2019
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November 30th; Saturday. Historian suggests the origins of Islam were different than we believe. Late in the evening, finish 'Meetings With Remarkable Men' by Gurdjeff, which I've been meaning to read since school. That was after enjoying Colin Wilson's account of him (I think called 'The War Against Sleep') from the public library. There are many warnings about this book, claiming it's an invented autobiography filled with fairy stories, and so on, but it's loosely plausible. For one thing, none of the men are really that remarkable. There are signs that this is a storyteller spinning yarns (the account of crossing the Gobi Desert during a sandstorm on stilts is sweet), but also that Gurdjeff wasn't really a writer. I got more the impression of a gifted talker and raconteur fairly randomly writing down some of his more successful tales. The spell in a monastery somewhere in Central Asia run by the "World Brotherhood" is left hanging oddly, as if it cannot be resolved because the prewar cult leader's own project (codenamed 'The Work') needs to be seen to follow from it. One of Gurdjeff's followers in his growing private sect at this time was P.J. Travers, creator of Mary Poppins. 'The Work' involved a quasi-religious fusion of dance & movement therapy. In the closing pages, this is casually prefigured at that mysterious monastery's "dancing priestess" training, as if to make the guru's own 1920s venture at Fontainebleau a live epilogue to this vague, open-ended book. Towards the end, started wondering how much Paulo Coelho was trying for something similar.

November 29th; Friday. Interesting article about luxury viewpoints. The idea is that political opinions are often a form of status display.
November 28th; Thursday. List of folk songs written by pre-WW1 'Wobblies' union organiser Joe Hill.

November 27th; Wednesday. An intriguing pair of articles one and two about the little-discussed White Helmets group, and now-dead MP Jo Cox's involvement with them.
November 26th; Tuesday. Electric cars will create a battery-waste problem? Seems there were near-crashes in the new Boeing's simulator. Some cheering work on a virus to kill cancer tumours. Curious study says queens were more warlike than kings. Adorable little animation showing cuts to make triangles into squares, squares into hexagons, and hexagons into triangles.

November 25th; Monday. Finish 'Supernormal' by Dean Radin, more thought-provoking stuff about his experiments with quantum-anomalies and what he calls "micro-telekinesis".
November 24th; Sunday. Robin and I stroll around after dark and drop into a Protestant church built in 1913, and chat with the organ master. Afterwards, we have a night-time coffee on the stretch of Andrassy street near his flat, and we see the eerie sight of a small van moving from lamp-post to lamp-post mounting strings of white Christmas lights and switching them on, one set at a time. I suddenly recall one of Travers' Mary Poppins stories about a man in suburban London with a ladder into the sky whose secret job it was to put the stars up into the firmament each night.

November 23rd; Saturday. A 'Fresnel-Prism' lens seen in Labour leader Mr Corbyn's spectacles suggest he might in recent months have suffered a minor stroke.
November 22nd; Friday. In the quiet flat, when I sleep on the floor I can feel, not hear, a very faint distinct throbbing coming from the floor into my head - around two beats a second. I think it must be a pump a few floors down in the building's heating system moving water or oil through all its radiators. In other news, there's a horse so lazy it plays dead when someone wants to ride it.

November 21st; Thursday. Provocative set of short films alleges that Sumerians knew of the planets Uranus, Neptune, & Pluto only discovered by modern Europeans after the 1780s. Enjoyably, the film has lots of attractive close-up images of cuneiform-script tablets.
November 20th; Wednesday. Finish the third of three astrology books borrowed from Esoteric Veronica: 'Aspect Pattern Astrology' by Bruno Huber, Louise Huber, & Michael Huber. This is all about trines, squares, and all the other traditional geometrical relations between houses and planets in birth charts.

November 19th; Tuesday. Steady yourselves, citizens: Terence McKenna's darling yet also alarming "DMT elves" want the elite to kill us all?
November 18th; Monday. Late evening, at the all-night shop on Kiraly street, a group of two males and three brunettes, all speaking Russian, are roaming the shelves of the crowded store buying potato crisps and drinks on the way to some party. All three girls wear skin-tight glossy black leggings showing pert bottoms in perfect detail, and all three are pretty with doe-like eyes, but they're not sisters. Earlier, in the late afternoon at the hairdresser I was telling a couple of Russian-girl anecdotes, and a Hungarian male colleague of my barber Istvan lounging exhausted in a nearby chair (while Istvan snips away at my locks), remarks that Russian lasses reliably have lovely legs and beautiful eyes. Perhaps this was the conversation that conjured the group at midnight. Meanwhile, things seem to be kicking off in Iran.

November 17th; Sunday. Russian professor who routinely dresses as Napoleon found in river with severed limbs of ex-girlfriend in his knapsack.
November 16th; Saturday. Albanian drug gang in Italy has hidden cocaine stash snaffled by wild, furry, forest boars. Oink!

November 15th; Friday. Swedish bombings in 2019 pass 100 explosions. Apparently gang wars between, er -- recent arrivals in the Scandinavian nation.
November 14th; Thursday. Poignant glimpse of 1967 futurists talking about now. What is genuinely refreshing is that they seem quite clever, serious people who mostly emphasise we can choose what kinds of futures we create.

November 13th; Wednesday. At the cafe Art Dealer Tony introduced me to, the outdoor stretch of tables with the fat, arsey pigeons somehow a fortnight back became shorter. A single line of tables along the pavement extends between a large potted shrub and a cylindrical poster stand, and for a few seconds I couldn't work out what had changed. Then I realised the shrub had been moved to bring 6 or 7 tables down to just 4. Smoothly adapting to the cooler weather.
November 12th; Tuesday. Finish a book Esoteric Veronica lent me: 'The Planets' by Bruno and Louise Huber: good overview of the effects astrologers conventionally say nearby planets (a term that includes sun & moon) have on birth charts.

November 11th; Monday. Exciting test of my logistical skills. I catch the early bus from Tiszainoka (there are 3 or 4 a day only) to the next village, meet Seamstress Aranka who has done her stitching just as well but faster this time, get into the "centre" of Tiszakurt and follow directions from two affable locals to get a bus to Kecskemet, from where I get a train to Budapest's West Bahnhof, right by Dr D.'s office at the Supreme Court for our 11.30 lesson. Using the train loo to change into the government-office-compatible trousers that Aranka had mended felt vaguely bank-heist caper-ish in a low-budget sort of way.
November 10th; Sunday. Gloomy, rainy day at Robin's in countryside. Is the EU a menace to freedom?

November 9th; Saturday. Journey out to the Great Plain by train. Spend three hours consuming cider, coffee, and slices of Margharita in the pizzeria at Lakitelek station until darkness falls. After some explanation of what has gone wrong, the curvy barmaid's boyfriend Christopher kindly drives me across the plains where it mainly rains (at least tonight) to Robin's house at one end of Tiszainoka.
November 8th; Friday. Discomfortingly effective Moscow-based study makes progress in using computers to see into minds.

November 7th; Thursday. Policemen packing heat seal off Andrassy street for a visit by Turkey's Mr Erdogan (once described by Boris Johnson as the "wankerer from Ankara"). They try to stop me entering a building where I temporarily have a key to an apartment. I persuade them I'm actually sleeping there.
November 6th; Wednesday. Article about hybristophilia (sexual attraction to violent people) tiptoes around discussing whether women are more prone to this.

November 5th; Tuesday. Turns out that degree-educated pensioners are more gullible and easily defrauded than the rest. Suggests standards for access into higher education fell at least fifty years ago, roughly dated by the creation of that swathe of new universities like Essex, Sussex, Warwick, Southamption, Exeter etc.
November 4th; Monday. Meet Marion for major natter while she's stuck indoors waiting for electric-meter men. Weather chillier now. You ask: what might superhappiness be?
November 3rd; Sunday. Meet Andras. We drive around after dark looking for the Vietnamese soup he likes. Then we find an Indochinese place close to Keleti railway station with an extraordinary bottled drink tasting of roses. Apparently he just spent three days in a Benedictine monastery.

November 2nd; Saturday. Interesting piece about how the 2nd attempt to impeach El Trumpo goes down in some US swing states.
November 1st; Friday. At the EU shell campaign to reverse the referendum result by doing it again & again & again until we get it right: trouble brews.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com