2017
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April 30th; Sunday. An early April mid-week story from one of our contributors about signs of mysterious goings-on in the bullion markets.

April 29th; Saturday. For those who love counterintuitive arguments, an article tries to argue that not only do cigarettes not cause lung cancer, but they actually protect against it. Apparently, it's all atom bombs really.
April 28th; Friday. 3rd morning without the vertigo. Perhaps can feel safe now. After I read one article by Shelly Palmer I thought he was quite bright, but then I read his defence of self-driving vehicles. Palmer doesn't even spot he's taking utilitarian ethics for granted. Notice also how he gets his reasoning the other way round in this article about default nosey-parker settings.

April 27th; Thursday. 2nd morning waking without the vertigo. Angry mother accidentally texts the phone of a 35-year-old stranger. Striking how incensed she is at him gently teasing her. A real lesson in not listening.
April 26th; Wednesday. Wake up on floor and sit up this time without nausea, vertigo, or any dizziness: second time lucky. After about 3 weeks of BPPV, back to stability. Some dance music from Fort Knox 5 & Jurassic 5, and then more Jurassic 5 fiddled about with: 'We Know Something You Don't Know'.

April 25th; Tuesday. Last night's head manoeuvre didn't work. Room still swims around me as I get up. Did I do it incorrectly? Sudden sunshine today after some slightly chilly, even cloudy, days. Walk past four adolescent cleaning girls wheeling bins on the street. The fourth one, so casual she's almost standing still, wheels a scientific-looking trolley with compartments full of different cleaning materials. She's a fake mid-blonde, skin literally the colour of honey, and one of those jewelled pins piercing the cheek above and beside the mouth that Gypsy girls seem to favour. We exchange a glance for a bit over a second as we pass and before we're even six feet apart a peal of giggles erupts from her three colleagues. "He fancies you!!" they squeal delightedly in unison. Spirit of proud-pied April at work again. Later after dark, out to the corner benches to try the head-roll exercise once more.
April 24th; Monday. Having no bed to use for this, go out in the small hours to one of the smooth cement benches with no backs or arms for an anti-vertigo procedure involving precise head rolls. They're in front of the corner office block they only built a couple of years ago. Waiting until the coast is clear, I perform the Epley Manoeuvre, feeling a wave of nausea at each phase.

April 23rd; Sunday. Voting today in French elections has the daughter of the mad paratrooper and the ENArque who married his schoolteacher predicted to get about 22% each, so both going through to the second round next week. Smart money must be going on the ENArque, as if large amounts of not-so-smart money there already aren't enough.
April 22nd; Saturday. A very odd list of countries ranked by "ignorance". Despite cafe waitresses knowing the population of all the surrounding towns and villages, and Britons being apologetically vague on lots of subjects, Hungary supposedly comes second-worst in a list of most ignorant countries, and Britain is supposedly second-best-informed. Dodgy methodology, I think.

April 21st; Friday. Slightly unkind: The awfulness of Gwyneth Paltrow; Harsh words on Hillary Clinton; plus a candidate in the day after tomorrow's French election who has suggested 100% taxation. Millions of French people actually support him. Taxation only of "the rich" of course.
April 20th; Thursday. Apparently the US has a community of people who dress up as animals ("the furries"), and some of them dress up as stormtrooper wolves. Or something.

April 19th; Wednesday. Heavy rain in a now-quite-chilly Pest. This rainfall irritates me, and I learn my shoes are no longer watertight. Perhaps the moment for some "egoless" images: Tantric abstract paintings, devotional objects rather than artworks.
April 18th; Tuesday. Gyuri drives me to the Lakitelek railway station. The single-track local service leaves Lakitelek on time but there are delays at Kecskemet. Noting the station announcement tune (four rising chords) I try to remember how long it is since the jaunty train-station call sign used under communism was replaced - it certainly continued a good few years after the change in regime. It went doo-dooby-doo dooby-doo, sounding pleasantly old-fashioned & perky. I remember two string players from Britain studying at the Liszt Music Academy telling me how cleverly structured that old tunelet was as a composition. Kecskemet being something of a Crewe-style railway hub, we get lots of announcements of incoming and outgoing trains, alongside the delays for my train being repeated and adjusted. I wonder if anyone in any railway system on earth has ever tried to create a small battery of call signs? This would be so that the ear can instantly pick out northbound, eastbound, southbound, westbound service announcements with perhaps a difference of tone for arrivals and departures. It wouldn't be hard to create a 5 or 6 chord tunelet with shifts to make 8 or 16 versions of the same announcement music that passengers can recognise as variations of one thing but also pick apart (for example just play the little chord sequence backwards and forwards to differentiate arrivals and departures). I've also wondered for years if hearing the same noise hundreds of times a day drives people working at airports, train stations, or just cash registers, a bit mad, and some variety might heal their souls. Something tells me the answer to my question about a rail system with a set of call signs is no.
Lightly dozing in the carriage on the way back to Budapest, my mind drifts back to the mystery of seat design. That not only has centuries of work upholstering stage coaches, train seats, seats in cars, buses, aeroplanes not created a comfortable seat, but has amazingly produced its precise opposite - a hollowed-out shape that optimises discomfort. Yet what everyone obviously wants is protruding cushioning, if possible adjustable (for example, under the shoulder blades), that the spine can drape itself over, that supports you semi-upright and holds you softly in place against the natural slumping of the tired body. Considering the obsession at hundreds of design colleges since the 1920s with "rethinking" the chair, this small but endlessly repeated failure suggests mass dimness & unhelpfulness of almost magical dimensions. Reach town just in time to teach Zita then David.

April 17th; Easter Monday. Weather turns chilly. Pityu shows me how to cook the roadkill April Hare, Magyar-style. Garlic, strips of pork fat, + white wine. Very tasty.
April 16th; Easter Sunday. Kristos Anesti! Robin & Constantine drive back to Budapest, leaving me with the dogs, farm animals, Gyuszi, Gyuri, Pityu, and the star-filled country sky. A photo of Antonio Canova's Cupid kissing Psyche awake with a nicely caught sunbeam passing through translucent marble wings. Someone has kindly read out one of my "superb" articles and you can listen to it here.

April 15th; Easter Saturday. Last night as I shuffled far too late to the studio to sleep, I was guided across the lawn by light in the windows of the smaller next-door winter studio. These are lit up orange by heating lamps dangling over half the floor where chicks of various sizes are bustling about chirping at each other or else dozing in small groups. Inside the larger studio, up in the gallery area, a wasp seems to want to get into bed with me. Tangled up in bedding, I try to shoo it out of the snug pillow area, and it indignantly stings my tummy. I score a few hits with the pillow, a white ring appears on my skin where the sting was, and the insect grumpily retreats to safety under the empty bookcase.
Today, drunk with long hours of sleep, I stumble out far too late into warm midday sun. I suddenly realise that the tree right by the door now has huge purple blooms dangling from it. The thick, slurred mumbling of bumble bees, a much deeper fatter buzzing than the wasp, marks which blossoms they're clumsily clambering in and out of like portly country parsons. Past the still-cheeping indoor kindergarten of baby chicks is another tree fully out in white blossom. I visit Zsuzsi's skittish horse and give him a half apple, and Gyuszi explains to me which birds are which in a large chicken-wired area where they are all squawking, creating a mediaeval-market-square sort of racket. Round the back by the trees, the pigs make peevish snorting noises at me for failing to take them food again.
Further excitement as Robin, Constantine, Bela, and I attempt to chop bits of wood and make an outdoor barbecue, complete with improvised spit, to roast a lamb. Pityu shows me how to chop logs more effectively. The large white Komondor dogs, Domor & Sissi, appear less shaggy & matted. They seem to have been trimmed and are a bit more mellow and lighter on their feet as a result. The lamb cooks to a wonderful crispy, salty, smoky flavour. After dark, Robin & I drive over to some nearby villages to obtain bread and chocolate and we then drop in on the half-deserted Tiszafoldvar funfair. Tucked behind a colourful neon-lit magic roundabout with no-one on it, we try shooting with an airgun at a stall of prizes. Each prize is held up by thin wooden sticks, and I manage to score a hit right on the hip flask Robin wants to acquire, instead of the sticks. He takes over with the rifle, discovers it shoots slightly to the right, snaps two of the three sticks, and having spent enough on firing gets the dented flask the stallholder wants rid of. It now looks as if it once was inside his jacket and saved his heart from an assassin's bullet. We then have a quick drink in a sleepy-but-vaguely-futuristic cafe with concealed lighting recessed into green disc-shaped cutaways in the ceiling. In the usual odd Hungarian way, when I ask the curvy serving girls the population of Tiszafoldvar, they promptly reply 12,000 and know the populations of several surrounding towns to the nearest 500 inhabitants.
Mood of bleak darkness just in black and white: An illustration of the much-maligned Countess Bathory perhaps fitting to the Day of Burial.
April 14th; Good Friday. Drive into the countryside with Robin, Bela, & Constantine for Easter. Several transparent bags of eggboxes in the back of the car rustle peacefully as we motor across the republic. Bela asks if I am focusing my chi.

April 13th; Thursday. John Coltrane does something odd with the circle of fifths. Physicists say they've made a substance with negative mass. Tibetan monks found chanting bits of Derek Parfit.
April 12th; Wednesday. Last night Jessica and I move and assemble more furniture. Jessica gets annoyed with recent version of Beauty & The Bear Man, as she calls him.

April 11th; Tuesday. Criminals with a meth lab get raided. Police find the drug-makers have a pet snake which has absorbed so much of the chemical in the air through its skin the serpent is addicted to meth.
April 10th; Monday. I knocked a drinking glass off a counter onto the tiled kitchen floor on Thursday, smashing it into dozens of smithereens surrounding me. Helpfully, I was barefoot at the time. Wearily, I picked up all the tiny fragments until it seems safe to move off my spot. I manage to get away with only one splinter in one foot. Days later as light shifts with the hours, miniscule curved shivers of glass continue to wink cheekily, safely nestled in the fibres of the kitchen rug. Are they mocking me? Meanwhile, inmates inside an Ohio prison build themselves two computers hidden above ceiling tiles.

April 9th; Sunday. An odd thought comes to me that the young Mr Putin looked like a less-pretty version of the Illya Kuryakin character. He from the 1960s Man from U.N.C.L.E. television series with its brass-boosted bongo-drum beach-guitar music. Even odder, the young Mr Trump looked like a sort of sci-fi fusion of both the Illya Kuryakin and the Napoleon Solo characters.
April 8th; Saturday. If wind makes whistling and moaning sounds going through doors and windows even on bright sunny afternoons, does that mean the building is poorly made? I keep seeing snatches of invented 1940s movies in my head: "Damn this dark, lonely house, with its weird unsettling sounds!" So, a slightly unsettling colour-blot test.

April 7th; Friday. Finish another book from generous Amanda, 'The Magician's Nephew', by C.S. Lewis. The opening two chapters felt strange, because I remembered them clearly, despite never having read the Lewis children's books. Then realised I must have heard these chapters, perhaps twice, somewhere like Book at Bedtime on BBC radio, or perhaps on the TV read-aloud show Jackanory. Soon after, I got to chapters that stirred no smidgeon of memory, rang no bell. The storytelling is good and the Ulster Christian author blends themes of morality and personality smoothly. To my surprise, towards to the end of the book as I was reading it on the 19 tram, I had to close it. At the point where The Witch or Queen is tempting Digory to disobey Aslan by stealing an apple to save his dying mother's life, my heart starts beating so hard I had to stop reading and restart later. All the way through, kept thinking of the article I saw in either The Spectator or The Salisbury Review years ago, saying that Philip Pullman, the author of the 'His Dark Materials' series, had written his new series to attack and subvert the Christian subtext of the Lewis Narnia children's stories. The Magician's Nephew is a kind of prequel to the main series of stories.
April 6th; Thursday. A piece on hacking human DNA: doesn't quite deliver.

April 5th; Wednesday. A very nice example of how the right choice of spooky music, a 5-minute slideshow, and very short bits of text can create an engrossing mood of mystery and unsolved thingummyness. Nos. 4 & 2 my favourites.
April 4th; Tuesday. I finish the collection of Dion Fortune's wartime letters kind Amanda sent me, 'The Magical Battle of Britain'. The calm, self-confident tone of Fortune's descriptions of how her group contact higher spiritual entities (including Arthur & Merlin) so as to defend the British Isles is extraordinary. Here she jokes about her address being bombed during the Blitz: "October 27th 1940 / In our last letter we asked our members and friends to invoke for the protection of 3 Queensborough Terrace, and in this letter we have the ironical task of informing them that we have been bombed out of it, though without casualties; so it may be maintained that the invocation was at least a partial success, though your Leader and her Librarian look like a couple of sweeps owing to a difference of opinion with the roof, which fell in on them, but tactfully refrained from hitting them.
It has often been alleged that Dion Fortune is a Black Occultist, and we regretfully admit that the allegation can no longer be denied; however it is hoped that soap and water will restore her to the Right Hand Path and her students will be able to once more hold up their heads before a world always too ready to think the worst."
The text is intercut with short news bulletins to give context of the war. Interesting to see the February 11th bulletin in 1940, Britain's darkest hour: "Paper supplies are cut by 40% as rationing is introduced. In Birmingham, five IRA bombs explode."

April 3rd; Monday. Mark Steyn on Islamist use of threats to silence critics.
April 2nd; Sunday. Sounds bizarre. Migrants' children going into comas if their families don't get Swedish citizenship. A poisson d'avril story from yesterday?

April 1st; Saturday. Interesting article about Uber trying to swing the Brexit referendum for Cameron. Strange how the URL misspells the author's name.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com