or at least me), and then unfollow a few days later once you refollow them. Cunning wheeze! 1; 2; 3; 4; 5; 6; 7; 8; 9; 10; 11; 12; 13; 14; 15; 16; 17; 18; 19; 20.

May 29th; Friday. Finish a book borrowed from Robin, called 'Soil, Soul, Society' by Satish Kumar. A gorgeously produced hardback, with picture pages of russet-brown on black starting each chapter, and page numbers in the same brown, this has a message so wholesome and good-hearted it seems dreadful to quibble with it. Mr Kumar is clearly a delightful & thoughtful man, admiring Gandhi & Tagore, setting up an ecologically-minded school for children in the south of England, working with and becoming a friend of small-is-beautiful 1970s economist-de-jour E.F. Schumacher, and spending many years editing an ecology magazine, also in Britain. Aside from the more powerful lines quoted from Tagore, the book is rich with Kumar's own slightly bland aphorisms and small earnest verses about mother earth, opening our hearts to others, learning with our hands not only our minds. Hard not to agree with almost all of it in separate pieces. Except that his overarching deep green worldview is full of mistakes, carried over wholesale from the 1970s. Despite his manifest gentleness, this is a perspective still uncritically in the shadow of the 1973 oil crisis, which regards western science and free trade as curses when in fact it is they that have lifted and are still lifting the world's poor out of misery. Kumar thinks minerals are running out when in fact they aren't (no mention of the failure of any of 1970s prophet-of-doom Paul Ehrlich's predictions to come true in the ten-year wager he lost against economist Julian Simon, although the echoes of Ehrlich sound throughout this book - Ehrlich originally said "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000"). Kumar thinks the number of starving is rocketing when in fact it is shrinking. Population globally is set to top out at around 11 or 12 billion. This is precisely because India & China abandoning socialism in the 1980s increased prosperity, reduced starvation and infant mortality, thereby reduced family sizes. It was this that put the brakes on previously accelerating world population growth. Around page 96 Kumar cheers on Tagore's championing of both India's rural poor and independence from Britain without quite conceding that the forces of progress and freedom in India were largely British, however irritating it might have been to admit that then or now. Elsewhere there is an odd moment where he condemns the west for developing nuclear weapons, then half a page later condemns the west for failing to share nuclear weapons with India, seemingly failing to see any contradiction. Much of this is a kind of revived, hippie-spiritualised William Morris, and nothing wrong with that. I only wish more people took Morris as seriously as this author does. Kumar's idea pursued through several pages of children in schools learning to grow and cook their own food together with teachers is particularly appealing & sensible. However - although we definitely need a revived spiritual sense - his grand vision, his big picture is wrong, and this book is above all else an attempt at a big picture. He likens his trinity of "soil, soul, society" to an improved version of the French Revolution's "liberte, egalite, fraternite" or the American War of Independence slogan of "life, liberty, pursuit of happiness", clearly unaware of the damage both events wrought, or how implicated both revolutions were & are in the things he dislikes (quite rightly) in the modern world. Of course, certain commodities, such as deep-sea fisheries, are being squandered, and widespread inflation clouds attempts to accurately chart scarcity of various resources. But the basic view reiterated with his approving quotation of Gandhi several times that there is not enough for everyone unless we all cut down is not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. It's exactly this grim puritanical pessimism that condemned billions to poverty for decades and at the same time pushed those poor into having the biggest families they could. I'm absolutely with Kumar in his championing of the multiplicity of life: if only he could embrace the multiplicity of life, growth, and human creativity himself.
May 28th; Thursday. Obtain some coriander seed.

May 27th; Wednesday. Latest radio show #331 from Saint Petersburg DJ Waks.
May 26th; Tuesday. Typical music academy scene.

May 25th; Whit Monday. Work all day.
May 24th; Whit Sunday. / Forbes Magazine says new NASA data show polar ice caps aren't receding at all. // Delightfully dotty advice to learn 2 languages at once. /// One of our contributors, Niall Ferguson, discusses how Paul Krugman discusses deficits.

May 23rd; Saturday. Sometimes hot & sunny, then sometimes rains all day: like a minor upgrade on Britain. Working all day on a translation. Seen last few days (perhaps via Elaine) a handy guide to how women fall in love.
May 22nd; Friday. Finish a borrowed copy of a very abridged 100-page pocketbook version of Walter Scott's 'Ivanhoe' intended for foreign learners of English. Nifty little drawings to illustrate terms like 'feather', 'arrow', or 'ladder' seemed odd at first, but I soon got used to them. When someone (Britt-Katrin Keson, to be exact) is cutting the use of big-vocabulary words right to the bone, it's quite hard to keep track of the characters or even follow the plot in places, but I did find myself getting caught up in the story a couple of times. Should be interesting to compare with the real book when I get the chance. A rich tale of derring-do full of touchingly earnest statements of loyalty & allegiance. Scott's attempt to distinguish between those people who are nasty to the old Jew & his beautiful daughter from York (the setting is late 12th-century England, around the time of the Clifford Tower incident), and those who show a sense of decency towards them is interesting. Some of the reconciliation and let's-sort-this-all-out scenes have more than a touch of Famous Five or Scooby Doo in the mood.

May 21st; Thursday. A Scots diarist tracks how Scots government deficits per head compare to rUK (England + Wales + Northern Ireland) per head: a handy chart, and the whole article. For something completely different, here are some people in Germany recording a strange sound they can hear outdoors.
May 20th; Wednesday. Hot on the heels of learning that traces of their children's DNA and their male lovers' DNA often stay within a woman's body, we have this: more evidence that the Weissman sex-cell barrier sometimes gets crossed.

May 19th; Tuesday. Two days ago read a copy of 'The Skin' by French author Albert Barille in the 'How My Body Works' series, kindly lent to me by Lorinc. Barille has a number of characters (The Professor, Globus, Captain Courageous {chief of the white corpuscles}, Ace, Corpo et al) who appear on various pages moving through vastly magnified landscapes of human tissue. For example, "Captain Courageous and Ace are on patrol through the dermis. They're making sure that the Meissner's corpuscles are working properly: are they transmitting all the messages from the skin to the brain?" They're doing this 'making sure' in two hovering bubble-shaped craft floating through a luridly coloured array of yellow, orange, and brown nerve cells. A bit like Inspecteurs de Finance perhaps, cruising through the tangled networks of French commerce casting a beady eye on the details. I was hoping for a tad more information, even given that this is a 23-year-old 28-page picture book for children. Always been curious what children get from these books - I remember reading some a bit like this at that age, and feeling a thrill at the pictures and the knowledge, as well as wondering why they couldn't say just a bit more. A small blue-inked rubber stamp in the front, marked 'Laura' between two lines of blue hearts, suggests Lorinc might have got this a few years ago from another of my students, since they both live on the same street.
May 18th; Monday. Budapest is hot now. A man in the US is tackling homelessness by - wait for it - giving homeless people homes.

May 17th; Sunday. Rather sweet story of a creative classified ad that lasted decades.
May 16th; Saturday. Paul reminds me of a ditty I'd long forgotten: bishop/poet Richard Corbet's farewell to lost Catholic England + pagan vibe. Did 'Old Religion' have 2 meanings here? Probably not, but perhaps fairies were traded in for a Faerie Queen.
Stanza 4 goes:
- Witness those rings and roundelays
   Of theirs, which yet remain,
Were footed in Queen Mary's days
   On many a grassy plain;
But since of late, Elizabeth,
   And later, James came in,
They never danced on any heath
   As when the time hath been.

May 15th; Friday. Latest Lady Waks radio show, #329, a bit mellower than usual.
May 14th; Thursday. I've started using the silly-name duckduckgo search engine. Bow tie a nice touch.

May 13th; Wednesday. Since I obtained some milk thistle and am taking it, I can now tell people I'm "on a liver detox".
May 12th; Tuesday. We drive into town, though when I get home it emerges that software-project-manager Akos is working late again at the office and cannot come to his lesson. The last two Tuesdays we talked about home improvements: he revealed last week that doing work on one house he'd discovered that in most older Hungarian apartment floors the wooden parquet blocks sit on a trellis of wooden strips themselves lying on a two or three-inch-deep bed of slag or cinder granules. He's been living with his girlfriend for several years but 2 weeks ago confirmed they aren't married. "Do you own a lawnmower?" I was suddenly inspired to ask him. He admitted yes, I retorted that in that case he's clearly married, and we laughed.

May 11th; Monday. Go for brief walk outdoors with Zsuzsanna as the wobbling globe of orange sun subsides towards the flat horizon. She gets at least 8 or 9 ticks on her shoes after we walk through long grass, but it seems none want me. I feel undesired. Then we visit Solero her horse in the stables which has swallows flying in and out, wheeling round the chestnut stallion's head, whisking past the ceiling lamp switched on now that dusk is deepening outside. Solero is busy eating hay, but tolerates the two of us joining him in his fence-boarded enclosure. A rough licking sensation of something tasting my elbow alerts me to the presence of two large calves in the next pen, roughly halfway to full cow size. I am introduced to Camilla & Daisy, both of whom are covered in soft white fluffy fur and have expressions which are bovine but still mildly curious. I turn my back on them to have a closer look at the horse (noticing for the first time he was branded with the two digits 10 near the base of the right side of his neck, perceptible as a faintly higher surface, the 1 and 0 digit each about 2 inches from top to bottom). As I stroke the embossed number, a quite loud splashing sound like a water tap's been turned on comes from behind me. "That's right, Camilla, piss in your sister's face," mutters Zsuzsi.
An hour later, another beautiful evening meal. At Robin's instigation, we all have scarves tied over our eyes during the meal so we can experience what near-blind Gio from Rio has to go through. Interestingly, some people become uneasy after a few minutes of seeing only blackness, while others become calmer (Gio & I find the whole thing rather soothing). We learn to carefully pass food round the table by moving our hands along the table edge and negotiating handovers of dishes by touching hands until both people can feel the weight has been properly transferred to the other person. Zsuzsanna takes on the interesting challenge of getting up from the table to prepare everyone's pudding while still blindfolded. Everything happens more slowly of course but what she makes is very tasty. When we take our blindfolds off after about an hour, the colours are intense, and I realise with a shock that I hadn't previously noticed two candles burning on the table during the whole meal.
May 10th; Sunday. For the second night we watch a film in video form suggested by movie buff Constantine. Last night was 'Walk on the Wild Side' (1962) and tonight was 'Bonjour Tristesse' (1958): both with opening credit sequences designed by Saul Bass. Something about the lighting, the intense ice-cream colours of the frocks, and the courteously flippant jolliness in the 1958 film strikes me as incredibly alien now. Earlier in the day, we have as late lunch a wonderful pasta salad, again another lovely meal prepared by Sara & Zsuzsi together. When Sara's mother telephones from Italy (it's Mother's Day in Italy) Sara holds her video phone right inside the bowl so her mama can see how delicious the salad is.

May 9th; Saturday. We all sit under the horse-chestnut tree in Robin's garden, shaded from the sun, drinking tea and munching pastries. We chat with Constantine about school bullying, the French versus the English teenage spirit, what happens when Pax Americana soon runs out of cash, and the unconventional in general. I mention the mysterious medical student (schoolfriend of one of our college gang) studying his degree at a London hospital who drove a black taxi cab he owned up for a surprise visit one day. How he almost persuaded my chums we could all buy a near-scrap-value double-decker bus and do the Cliff Richard Summer Holiday trip across Europe for real. I was all for it, of course.
It seems that on Thursday (votes counted by yesterday morning) Britain's voters replaced a Conservative/Liberal-Democrat coalition by a new Conservative government with an overall majority. I was privately predicting an overall majority of 2 or 3 MPs to friends (though not on here, coward that I am), but the majority turns out to be around 10 MPs. If I had any money, I could have put money on it. Widespread media & pollster predictions that the Tories would fail to get a majority turn out to have overestimated the left-wing vote, just as happened in September with the Scots independence referendum.
May 8th; Friday. Brilliant sunshine streams into the Budapest flat. I wake up from yet more vivid strange dreams, get the chilled laptop out of the fridge, plug it in, and switch it on. It works.
A couple of days ago, rode out of town in Robin's car with him, his Italian girlfriend Sara, and Gio from Rio under the full moon. We have the roof open part of the way, and the cool-but-not-cold breeze after the hot day is intoxicating. Listening to one of his Fields of the Nephilim tapes, the music seems more compelling than any of those old Goth groups has ever struck me as before, sucking us down motorways and country roads. We stop for a coffee at a petrol station. The stubborn passive-aggressive female employee blank-facedly tells me it is impossible to cancel a cash transaction on the till and redo it for a credit card. Without warning, the moon goddess intervenes, my cheerful courtesy vanishes, willpower suddenly stands up inside me, and I find I am saying "Make. It. Happen. Do as I tell you." The girl complies, as of course she should. My companions raise their eyebrows slightly, chuckle, and quietly point out the moon is affecting me. Later that night we ate the spicy dark meat of Robin's free-range Sussex cockerel, which apparently had to be killed as it was too large, too strong, and rogering the hens so powerfully it was hurting them. The dead fowl, rest its soul, tasted superb.
Tonight back on the late train down to the countryside again, changing at Szolnok. Instead of the usual sweaty sprint through a tunnel under 10 empty platforms to change in 5 minutes, things have developed. After ten years it's finally occurred to someone to route the incoming train from Budapest for that 5 minutes on the facing platform right across from the train leaving for Kunszentmarton. Progress!

May 7th; Thursday. Early morning I go up one floor to ask help with my electricity from the vigorous auntie-type lady. She is without her usual train of perky little girl and confused dog, but in good spirits. Sun is pouring in off her balcony from the leafy back garden, tinkling the Feng Shui wind chimes. She shows me her mandala above the door and chortles about how she asks Shiva and Lakshmi for assistance. I explain my electricity problem and the vigorous auntie-type lady swings into action, letting me use her phone to call a couple of firms. A cheerful man comes in the afternoon, flips a small blue button above the door, and all the lights come back on. So the row of black switches didn't work, the other fuses in the corridor fuse cupboard were unaffected, but I hadn't noticed the blue switch above the row of black switches. He establishes that one hob on my cooker is sick and puts blue gaffer tape across that dial, allowing me to use the other hobs. I ask nicely and he fiddles in the fridge. The new bulb I put into the fridge about two years ago comes to life and my fridge is no longer dark inside for the first time since at least 2013. I forget to ask him to look at the strip of ceiling lights not working at one end of the room for about six months. Later in the evening, my laptop suddenly dies and goes dark. I put it in the fridge, as you do.
May 6th; Wednesday. Boardgame Orsolya in esoteric mood tells me that according to how she sees the universal consciousness, everything happens at the best possible time. Around midnight the power to my whole flat fails as I switch on a cooking hob. Flipping fuse switches in my flat, and in the special fuse cupboard at one end of the landing, has no effect. I go to bed by candlelight. Candles sometimes make me think of the real miners' strike, the one in 1972 that helped to bring down a democratically elected British government with electricity power cuts.

May 5th; Tuesday. A list of overlooked children's books which look good. An alternative-history novel which might be fun.
May 4th; Monday. 2 friends are trying to get me to watch this film. Looks a bit like an attempt to crossbreed 'My Dinner With Andre' and 'Primer'.

May 3rd; Sunday. Turns out online friend Elaine has her own weblog. She says my diary here reminds her of this soap manufacturer. Am honoured.
May 2nd; Saturday. Two articles by Adrian about Voltaire with good anecdotes & detail: one about his plays on Islam, the other Voltaire meeting Franklin.

May 1st; Friday. The spring/summer/workers day off closes most shops but I pop over to teach Lorinc and then to meet Boardgame Orsolya, not at the upstairs indoor cafe but at a sort of ice-cream bar outside the shopping mall. Orsolya notes that the pair of escalators we usually take passes on the left, and suggests that's because we meet there for English. Wondering about translating a Hungarian word usually rendered in marketing texts as "herald" we decide to settle on "pre-sell". Vanese recommends an odd physics film which makes several rather tall claims. One is that mass is all about vortices, and another is that the big particle-accelerator experiments of late are actually quite dangerous or irresponsible and the handful of physicists saying this are not the marginalised eccentrics they've been portrayed as. The risk is (goes their story) small but steadily accumlating quantities of super-dense particles called strange quark liquid or strangelets sinking to the earth's core over time risk destroying the world through a kind of runaway black-hole effect or something resembling an "ice-9" effect. Other allegations in the film are that the importance of the Higgs boson was hugely exaggerated to ensure funding, and that particle accelerators are really much more part of the nuclear-weapons and nuclear-power industry than seems at first. Hard to judge claims about such a complex and self-confident field, but interesting to see physicist gurus being portrayed as reckless careerist tinkerers. Another subplot seems to be the simple elegance of Saint Einstein's worldview being betrayed by the likes of Murray Gell-Mann. The whole thing is suspiciously glib about the science of the structure of matter, but has some nice bits of glossy film & graphics.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com