2021
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April 30th; Friday. Travel back into Budapest to stay some nights with kind Anne, a dancer, so I can do my second rather suspect covid test at 11am. Well-argued piece about the origin of covid-19.
April 29th; Thursday. Travel to Budapest and back to Szeleveny to sign my name on 68 separate sheets of paper. Too expensive to buy, but in the Chinese supermarket discover some intriguing Oriental bags of Kit-Kat bars in curious spicy flavours where they colour the chocolate pale green or bubblegum pink. Mostly Japanese judging by text on the packaging. So this Kit-Kat, not the original Kit-Cat Club that inspired the fictional Kit Kat club in 1930s Berlin, nor the real 1990s Berlin club inspired by the fictional one.

April 28th; Wednesday. Meanwhile, Mr Fauci seems to have recently restarted germ warfare research without presidential approval.
April 27th; Tuesday. Lucid piece from Koestler in 1972 comparing physics & (for want of a better word) magic.

April 26th; Monday. Remainers were "wrong about everything". Really?? Duh.
April 25th; Sunday. Thoughtful, interesting article: Why is Everything Liberal?

April 24th; Saturday. Apparently in French avocat means both 'lawyer' and 'avocado'.
April 23rd; Friday. Bake second pair of loaves using Diane's recipe. Not particularly close to getting the hang of bread-making any time soon. Edina is nonetheless very positive about the products of my dough-kneading efforts. We discuss Polanski's obvious obsession with the occult and this short note from Jacques Vallee of all people (real-life inspiration for this film character played by Francois Truffaut) raises the awkward thought that Polanski's interest in the dark arts is authentic and suspiciously personal.

April 22nd; Thursday. Visit Kunszentmarton with Edina.
April 21st; Wednesday. Article homes in on the results of early-2020's unscientific but curiously co-ordinated attacks on HCQ & ivermectin: safe, cheap drugs effective against covid-19. It's an important shift now to begin pointing out who really killed the people denied those medicines: eg. Fauci, WHO, others - not Trump.

April 20th; Tuesday. A review that changed my mind. This makes me want to watch what's still the highest-grossing-ever French film.
April 19th; Monday. On a whim, I type 'jigger wigger' into a search engine and learn this handy definition.

April 18th; Sunday. Wake out of a dream in which Michael the Greek is still alive, and busily presiding over a jumble sale (in an underground railway station of course) of assorted stuff, including stacks of panels of coloured plastic he has acquired in some way. As customers bustle around, picking out two-by-four-foot boards of translucent orange or opaque lilac fibreglass, or whatever it is, Michael & I discuss Christo, the Bulgarian artist who repeatedly wrapped things until summer 2020.
April 17th; Saturday. Finally, some good news. A BBC1 special 9pm broadcast starring the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg three days ago attracted disappointing audiences of barely more than 1 million.

April 16th; Friday. So exhausted after yesterday's non-adventure that I forget my postponed lesson with Balazs. Denmark becomes first country in EU to stop AstraZeneca vaccinations for safety reasons. For added excitement, the Danish official announcing the country's decision collapsed during her press conference.
April 15th; Thursday. Go to Kecskemet to visit cardiologist, discovering the sheer thickness of public-transport planners in Hungary. First bus is on time, the driver is cheerful, won't let me pay, jesting that it's my responsibility to hide under the seats if an inspector gets on. The second driver is quarter of an hour late, won't let me pay (with a weary hand gesture that expresses both that I am his guest and that all life in general is hopeless). Once in town, it takes discussion with four separate bus drivers, one of whom doesn't give me change, in order for me to reach the military hospital, not exactly a small feature in the Kecskemet landscape. There appears to be no bus from the railway station or coach station that goes directly to the military hospital. Once at the military hospital it takes me an hour and a half to see Akos, who is very kind and encouraging when I can see him, but by which time I'm in danger of missing the last coach back to Szeleveny. Then I find myself waiting at a Kecskemet bus stop near the military hospital for 3/4 of an hour, for a scheduled bus that simply fails to turn up, ensuring I have indeed missed the last coach back to Szeleveny. Then back at the coach station someone at the timetable information office tells me with evident pleasure I'll to wait two and a half hours to even start my trip to a town near Edina. Then the next-door railway station tells me I can get to the same town near Edina (a distance of about thirty miles) if I take a three-hour journey with two changes of train one involving an hour-long wait. Finally Edina finds a coach to another nearby town, Lakitelek, leaving in a few minutes (I phone her and my mobile decides to keep cutting out during the conversation), I get on it, and the driver refuses to let me pay. Patient Edina picks me up from Lakitelek. All for an hour-long consultation with my cardiologist which had to be cut short to ten minutes.

April 14th; Wednesday. Three articles in the Spectator: Douglas Murray on the closure of Britain's most moderate & sensible Muslim organisation. Simon Wood looks at the (lack of) evidence that covid-19 lockdowns ever made sense. Matt Ridley on the immensely stupid precedent of post-war food rationing under the young Harold Wilson, the 1940s "technocrat". This last article reveals what really enabled Germany's economy to surge ahead of Britain's in that decade of postwar recovery - scrapping government regulations.
April 13th; Tuesday. Under-skin microchip to detect covid-19 invented. EU planned "vaccine passports" 20 months before the covid-19 pandemic.

April 12th; Monday. Wake out of a dream in which Peter Ustinov is a cartoon owl, and is declaring that "I lived my life as I wished to!" surrounded by a busy host of other cartoon creatures, all under the sea for some reason.
My scales are still at Simon's, and Cardiologist Akos wants me to weigh myself for a few days and take some blood-pressure measurements. Since I found yesterday that the batteries have died in my blood-pressure device, today entails two main tasks. Job 1 is to buy four small batteries at the 'Feribolt' (one of the two shops, the one where the owner is called Feri). For Job 2, Edina sweetly drives me to a second-hand furniture emporium a couple of miles away where I obtain some 1970s bathroom scales in a handsome mid-blue for the sturdy sum of 600 forints.
Robin & Bela drop by Edina's later, risking getting captured crossing enemy lines when they cut it fine driving back before curfew.
April 11th; Sunday. This might be nifty. Or entertaining. 28 pages isn't much investment to ask, considering what it promises. Astral projection, CIA, travel to other dimensions. What's not to like?

April 10th; Saturday. Sleep 13 hours, to Edina's slight concern. Today do most of the work writing an article called 'Why I Am Not An Atheist', referring to Russell's famous book.
April 9th; Friday. Rescue my shirt from the tree below Victoria's balcony where it blew last week, leaning out over a sheer drop, wielding a Heath Robinson tool composed of two brooms I taped together. This takes 3/4 of an hour, but I win. Then try to find my cardiologist, without success. Then in the centre of town, after meeting my second ever Malna (Raspberry), this one a rather dishy production assistant, I get a costume fitting and a trial make-up application for my forthcoming role as a comic undertaker. After this, the trip back into the Great Plain from the Big Pogacsa goes reasonably well. Changing trains at Szolnok around 9pm, I pop into the white concrete ticket hall to buy snacks from the snack counter. Another wonderfully leggy girl, a brunette this time, is working there, though incredibly slowly. She shows me the chocolate bars, I ask for the yoghourt-flavoured one, and then she proceeds to slowly show me the bars again. Biscuit-flavoured? Thank you no, the yoghourt-flavoured one. Strawberry-flavoured? No, yoghourt, please. Finally we manage the transaction in time for my connecting train to Kunszentmarton, and she pouts at me reproachfully from under her long black eyelashes. Isn't it enough she's showing a gorgeous figure in her skintight pink velvet tracksuit? I expect her to be an intellectual as well? Of course she might be such a party girl that she hasn't slept in three days. Often the problem.
At Kunszentmarton, I have about twenty minutes to walk from the railway station to the bus and coach terminus, more than enough time. I arrive there and one bus is lit up. A helpful passenger says that will be my service at 20 past 10, but rather than getting on where it is standing, I should go and wait at another little platform in the middle of the square. Everything promises to go to plan. The empty platform has an illuminated dot-matrix sign saying 10.20pm, identifying the service as the one I want. Around 10.11, a driver gets on to the lit-up bus and peers curiously at me through his big windscreen. Then he drives off, leaving the whole square and its ten or twelve bus stops dark and deserted. The dot-matrix sign counts off the minutes. Another bus arrives and drives straight past. Darkness and quiet return. Another bus drives through, and silence is restored. Then at exactly 22.19 a bus arrives, pulls in where I'm standing alone, and the driver motions me to get on by the middle door. I do this. His cab is defended by coloured strips of tape, in case I go close to infect him with the deadly plague. Inside the taped-off enclosure, a middle-aged woman is nattering on her phone, the only other passenger. We pull out onto the road and I hesitantly say across three rows of seats to the back of the driver's shoulders that I'd like to go to Szeleveny. "We're going there," he replies wearily. I ask him how much should I pay? What do I owe him? "You don't owe me anything," he declares in a sad, exhausted voice, addressing the night-time road ahead. Half an hour of silence later, he stops a few yards from Edina's house, and we solemnly bid each other good night.

April 8th; Thursday. I catch the 5.30am train towards Budapest. Adventures ensue, including a covid-19 mouth swab conducted entirely without words. Assuming I cannot speak her language because I'm a foreign actor, the white-lab-coated dragon with the swab makes a noise like Aaaa-aah! to indicate I must open my mouth. Aaa-uu-ah? I reply, trying to open my mouth like hers. Aaah-oo-ah, she explains, poking a cotton-bud stick into the inside of my cheek. We make these noises at each other another couple of times, and I'm out of the building. Then I cross the river to retrieve Victoria's harp from a music school a bus ride away from the new metro line terminus. Oddly it starts to snow in big fluffy flakes to add a little atmosphere to my journey there and onward to Victoria's. After a short rest, she & I go out to two Vodafone offices to reconnect her phone and internet, the first place making us wait for an hour and then refusing Victoria's cash. Not ideal behaviour from them since the ATM hole-in-the-wall swallowed her bank card for no good reason several days ago. I persuade the second Vodafone office to finally (this is her 5th attempt) let her settle the bill she's been trying to pay for over a week.
April 7th; Wednesday. Robin drops by with one of my boxes, and Edina makes us all lunch. Edina is currently interested in Old Turkic runes.

April 6th; Tuesday. I explore Szeleveny, visiting both shops, one at each end of the half-mile-long main street.
April 5th; Monday. Travel by train to Szeleveny on the Great Plain. Kind Folklorist Edina and her cheerful boy Bendeguz are waiting there by the railway track to pick me up. She's had a book published:'`Napevo, Holdfalo' (Sun-Eater, Moon-Gobbler - Mythical Creatures of the Volga Turks).

April 4th; Sunday. Careful, detailed late-March article by Iain Davis about why we should disbelieve covid-19 death figures.
April 3rd; Saturday.'Why Is Everyone In Texas Not Dying?'' More common sense and rational science about the covid tantrum. Meet Oluwafunmilayo and we sit on a sunny bench facing the leafy Margit Island across the Danube for a natter.

April 2nd; Friday. A nice Unherd piece about the tediousness of modernists like Virginia Woolf.
April 1st; Thursday. Finish a book of Victoria's: 'The Queen's Conjuror', a biography of astrologer, cryptographer, and all-round 16th-century wizard John Dee, put together very nicely by Benjamin Wolley. The recurring sadness of his life, and the repeated struggles to find a stable income or profitable business come over clearly. I would have liked to read more about his cryptography and code-breaking for Elizabeth. The slightly malign and shadowy court presences of Cecil and Walsingham, the Tudor spooks, is also covered. Wolley handles reasonably well the difficult business of what actually happened when Kelley & Dee summoned demons and angels together in Bohemia.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com