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February 8th; Sunspot 1045, is apparently, very large & active.
February 7th; Robin & I drive in the snow to church for the afternoon service at 3pm, but find it empty and locked, with the large Xmas pentacle still on the side of the belltower. We drive on to Nagyrev, site of the famous epidemic of husband-poisoning before World War One. There we get to the vicarage, find it empty too, facing another larger church also quiet and dark, with no footprints in the thick snow leading up to the closed door. We drive around, stop off at a bar made dismal by - Robin points out - the use of grey mortar for all the internal brick and tilework. Driving out again, we chance on the vicar and he gives Robin a CD with three films on it. Later on, we visit Pisti at Tiszainoka in his pink room to pick up some more films.
Late at night I finish Robin's copy of a book called 'Arts of Darkness' by Thomas Hibbs. This is a curious review of American 'film noir', from the 1940s American movies first given that name, stretching through 'neo-noir' and 'sci-fi noir'. Hibbs says that film noir's sense of claustrophic hopelessness - where a central character goes on a quest, often misguided, often leading him or her to become increasingly entrapped in a web of doubt and guilt - asks important questions about modern alienation. Hibbs' main idea is that the best philosophical guide to this perplexity and darkness is not the existentialists or Nietzsche, but Pascal, the French philosopher, theologian & mathematician he quotes throughout. Pascal speaks of a hidden God, and expresses spiritual misgivings that undercut the Enlightenment project of science and rationalism. Hibbs see these misgivings echoed in movies from 'The Maltese Falcon' to 'Blade Runner'. He points out that many directors unaware of Pascal claim they were influenced by T.S. Eliot's 'Wasteland', itself strongly influenced by Pascal. Despite some odd typos {on page 207 he writes 'bribes' when he means 'blackmails'} the review of fifty or so movies is enjoyable, and convincing in parts. A lengthier comparison of Hitchcock and Greene would have been interesting, since both are arguably much more important for the genre and cinema in general than most of the titles he leaves in, and the prolonged discussion of 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' doesn't quite persuade, but overall the book is worth reading. Two complaints would be that 1) the film descriptions sit separately and fail to quite form an overall argument, and 2) despite references to 'America' the book glides past the thought that film noir might describe a set of social problems distinctive to the US. The idea that damage to traditional social customs & structures might be the root of both film noir's angst and Blaise Pascal's 17th-century worries never crosses Hibbs' mind. To compare twisted plots about dark rainy streets and cynical femmes fatales with the agonised theology of Europe's century of religious wars clearly strikes the author as quite a daring step already. Yet it is not much further to note two more links. Both the United States of the film noir genre and the France of the critics that named it are cultures heavily involved with moving pictures. They are also societies that repeatedly insist they remade themselves afresh from a clean slate just one and a half lifetimes before Hitchcock's birth.

February 6th; We pop over to Tiszafoldvar and I buy some nails & a rolling pin in a cramped hardware store. A small dog dozes behind the counter, curled up comfortably in a single plastic shopping basket.
February 5th; I hear how Georgina's latest car crash happened on the icy, snowed-up country road just as she was driving fast to the village with divorce papers. Once the car turned over, and she got out unscathed, the divorce documents had disappeared and are probably still hidden, waiting in the ditch to reappear once the snow melts. Markets react nervously to Greek, Spanish, and Portuguese debt worries.

February 4th; Train down to Robin's in daylight. Huge sections of open plain covered in thick snow, lines of shrubs & fencing separating fields smothered or blurred, until sections look like vast white lakes, brighter than the pale grey sky above them.
February 3rd; Biology lesson with Exotic Girl 1.

February 2nd; Lunch at Martin's with Exotic Girl 1. Martin, while talking about Spanish/Catalan cuisine, makes a wonderful pudding which he calls a failure.
February 1st; Leisurely squiffy evening with Rob. My initial homework: the circle of fifths.

January 31st; Sunday. Meet Nikola for a coffee and hear about the literary world of Croatia.
January 30th; Saturday. Evening out with Mystery Friend 2 & his friend Exotic Girl 3 visiting Budapest for a couple of days. Mike Foxtrot 2, as he starts to call himself during the evening, confesses after a visit to the loo that "I found it incredibly liberating to get the old chap out in public.... I do it whenever I feel the need, though sometimes in a more private setting." On the theme of his old chap, he explains that "We're a team. It's never clear who has the upper hand. The old chap has - let's say - a one-track mind. He doesn't have my liberal outlook." Exotic Girl 3 suggests that him having a name for his phallus is silly, but Mystery Friend 2 grandly brushes her aside, continuing "When I say me and the old chap, it's like Athens & Rome, or Britain & America. One is larger, but the other is the repository of more wisdom, style, and class." Exotic Girl 3 proposes that the future holds no place for men and that women shall inherit the earth, and what's more, women can give each other more erotic pleasure than men can. MF2 nods wisely at this point, agreeing that he understands entirely what she means. "It's the love between ladies," he says sagely, adding thoughtfully "Though sometimes there's a man helping. I've seen the films." When Exotic Girl 3 protests that this is no joke, and men will be disposed of, MF2 looks baffled. "But that's ridiculous. It's like you're suggesting a world run by squirrels. It makes no sense."

January 29th; Friday. Over at Mystery Friend 2 to watch three episodes of 'The Office' on DVD with him. No playful fluffy puppy joins us this time. The first time I see this legendary British comedy from 2001 - excruciating. The central character is an office manager who is vain & desperate to be liked. His insistence on doing funny voices and repeating bad jokes perfectly skewers a certain kind of call-me-Al manager, and the Big-Brother-influenced monologues to camera are clever, but the overall effect is cruel, embarrassing, and depressing to watch. It is nice to see the gibberish of Management Speak exposed, but like so many satires, the raw emotion is hatred. No redeeming likeable qualities keep us interested in the main characters, particularly the bathetic creep at the centre of the series. Pinpoints what is so grotesque about today's Britain, but squirm-making to sit through.
January 28th; Morning appointment at clinic to get prices of general health checks. Waste lunch hour plodding around in falling snow and irritatingly chilly wind, trying to find a shop that sells triangular graph paper: of course it takes 2 minutes on the internet. Pop in on Meghan for a cup of tea, and see Emma the rescued Belgian/German shepherd dog restored to health after her double operation, and bouncing around Meg's flat enthusiastically. Meet Dallan for Mexican snacks in the afternoon.

January 27th; Lunch with Jill, dinner with Caroline {who intriguingly remarks that Hungarian girls "always seem to leave the loo seat wet"}. Dinner comes after taking fluffy rescued puppy Oscar in the early evening back to Anouska & Caroline's flat, where they are missing his cuddliness. Jill at lunch shares her wish list for 'non-lame boyfriend'. List includes 4. Must not live with his parents; 5. Non-clingy, doesn't kiss her in public; 7. Has to have voted; 9. "If he looked like Jesus that would be awesome, e.g. able to wear a good hemp shirt."
January 26th; Take Norwegian vet students Maud & Caroline to an XpatLoop wine-tasting event, where we bump into Niall & Henry among others.

January 25th; Out on a short morning walk to the computer shop in rather cold air, Oscar the abandoned puppy suddenly sits down on the pavement with a weary, stubborn expression I haven't seen before. I look at him and think for a second. Then I solemnly promise to him that it's going to be a short walk, and we aren't going up the Normafa hill again today. I give him my word. Oscar gets up at once, we continue the walk, and get back home ten minutes later.
January 24th; Meet Matthew Z & his girlfriend Krisztina at the Most restaurant once again {this time I'm unable to restrain myself from asking our Friday waitress how she got the cold sore right under her lower lip - she takes it well} and receive Oscar the former street puppy back, along with a bag of puppy food. He now has one paw in bandages due to a mishap with an escalator, has apparently been fed enormous amounts of food, and got taken up the big hill at Normafa earlier today on a mammoth walk. As a result of this action-packed weekend, the hound seems wiped out and in need of some slumber beneath our table. From there to Mystery Friend 2's flat, where he, I, and a still-snoozing Oscar watch a comedy film 'Year One' on DVD. This moves from forest caveman life to the world of the Old Testament. Climaxes with political adventures in Sodom. Lots of slapstick and verbal humour on the way. Very enjoyable light entertainment - essentially an American Carry On film with some lovely moments.

January 23rd; A bit late {though just last night I saw a confused street woman wrestling with some discarded Christmas trees that still haven't been cleared up}, here's an ex-nun, Karen Armstrong, saying why the Christmas story is subversive. Meet Mystery Friend 2 for a late Mexican lunch, where I grumble, perhaps a bit unreasonably, that all the meals on the menu seem to have Spanish names. Very tasty, whatever it was I ate. Still cold and crisp outdoors. By night I meet Exotic Girl 2 for a Thai meal, and when I mention that computer people talk about Debians, she reminds me of her onetime phone-texted misprint 'lerbians', warming to which theme she asks why men get so much stick for not putting the loo seat down again, when {she claims} some women pee standing up and don't bother putting the seat up in the first place. "Do you ever hear complaints about that?" she asks, crossly. Several realisations gel, as she recalls women she shared flats with who always left the loo seat wet, and how each of them casually asked her at one time or other if she'd ever thought of "being adventurous" and "going to bed with a woman". Hence her tentative conclusion, strengthening over the evening, that lerbians like to wee standing up. She also mentions having been to the circus for her first time ever, earlier today, where she saw some rather tired-looking Latvian lions still stiff from their night in the caravan. She reminds me giggling that I once referred to Hungarian girls as "Space Bitches from the Planet Fuck".
January 22nd; Elevenses with Peter the Filmmaker, who then comes back to my place for tea to meet Oscar. In the afternoon, make it over to a curious restaurant called Most {Now} which welcomes people with dogs, has wallpaper in one room consisting of shelves of books photographed in black and white, and wallpaper in the lobby consisting of lots of old tape cassettes photographed in black and white. I meet Matthew Z for dinner, he says the code word and I hand over Oscar to him for two days, like exchanging briefcases with that man in the park. My dinner is good overall, even though my pasta dish is the hottest I've ever encountered, suggesting someone in the kitchen used the wrong spoon for the spice powder.

January 21st; Fresh snowfall, exciting Oscar the rescued puppy. At 9am, take Oscar for a long walk to the potting cellar to meet Fitness Mariann's ceramics teacher. We go down steep steps - Timea the Potter is completely calm and happy about letting Oscar sniff & explore the interesting new space. We lose him temporarily behind a big set of cabinets and kilns, but one of Timea's delighted girl students coaxes him out. After dark, tea & snack at the nearby Turkish kebab restaurant with Andy the DJ.
January 20th; Lots of people admire Oscar's fluffy puppy fur and his markings. He is a dusty black with his lower legs white for a couple of inches above each paw, like school socks, an inch of white at the tip of his tail, and a white throat and tummy. A few streaks of white fur appear in the floppy tufts above his face, giving him a vaguely 1980s New Romantic haircut. Though, like Emma, he doesn't like being left alone, he has a busy air about whatever he does and bustles around my flat, carrying things that interest him from one place to another, though, remarkably, damaging nothing important when I go out and leave him indoors for an hour. Perhaps a yoghourt carton retrieved from the rubbish to be given a good chew, or a candle from the handicraft zone. Neither Emma nor Oscar have ever touched my books, still stacked on the floor.

January 19th; Have taken to having odd naps in the afternoon, not quite sure why. Depressing that winter is bitter and still here - I've got used to it being mildly chilly for a couple of weeks in Hungary before a sudden burst of spring makes itself felt in late January, early February. I still have the remains of my permacold too. Here is a Japanese artist who takes excellent, artless photos. And a Canadian potter based in Japan trying new things with porcelain. Here are two house/club tracks where voice & rhythm work well together, as so seldom happens, both given their final go in the blender under the aegis of DJ Ray, Stereo Flo, Feel the Wave.
January 18th; Fresh fall of snow, about an inch. Oscar the stray puppy is delighted and fascinated. He bounces and skips in the snow, relishing something about it. How cool & soft it is, perhaps. Funny how people walk around playing music out loud on their mobile phones now - it's like going back 30 years to the era of transistor radios and hand-held tape players, before people used headphones on the street.

January 17th; First day with Oscar the Puppy. Noticeably a boy dog, Oscar is drawn to the garden-shed area of my main room, a space under one of the big table's two trestles {too small for Emma to get into} full of tins of paint, screwdrivers, rolls of iron wool, bottles of thinner and stripper, bits of sandpaper, candles, and the square, thick fired-clay tile Robin gave me for melting silverwork safely with the blowtorch. Emma uses this thick tile as a step for her two front paws so she can raise herself a couple of inches to beseech me more longingly for another walk. Oscar, perhaps using Boy Thinking, seems to see it as a tool or workplace. He finds chunks of the bones I got Emma, and, ignoring an entire room of tiling and lino flooring, he chooses this thick, flat brick-like tile as the perfect space on which to place a bone in order to give it a proper gnawing. He uses the thing like an anvil or workbench. The crunching, snapping sounds of bone-chomping echo through the fired-clay tile with an outdoor acoustic, and this adds dignity to his labours.
By night, take Oscar over to not-hungover Mystery Friend 2's flat for another tasty pasta supper with tea, where we eat, and watch three more episodes of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm', with Oscar dozing between us. If anything, these episodes seem to lay bare American insecurities even more savagely than the ones I saw already. If Cleese in 'Fawlty Towers' needles at the tenseness, nastiness, and hypocrisy of the English, David in his series depicts a Los Angeles full of pushy, needy narcissists who have no idea how to dress and no idea how to treat each other, yet many of whom believe they are reasonable people being victimised by others. The intended humour is a group of people mocking their own mores, but the real humour {note many actors play themselves in the show but go to pains to say "I'm not really like that"} is watching Hollywood people so smug they think they can exaggerate themselves and have everyone else laugh along with them rather than at them. The culture the show takes for granted as its backdrop has freed itself from etiquette, dress codes, agreed markings for social rank, distinctions between private & public, and it looks hellish. Never have I seen a TV series that shows so sharply {or at all} the benefits of having an explicit class system, and why formal manners are what give people real freedom, but intentionally or unintentionally, this show does that. The snobbery & hypocrisy & pettiness of Cleese's England are there in David's California, but now set loose like monsters to roam free, unchecked, somehow not even identified. Incoherent phrases like "Quit being an asshole", "Am I the only one who does that round here?" mask deep confusion in a void with no social structure. The lack of any code other than reciprocal self-interest cripples the show's characters and exposes the thinness of American society: the same thinness the personally frustrated Said Qutb faintly grasped but misunderstood. In the three episodes we watch, 1. Larry is befriended by a Muslim women in a burkah who strikes him as the perfect romantic interest for his blind male friend - she gets along well with the mentally-handicapped men who wash his wife's car and steal her sun block 2. Larry's dental hygieneist tells everyone how bad his plaque is, and a friend's child hides one of his shoes, 3. Larry finds a major figure in the Jewish community is going to be buried with his, Larry's, rare golf club in his coffin, after which a friend's Alsation dog bites Larry's penis.
January 16th; Emma the Dog is taken off just after lunch for her operation, I go weight-training, then about 5.10pm I get back to find Caroline the Norwegian vet student, with her Budadogs white van {the logo is a big paw print}, ringing my doorbell, wondering where I am. We get Emma out of the van, and it is immediately clear the spaying & anaesthetic were quite a shock for the Alsation. She cannot stand up alone, and sinks to the tarmac looking confused. Caroline takes my bags and keys while I carry the bitch into my building and flat. She shows me how to fit the white plastic lampshade to the hound's head - vital to stop Emma from picking open her own operation scar and spilling her intestines out onto the floor. I wrap Emma up in a blanket and am instructed to check the dog's still ice-cold gums every half hour to see if they are warming up and she is recovering from the anaesthetic. The old lady & her pastry cook brother at the patisserie had this theory that Emma is not eight years old, but closer to four or five, being still too supple and perky in her movements, but now, seeing how badly the dog has taken being drugged, her youth is not so obvious. As my evening wears on, Emma starts to move around, still very drowsy from the anaesthetic, but repeatedly summoning strength to try to get the lampshade off her head. I put her on the sofa to sleep. I start sending text messages to Caroline saying the dog is not recovering so well. Around 8.30pm, the dog gets off the sofa and I see a deep patch soaked in blood, and see that she is dripping blood wherever she walks. I text that Caroline should come over. I try to keep up with cleaning up blood coming out of Emma as she staggers around the flat, still intent on removing the blasted thing tied to her head by any means necessary. She keeps crashing around, I keep holding her and getting her to sit in one place while I try to clean up, so the lino & tiled flooring gets increasingly splattered with red. Caroline arrives, we tie a bedsheet round Emma, and Caroline carries her down to the van, with me holding the other bits and pieces this time. She carefully ties the grumbling, bleeding hound into a cage, while a small fluffy dog crashes around the front of the van. Caroline gets into the front of the van as the terrier puppy ricochets around the vehicle, and asks if I can look after the little hound overnight. Since any distraction is hardly going to help during late-night surgery with Emma, I take the small black fluffy dog with white paws under one arm, and the van drives off.
The terrier, {Caroline sends a text to say it is called Oscar. There is a distant resemblance to the Sesame Street puppet} is quiet, with soft fine fur, and on entering my flat, at once begins quivering and trying to hide from me behind a basket of packet soups on the floor. I suddenly realise that my whole flat smells like a butcher's shop and is visibly splashed with cupfuls of doggy blood across much of the main room. The terrier thinks it is in some kind of David Lynch film and has been lured into the lair of a serial killer of hounds. I start mopping up the blood - 2 whole rolls of large kitchen tissues - and Oscar slowly edges out from behind the cup-a-soup stash. After some reassurance he carefully gets to know me. I get messages later from Caroline & Anouska saying that Emma had internal bleeding, a normal risk after spaying at this time of the month, and seems to be surviving after the 2nd operation.

January 15th; Still find my whole day revolving round Emma, the once-starved German/Belgian shepherd dog, who is staying with me. It's five {long} walks a day with this enthusiastic hound. The charity that rescues unwanted & mistreated dogs in Hungary run by some Norwegian veterinary students has, I discover, its own web page as well as another page on Facebook. All animal-lovers should join their Facebook group to show support - they seem to rescue a lot of dogs from doom and find them loving homes. Good motto: "To err is human, to forgive canine." Change of plan. Emma's spaying not today, but tomorrow, Saturday.
January 14th; Yesterday afternoon, my long-nosed pliers came in handy. Emma the Dog is being particularly odd, bouncing around demanding walks, wanting to be stroked & cuddled every time I start doing some work, and as I check her fur I find a lump. Quite close to the anti-tick collar is a large fat tick, quietly feeding off her like a bureaucrat. I pull it out and throw it away, but then realise I failed to get the whole thing out of her flesh. As so often, the mouth parts have been left behind. Having no fingernails to speak of currently, I look around for a tool, and see the pliers. At this point, Emma looks very alarmed. Though she makes no sound, she continues to wriggle vigorously however I try to hold her still, keeping one beady eye on the pliers. I put the pliers down, and try to explain in a soothing voice it's for her own good. I pick the pliers up again, and again in complete silence she struggles against me with great strength. Of course, not evidence that her mistreatment in Heves involved tools, but a sign of very deep wariness. We go through several rounds, with me putting the pliers down, picking them up and putting them down again, all the time trying to explain in English {how else?} that I want to help. Suddenly, after about 2 minutes of resisting, she seems to accept that I mean well and goes totally still, like a child being brave at the dentist. I carefully get the mouthparts of the tick into the pliers and pull. Out it pops, like a miniscule grey lobster's head smeared pink with a drop of Emma's blood, fringed with 5 or 6 of her mid-blonde fur hairs. She makes no sound through all of this, shrugs her neck where it was and walks in a little circle, seemingly agreeing the ordeal wasn't so bad after all. I throw the repulsive miniature crustacean body part in the bin. Barely half an hour later, a tired-looking woman appears at my door. She and her mother upstairs are struggling to disconnect the washing machine as they pack to move out. Goodness - neighbourliness. I go up and find the machine in a dark cupboard. I ask for a lamp, and plug it into the socket inside the cupboard illuminating the situation. This evokes amazed cooing noises from the two women. Then the pliers help me turn off the tap properly before unscrewing the nozzle. Finally I'm asked to stop the boiler display blinking, and I randomly press one of two buttons on the display. It stops. Never really seen myself as a handy man, but if this is all you have to do to qualify, I suppose I could get used to the part. Today, the Norwegian girls tell me Emma is to be operated on tomorrow, Friday, because a roll in the hay at her Xmas kennels might have left her up the duff, endangering her legal status for flying to her new home in Norway on the 21st.

January 13th; After Emma the Dog sends me to bed last night at 11pm with her grumbling noises {she seems to have very firm views about me spending too long on the internet - I wonder if the laptop makes an annoying high whine I can't hear but she can?} I get up early this morning to find not one, but two, complete sets of protest poo both neatly arrayed on the only rug in a room otherwise totally floored with lino and tiles. Am I overfeeding her? Perhaps 2/3 of a tea mug of food granules is a lot more than one coffee cup of food granules? Or the bone? Ho hum. I clean up, pop the rug in the washing machine, and we go out for a mega-walk where we twice meet Hungarian dog lovers who pet her and tell me about their own dogs. We walk out of town east along Prater street and Emma & I discover the university botanical gardens in one run-down area. The last place in town I would have expected them to be. Back at the nearby patisserie, the old lady and her brother give Emma a scone each. Now she wants more, and acts personally hurt if I eat any myself.
January 12th; Emma the Dog is being very strict with me. We went out for six walks yesterday. She makes it clear she doesn't like me staying up past 10pm. Today we "only" go out four times, but I bring her back a bone and this seems to keep her busy for a while, though {understandably} she seems to need constant cuddling and reassurance that I love her.

January 11th; First day with Emma the Dog. I go out with her and get new & stronger curtain hooks so I can remount the big curtain without the landlady's plastic hooks snapping off regularly. Emma is apparently a mix of German Shepherd, Belgian Shepherd {hence yellower fur and smaller build} and something else. An early life of constant starvation is fairly clear from her desperate interest in bits of bread and discarded sandwiches lying on the pavement, despite having been fed normally before we went out. In an odd way, Emma's presence is making me more organised. In the morning, I hear the clicking of her claws on my lino floor outside the bedroom as she waits politely for me to get up and do something interesting with her. The need to repeatedly give her walks {she seems easily bored, and enthusiastic to explore the neighbourhood - of course after seven years on a six-foot chain most of us would probably value getting out and about) chops my day up into small chunks, so I have to tick things off my list between trips out with Emma.
January 10th; After Mystery Friend 2 persuades me to help his Norwegian charity friends last night, Emma the ex-stray dog arrives at my flat in the evening for her 12-day stay. A rather dishy Nordic blonde climbs out of her white van holding a wriggling puppy under one arm, a lit cigarette in the other hand, and opens the back. She hands Emma, an 8-year-old Alsation mongrel, over to me, complete with sack of food granules, food & water bowls, rubber chewing thing, leash and sleeping basket. Emma has, I'm told, had a ghastly life in the town of Heves - home of the Scientologist builder Terri sued - where some Gypsies apparently starved her on a chain. The detail that she was found surrounded by her own dead puppies, some of which she had been forced to eat due to hunger, is hard to forget. Emma has been rehabilitated since then by six months with an Irish girl, I hear. Her fur has grown back, apart from the two front shins, and she seems quiet & diffident but very affectionate, with her spirit of doggy curiosity unbroken. Emma looks round my flat shyly sniffing at things, and we go out for two late-night walks. It occurs to me she might be still looking for the Irish girl, missing the company of the first human host who treated her kindly.

January 9th; Finish the book lent to me by Mystery Friend 2, 'The Triumph of the Political Class' by Peter Oborne. A disturbing and important book about British politics since the 1980s. Everyone who cares about freedom should read it. My only complaint is the startling fact he makes no mention of Labour's genuinely sinister attempt to pass their first draft of the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill in 2006, a law so nakedly authoritarian in its unamended version that most Britons seem to have completely blotted it out of their memory, perhaps in disbelief.
In the afternoon, I join Tiina, Ines, & Jill to watch a film I wouldn't have gone to otherwise, but which I thoroughly enjoy: 'Avatar', a large-budget sci-fi adventure set on a planet called Pandora. This is directed by James Cameron, the Canadian whose films are usually expensive to make but commercially successful. Cameron brings us not one but three relative novelties - a plotline about remotely inhabiting other bodies {the 'avatars' of the title}, lots of fairly impressive computer-generated footage {since the indigenous tribeseople on the alien planet are ten-foot-tall blue people with yellow eyes and vaguely catlike faces, they certainly need to be computer-generated}, and all of this shot in 3D for good measure. Wearing the special spectacles with polarised glass in the cinema is not too bad {my first 3D movie ever} though for some reason the spectacles pinch at the bridge of the nose quite unnecessarily. If this is not enough raw circus, we also get floating mountains, as promised by the poster. I assume these contain lots of the rare mineral {archly named 'unobtainium', arf arf} the humans are on Pandora to profitably mine. This would make sense since a small chunk of this mineral floats above the desk of the snide corporate manager in his office, but this is never spelt out. If it had been spelt out, we might have wondered why the human miners don't just tow away a floating mountain or two instead of turning massive firepower on the tribespeople's sacred home, but never mind about that. Jill claims to spot men firing from the open doors of helicopters without air-supply masks {the atmosphere is thin and the gravity low}, and some of the day-time/night-time switches look odd to me, but the overall spectacle is impressive & grand enough to carry you through. The blue-skinned people are likeable but, like so many computer-generated characters, still have an odd residual smoothness and 'float' about many of their movements. As well as being Australian abos resisting the mining company, they are also rather obviously the Red Indians who still haunt the USA's imagination, with their yodelling yells, feather head-dress, and proud warrior ethos. The film clearly owes much to Ursula LeGuin's 1970s eco-feminist sci-fi novella 'The Word for World is Forest' {set on an alien planet covered in forest, where green-skinned, peace-loving tribespeople with a poetic & magical culture are oppressed by a greedy human logging firm [Why would you transport anything as bulky as wood across space? Anyway, not important...]}, but enough has changed to make this copyright-different, at least in the groovy details like the bodyswapping and the hovering rocks. For me the starring character was Cameron's forest itself, filled with a variety of interesting animals and plants, made to look rather more unearthly yet still more believable than your usual alien flora & fauna. At moments the forest with its glowing plants succeeds in making the film dreamlike and haunting, as do some of the scenes where they fly on the backs of large pterodactyl/bat-type creatures doing vertiginous swoops off the sides of the mountains that hover in the clouds. To add to the pudding, there is a gigantic tree of the order of a mile high, our hero is wheelchair-bound in his human form, poignantly able to experience running and bounding when remotely linked to his ten-foot-tall blue alter ego, while the helicopters of the future look interestingly different and are complemented by a magnificently thuggish airborne sort of aircraft carrier. I can tell all this works on me because I am surprised to find the film is so long, and emerge blinking into the late afternoon darkness completely caught up in it still. Though my own 3D vision is faulty {my brain tends to ignore my right eye}, enough of Avatar is in depth that I occasionally feel the urge to brush away a fern poking out at me from the jungle, and I am caught up in a fairly 'shallow' fantasy much more strongly than I would be, I'm sure, in normal 2D.
After a milkshake with the girls, Tiina whisks us across town by car, and I join Mystery Friend 2, complaining of a hangover, for a tasty pasta supper with herbal tea at his flat. We watch three more episodes of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' on DVD, reminding me of Fawlty Towers in the way the central character gets into terrible scrapes that are almost too much to watch. In its own way caustically exposing more American insecurities {though knowingly in this case}, we get 1. a story about Larry accidentally going to a baseball game with a black prostitute after nervously buying cannabis to ease his father's glaucoma, 2. an episode about penis size, lust of white men for black girls, and problems passing medical checks and faking strokes, 3. a tale of a condom coated with a chemical to maintain erections worn inside out rendering Larry's wife's vagina numb until she is cured by the ancient herbal knowledge of the Red Indian gardener Wandering Bear. Home to sleep. I dream surprisingly vividly of flying & running through luminous 3D forests while being blue.
January 8th; Some quotes cross my mind that I failed to log. Mystery Friend 2 a week ago candidly describes his excitement about one girl as "...purely trouser-driven. She's just the hottest thing I've ever seen," Robin in the countryside at the weekend tries to claim that some Glaswegians inject flat beer into their veins. Whether this is true or not, it certainly sounds like it belongs with glue-sniffers eating deep-fried Mars bars. Robin also adds that his part of Hungary, where we are late that night surrounded by snow, "has some very interesting moths," bringing respectful nods from Lisa & me. Two nights ago, Mystery Friend 2 mentions a Norwegian charity that rescues lost dogs in Hungary, putting them for a few weeks with students in Budapest "before shipping them out to Norway to live in splendour in the frozen north. It's like Schindler's List."
I finish a paperback puzzle thriller I picked up in Budapest 2nd-hand a few days ago, and 2nd-hand it deserves to be, New York Times bestseller or not. 'The Rule of Four' is from the same stable as 'The Da Vinci Code', and though it is a lot better than the Dan Brown book, it is still pretty bad. Just as the Nigel of Darkness predicted to me years ago, history is the new cool thing in the 21st century. Mystery & excitement once again come from the past as much as {or more than?} from the future. The story is about a group of young friends at Princeton University drawn into a scholarly dispute about a mysterious Renaissance text. In its defence, it has probably made tens of thousands of readers passionately curious about Italian, Latin, & Greek learning for their very first time. Unfortunately, the novel is mainly a tiresome screed about two themes of obsessive, almost morbid, importance to US culture: (1) Americans' powerful longings about history, something they are both desperate to invoke and repudiate at the same time; (2) American men's peculiar & tormented fixation on their friendships with other men and with their own fathers. These two are the same problem in a way, one personally felt over one or two generations, the other larger-scale, felt over a couple of centuries. (1) and (2) can be seen at work in almost any piece of American pop culture, but this book is a choice example where these worries gnaw away at the centre of the narrative. There is also some pompous writing, stuff like pp 272-3 "...and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two, but loving one. Love draws lines between us like an astronomer plotting a constellation from stars, joining points into patterns that have no basis in nature. The butt of every triangle becomes the heart of another, until the roof of reality is a tesselation of love affairs. Taken together, they have the pattern of netting; and behind them, I think, is Love. Love is the only perfect fisherman, the one who casts the broadest net, which no fish can escape. His reward is to sit alone in the tavern of life, forever a boy among men, hoping some day to tell stories about the one that got away." Of course this - apart from being an ugly mash of drunken metaphors - doesn't even make sense on its own terms: poignant evidence of just how illiterate a humanities degree can leave not one, but two authors {Ian Caldwell & Dustin Thomason}. The plodding tone gives us Scooby Doo without laughs. Along with bad prose, we get silly plot twists {the Botticelli in the post takes the biscuit, but there is more - only a Dan Brown fan could suspend disbelief with this}; a narrator of such weak character he accepts his girlfriend's ultimatum at face value; a gushing, breathless fascination with the general "ancientness" of Princeton; and - as said already - pages and pages of maudlin moping about male friendships and fathers. The title invites comparison with the Conan Doyle story 'The Sign of Four', but while Sherlock Holmes was pretty simple stuff, Doyle's writing was both tighter and lighter than this. Part of it is the strain of a short story puffing itself out into a novel, but other parallels are intriguing. The ambiguously homoerotic Holmes/Watson friendship carries many of the modern American anxieties, though Sherlock was less shrill. Conan Doyle was also a century fresher and more original. However, the most curious difference is that, flat as they are, the cartoonish Holmes stories exude mysterious confidence rather than mysterious doubt.
Here's an alarmingly Photoshopped Russian picture of an undressed girl.

January 7th; Finish one of Robin's books, 'Picasso's Mask', by Andre Malraux. Clearly translated into English {by June Guicharnaud} from a fluid, playful French, the result in English is in parts baffling & disjointed, even though I get the impression Guicharnaud did as good a job as she could. Malraux tackles several things in parallel. We are with him as Picasso's widow shows him round the paintings left in their home in the 1970s shortly after Pablo's death, as he reminisces about conversations with Picasso Malraux had, as he remembers the 'Museum Without Walls' exhibition Malraux was involved with, as he speculates about art in different cultures alongside our own. His writing style can be assertive {"Europe then tried to invent a universal Middle Ages" / to explain the differentness of non-European art} or cryptic, but if the reader can hang on to the thread, the reward is a rich and brisk text. Malraux dances expressively round the problems raised by the artistic revolution Picasso still seemed, even as late as 1970, to have dominated. Quoting himself answering Jacqueline saying "we never quite settled down", he replies "Did you ever really settle down anywhere? Judging from Mougins {another house}, I should say it was the flocks of paintings that had settled down there. And spent their time reproducing at top speed. What you two did was tend the sheep..." In his confident prose, Malraux emerges as a flamboyent and forceful figure, as powerful a personality as his friend Picasso. "During the period of Asia's great sleep, from Peking to Constantinople, admirable {?} small fragments of faience and mosaic used to fall gently into the silence. I had heard chips of mandarin tiles from Imperial City fall when foxes would climb into the violet asters at the foot of the high wall; and turquoise chips from the Koranic School at Isfahan, where roses grew wild again behind silver doors.... For the great ceremonies, thousands of kneeling women, who held in their long-fingered hands gladioli, as yellow as the bonze's robes, would, all at once, lower their field of flowers, which formed patterns that flowed like the wind's." As a poetic French rationalist, Malraux dodges the contradictions of saying that great artists literally have the power to transform reality {as he does}, yet do not outlast time and cannot replace nor invoke the gods they once depicted {as he also says}. The result is a book-length piece of lyrical paradox.
January 6th; Mariann's Phil volunteers some excellent links to something I'm looking for - prewar shirt patterns. Thanks Phil! Briefly meet Robin, Zita, Film-maker Peter, Kath & others for tea before attending an enjoyable mulled-wine-and-cakes thing at the flat of a Hungarian mathematician whose introductory course on topology I optimistically attended at college. Late drinks with Mystery Friend 2 at a bar where he tells me about the Druze. Then we watch an episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' where the central character briefly believes he is a gentile, as a result nobly agreeing to give one of his kidneys to a friend who won't lend him a golf club in return.

January 5th; Drive back into town with Robin & Lisa. I have a vindaloo curry with Mystery Friend 2 to further combat my cold.
January 4th; Spend day coughing & steaming my sinuses in the house while Robin & Lisa travel off to some thermal baths. I also get his useless scanner to finally work mainly so as to scan in a magazine image of Stockhausen, when I could have had the same picture crisper and using only a hundredth as many kilobytes here. Sigh.

January 3rd; Thick snow everywhere. I am woken in Robin's studio by a double rap on the door. Getting dressed and going to open it, I find Lupus the large shaggy Komondor pronking about in the doorway, randomly matted with snow. The hound seems keen to play with me and in a good mood, despite being chained to a car tyre with extra weights attached. Looking for footprints around the studio, I see none. The snow is three inches deep apart from a couple of curving shallow runways of one-inch-deep packed snow behind wherever the Hungarian sheepdog has trundled here & there dragging its rubber ring in search of adventure. Against the dazzling white snow it is clear that Lupi is not white, but a kind of deep cream tone, the colour of butter almost going off. It slowly sinks in for me that the double rap that woke me up was not a human knock, but the enthusiastic Lupus headbanging the door at full canter followed a second later by his tethered car tyre whiplashing on the chain.
Everyone goes down to the dyke to do sledging. Robin & I follow them in the Izh motorbike with sidecar (once we roll the green Benz out of the garage into the snow to get the bike out of its corner). In places the snow is a foot deep. We go on a small trek through some impossibly perfect-looking woods where every twig holds a windblown blade of snow twice its own width, like a kind of 3D etching. This is when we lose two of the three fox terriers. After darkness falls, Zsuzsi cooks dinner and Kasper carefully melts four red candles into place in the candelabra so we can dine without electric light. Three hours later, while Robin is driving the children to Kecskemet, the two missing terriers find their way home around 9pm. This is the night I think Robin, Lisa, & I watch a DVD of 'The Motorcycle Diaries', an atmospheric, gentle-seeming film about a journey through 1950s Latin America by a 29-year-old Argentine biochemist and his idealistic young 23-year-old medical student friend. The younger man is of course Che Guevara before he turned into a bedroom-wall student poster {personally killing quite a few people in the process} and we are quite movingly shown how his chance meetings with oppressed poor people gradually radicalise him over the course of the continent-wide journey. Perhaps the best depiction I've yet seen of how much Marxism resembles a religion, whose visions of a transformed world urge the pure-hearted into personal sacrifice & martyrdom. Some lovely scenes and lightly-treated moments of character development. This is really a movie about quite early beatniks, since the point is that (1) both travellers are young, (2) come from privileged backgrounds, (3) and in the process of discovering others are transformed themselves in a kind of blend of picaresque quest and spiritual ordeal. The tag line for the film states precisely this - "Let the world change you... and you can change the world", though of course Guevara didn't change the world at all in any sense the shocked young student would recognise if he came back to check. Element (2) is vital to the proto-hippy worldview, since their privileged background is a/ what allows them to slum-travel in the first place, instead of having to work like everyone else, and b/ is what deprives them of any personal experience of work and thus any close understanding of how life really operates. The two together are a deadly combination, of course, since they build the youthful combination of confidence, ignorance, and outrage that leads the young idealist into a viewpoint where he is morally obliged to kill people in order to improve the world. Quixote as tragedy rather than comedy.
January 2nd; After some confusion, catch the right train to Kecskemet. This is the train boarded at the Budapest airport stop by Lisa from Notting Hill. She has just now flown from Vicenza, Italy. It's her love of Palladio's architecture that takes her back to Vicenza on repeated visits to see his buildings. Robin drives us down to Tiszainoka along almost black country lanes, where we can see only snowflakes slanting into the headlights. Back at his house, once the children go to bed, the three of us talk until the small hours round the fireplace of spark-spitting logs. Later on, I finish Robin's copy of 'Alchemy & Mysticism' by Alexander Roob, a Taschen art book foolishly published as a thick paperback with an easily breakable spine, containing a couple of thousand haunting images of the Western alchemical hermetic tradition. These have detailed captions, and some linking text. The book suggestively slips in four or five 20th-century art pieces by the likes of Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp (Duchamp's photo of a single door being used for two doors in a 1920s Paris apartment is the final image in the book). The text explains some links, sets out some categories of theory & influence, and briefly describes various views among the alchemists without settling on one interpretation. The final effect is one of the intense importance the creators of these images saw in what they were depicting while hiding behind elaborate symbolic codes. They share an odd mix of playfulness and deadly earnest, and cry out to be thought through, in some way solved.

January 1st; Tasty lentil soup with Kata, Zsofia, Ildiko, & Andrea. I fail to make it over to Martin's for midnight. Around 2am, the girls want to go to Piaf, so that's where we go. We squeeze down narrow stairs into its crowded cellar disco which does quite a good impersonation of Dante's Inferno. This is a swarming mass of bodies, packed tight into two airless rooms thick with cigarette smoke. At one point a girl, when I suggest she be careful about how much she's drinking, says "I don't know this word ['careful'] - I only know 'too much'," and my heart sinks. Not that old story again. I only escape the dungeon onto the bright, chilly morning street at 8am.

Recent weblog entries continued:

Who can translate the next 300 words into Korean or Hindi? Contact me and there will be revelry.

Languages dying out each week - who cares?

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December 31st; Apparently a rare astronomical event tonight, says spaceweather.com - a lunar eclipse on a blue moon on a New Year's Eve. At least according to the modern, slightly dull, definition of a 'blue moon' current since the 1930s, namely the second full moon in a calendar month.

December 30th; Drinks with Martin, Mystery Friend 2, Gregor, & Zsolna. Later meet Nicholas, who works in public lighting. Two snatches of early Northern Soul, when it still had the hollow, tonking dancehall sound, from the wondrously-named Brenda & The Tabulations: The Wash / Scuse Uz Y'All.
December 29th; Meet Howard & his friend Peter, who tells of designing lettersets for early dot-matrix printers in the old days of computing. I tell them about Marjorie Hall of the home budgerigar breeding and the four scrabble sets in different languages.

December 28th; Journey back to Budapest by train, finding a locked empty compartment on the crowded overheated train. The sticky sign explaining why the empty compartment is locked is that the heating is not working. Perfect! Amazingly, I persuade a female attendant that I actually prefer a compartment without MAV's usual airing-cupboard levels of hot stuffiness, and she lets me and two gruff male Hungarian students in to relax in a comfortably cool compartment for once. Join Alvi for coffee straight from the train, who has inspiring things to say about e-books and the world of i-Phone apps, and am still lugging my luggage when I join Mystery Friend 2 for a drink somewhere else after that, meeting Zsofia again & her friend Kata, complete with deep husky voice. Martin & Mystery Friend 2 take me to the Feszek club disco cellar, where a mix of haircuts and tunes almost make it a psychobilly event.
December 27th; Hospital reports that Georgina now fine and sends her back in the morning by bus. Marcsi comes over, cooks turkey, and we all pull crackers. After dinner we watch a film on video, 'The Blue Max', a rather interesting mid-1960s film about German World-War-One fighter pilots, what women will do to satisfy their hurt pride, and what men will do to maintain the honour of an officer corps. Some sharp characterisation and a couple of clever plot surprises.

December 26th; Boxing Day, beautifully sunny again. Georgina is ill, an ambulance is called, but gets lost looking for the house. After half an hour the ambulance men get the hang of the one-street village, arrive, and take Georgina to hospital. This song shows how Hugh Everett's son, an "Eel", earns his living. A refreshingly down-to-earth North Korean car advert (its music oddly like that still played in some Hungarian Balaton holiday resorts, Robin points out) & a South Korean beer advert. Which looks sillier? On the other hand... Then again, on the other other hand...
December 25th; Strangely warm Christmas Day. While sunny, almost warm enough to go outside with no shirt. Sun dips below horizon under complex, interlocking clouds, lining their serrated edges with golden fringes. I walk through mild rain to the end of the village. By the time I turn back at the water tower, the sunset has been boxed into a single window, an oblong slot of sky framed on three sides by walls of blue-grey cloud. The Tiszainoka church has the five-foot-high pentacle of fairy lights on the side of the bell tower again, blinking on and off, while a single strand of richer, more flame-coloured fairy lights loops between the two bell-tower windows like a dribble of luminous honey. After dark, drenching rain & spectacular lightning.

December 24th; Christmas Eve. Take chocolates and a shirt-making project to the seamstress in the next village. Finish Robin's copy of a book of essays by Roger Scruton called 'The Roger Scruton Reader'. Scruton makes clear, well-reasoned points: modernist architecture offers no elements which can be reused as references to dignify simple buildings or help them refer to past & future; the fox hunt and its hospitality rituals symbolically reaffirm patterns of land ownership; erotic love is aimed at a personality; Burke's point about the unborn and the dead also being partners in any social contract alongside the living explains how continuity underlines any culture that aims at the eternal; good teaching is not pupil-centred, but knowledge-centred. I don't quite agree on wine and some of the references to Schelling & Kant elude me. I'm not sure if the USA is the healthy, robust nation Scruton thinks it is - he writes how Americans "constantly rehearse their founding myth" as if this is not good evidence there is something seriously wrong with that founding myth and that Americans know this deep down. Nonetheless, I can still recall Emma planning to attend a Scruton talk just to shout him down, obviously unaware his insights go deeper than anything she ever supported.
December 23rd; Quiet but strange day in the Hungarian countryside. Play chess with Kasper & Bela, and draughts (I lose) with Zsuzsi. The intense cold seems to be lifting. All the same, the base of the Christmas tree is still sealed into a block of ice the size of the tin bath outside the garage it has been sitting in. I get the two girls to bring out hot water, and there's an odd moment when I'm trying to cut into the ice block and Zsuzi says in a significant voice, "Shall I get ...the axe?", obviously quoting some vampire/zombie/werewolf movie. Both she & Letty start giggling. Zsuzsi brings me the axe and looks like she rather enjoys carrying it.

December 22nd; Slow, restful journey into the rustic wasteland of southern Hungary. Find I have an hour and a half changing trains in Kecskemet, and discover an empty restaurant playing eezee-listening acoustic-guitar-accompanied ballads, real Radio 2 stuff. Yet right now, in this mood, oddly restful. First proper meal since food poisoning yesterday morning. I hold it down. Arriving on the Great Plain, find Robin will be an hour late due to an event at church. I sit in the tiny part of the Lakitelek railway-station pizza restaurant where there is no smoking, drinking pear juice with fizzy mineral water and checking e-mail on my laptop. They let me charge it up from the power socket just to the left of the cast-iron range. After an hour, Robin & his younger daughter Zsuzsi pick me up.
December 21st; Wake up early several times in night with diarrhoea, which turns serious when I want to vomit but cannot. Food poisoning again? The low point is 9am, when for about ten minutes I lie on the comfortingly cold tiled floor praying to either vomit or lose the feeling I need to. It does ebb away quite soon after I frame my desperate hopes. I potter slowly through rest of day, making sure not to slip over in the thick white snow or the greasy grey slush, getting quite a lot done, but eating nothing. Train ticket for Robin's village tomorrow, some gifts, wrapping paper, renew postbox, mail out Christmas cards far too late of course, buy some white cotton fabric, lots of queuing. Do some more papier mache, and meet Mystery Friend 2 in the evening. He persuades me to eat some pasta and half a sandwich. This goes quite well, so, emboldened, I even drink a beer. We discuss Hungarian and Balkan women's bodies & characters, how "if Hungary was part of London, it would be Catford", and what fun it is to watch a girl with her eyes open heading into a disastrous marriage due to her being too cowardly, lazy, or unimaginative to show her hand to the kind of men she really likes. Talking over my morning illness with MF2, and its similarity to the sudden bout of poisoning that stopped me going to Austria for a week's work in February, I begin to wonder if slightly soft, vacuum-wrapped cucumbers are the culprit. Had another one yesterday, just as I had one of those cucumbers on the day before that horrible 2-day illness ten months ago.

December 20th; Snow still just sits around outdoors on all horizontal surfaces, being cold & white, not doing anything. The crisp yet chunky sound of Rodney Hunter's band : Definition [2] / Let Your Soul Guide Your Heart / and, with Earl Zinger, Physical. Steve Angello's remix - a moodier version of Gadjo's 'So Many Times'.
December 19th; Go to Keleti railway station to meet a friend on her delayed overnight train from Romania. Am struck by genuine chilliness in the station. People expect it to go 20 degrees below for a few days. We lunch & chat until Mystery Friend 2 arrives from airport, having just flown in from another exotic country. In the evening I find some interviews with the young Bobby Fischer on YouTube. Here's one. We join Martin & Zsofia for dinner.

December 18th; Snow presents itself in Budapest. A lovely online list of weird books, including such gems as 'Blessed are the Cheesemakers', 'Soldier Bear', 'Jewish Chess Masters on Stamps', 'Teleportation: a How-To Guide', & 'Why Do I Vomit?'.
December 17th; Two songs about male self-deception, and a man's uneasy alternating between feelings of omnipotence & helplessness. 'Superman Lover {Something Wrong With Me}' by Johnny Guitar Watson, bringing back the strange moment in the outdoor bar after Martin's Hallowe'en dinner party where Martin & Mystery Friend 2 at the bar struggle to chat in the confusing company of Miss Non Sequitur, while I retreat to a sofa and look up at the stars. Then Mel Britt's poignant hope-against-hope Northern Soul anthem 'She'll Come Running Back', which one online poster concisely describes as working off the contrast between the "joyful, chugging beat and the sad, sad lyrics".

December 16th; Mulled wine at Jeremy 2 & Csilla, bumping into Kath and her friends Kate & Greg. Meanwhile, Andeas sends me links to two videos Robin & I watched at his flat in Cologne almost 3 weeks ago. Charming custom where children dressed as the three wise kings bless a house in southern Germany, and an eerie forest scene where an adult {later to act Goldfinger} bewitches a child.
December 15th; Finish the book Elysia kindly sent me some time back, 'Tarot: Theory & Practice', by Ly de Angeles. Ly, a self-proclaimed Australian witch, is a confident & cheerful-sounding person who is clearly an accomplished and instinctive Tarot reader. So instinctive that in places, it is hard to see where her ideas are coming from - she writes things like "Look at those two cards there, don't they look threatening?" without having said why. Her English is a bit odd sometimes. She twice uses the phrase "with no discernible differences to blowflies or elephants" {I think she means 'similarities to', but I'm not sure}. There are a few curious sentences, but mostly the impression is of a self-assured, breezy personality who has some difficulty explaining how she perceives patterns in spreads because it all seems so natural to her. An interesting index at the end gives some surprisingly specific meanings for cards in the company of other cards {"Knight of Wands + 10 of Wands + World = backpacking", "9 of Cups + Devil + 2 of Cups = a situation where deviant sexual extremes give pleasure"} - surprisingly specific in view of how much she has counselled developing intuition. Perhaps each Tarot reader needs to create their own such glossary, almost from scratch, as a kind of vocabulary of images to use in readings? It's hard to imagine many cartomancers agreeing that 8 of Cups or 7 of Wands have "no consistent correlations." My three main quibbles are these.
(1) It could have been physically smaller. The large-format floppy paperback ill serves the subject matter, and wastes space woefully. Big margins are left unused, and the diagrams of card spreads are smaller than they need to be, yet much harder to follow than the clear diagrams in Pollack's '78 Degrees of Wisdom' which fit into a standard paperback page that could go in a coat pocket.
(2) The diagrams are hard to read. Of course, it being a Llewellyn book, it's natural to illustrate it with the Llewellyn Tarot pack, but since this set uses lots of muddy midtones plus a very elaborate italic font for the card labels, when shrunk down in black-and-white - unnecessarily small on the page - the result is that you are looking at a layout of small blurred oblongs of grey. They could easily have been left as empty rectangles with clearly printed labels to denote the cards, but they weren't. Unless you are deeply familiar with this specific pack and can recognise dim outlines of images because you already know the pack, the diagrams will simply be illegible. To compound this, Angeles uses a complex set of spreads, eight in all, to thoroughly look at a client's question, and understanding this sequence of spreads is central to grasping the book. She has her own version of the Celtic Cross, for example. The positions in these are numbered, and then we move on to a couple of case histories, proceeding through each of the eight spreads in turn, only in this case without numbered positions. As a concession to the illegibility of the diagrams, each spread gives a list of the cards, giving the number of the card's position, but in order to locate the card on the diagram, you then have to leaf back several pages to find the key for the position numbers. There is so much space on each page, this could easily have been shown in each diagram by numbering the positions on the page. In a couple of spreads in fact this was done, showing someone saw the problem, and then failed to follow through and finish the job.
(3) The pseudo-science tests the patience a little. Most readers might not know much about the scientific references Angeles airily drops into the text, but it is hard to think they would not care - otherwise why bother referring to quantum physics or "Y-Node Theory" at all? In one footnote, she announces that "In 1933, the International Committee of Weights and Measures adopted the triple point of water.... as the Kelvin"... not how I remember school physics - and why in a Tarot book? The Kelvin is a degree of temperature the same size as the degree Celsius only counting up from absolute zero {like the Rankine for Farenheit}, and the triple point of water {ice, water, water vapour in equilibrium} is used to calibrate the Kelvin, but it's not the same thing as the Kelvin. Since footnotes like these are not needed, readers will ask themselves what the point of an opening section about the Big Bang is anyway. Angeles seems to understand her own view of how deterministic a Tarot reading is, but I'm not sure I do, or that the quick tour of magazine physics helped. Other features undermine her message - a couple of anecdotes, like one about her first client with AIDS, are repeated almost verbatim in different chapters. Slips like this unwittingly give the impression that Angeles is not so experienced after all. Getting a writer or editor to interview her might have made a better book.

December 14th; Travel out to A-Plast & buy new 20-mm transparent sheeting cut into boards. Decide to come off the nasal spray for a day tomorrow after reading this about the active ingredient.
December 13th; Saint Lucia's Day. If I was living in Sweden, I could see girls wearing crowns made of candles this evening. Annika tells me it's regarded as a jolly good laugh sometimes for groups of them in their white costumes to enter the hotel bedrooms of people attending the Nobel Prize ceremony uninvited in the middle of the night. Accompanied by TV camera crews. If you didn't know about the custom, being woken from a deep sleep by some strapping blonde with lit candles in her hair singing a carol in Swedish might give you a really strong impression for a moment or two that you were dead. Anyway, I'm not in Sweden, I'm in Hungary, and at least this morning I was not dead but still rather poorly. However, the dubious-sounding nasal spray Rob sternly recommended me last night by both phone & e-mail turns out to be extraordinary. What on earth is in it? Surely nothing as puny as mere antibiotics. I arrive at the WestEnd mall to look for a pharmacist that opens on a Sunday, feeling optimistic and on the mend but very fragile. This is after two days of drinking Coldrex/Lemsip, taking vitamin C, and eating nuts & vegetables like a forest hermit. The cold even in the tunnel between metro and basement entrance to the mall is remarkable. Not actually uncomfortable, but I feel like my skin has been removed. I enter the shopping centre in the pleasant daze of the stupified convalescent, strangely, childishly aware that there are lots of people around me, and that they are moving about, sometimes quite close by me, purchasing things. In some peculiar way everything seems new, and surprising, fresh. Something looms into sight, and for about half a second I'm quite frightened: a person wearing a giant plush dog's head, with a basket of chocolates. Even though they are obviously there to spread a mood of good cheer and I know it is not really a werewolf or dogman, I'm still vaguely nervous as we pass. The soft grey dog mask is huge and ugly. I get to the pharmacy, which is open and brightly lit, and I drift in, feeling tremendously calm. Two skinny Gypsy lasses in tight jeans, like cartoon drawings of tarty girls, look utterly astonished when I gallantly indicate they should go to the counter before me. Seconds later, I too am served. Even as I sit outside in a handy armchair struggling to open the nasal spray and pierce its nozzle with my biro, I feel passive & patient. Finally, I squirt some up my nostrils, and wander down to the food court to see if I ought to eat something. After about ten minutes quietly grazing on a plastic bowl of Greek salad, I realise that events & perceptions have become sharp & purposeful. My head starts to feel clean & crisp. I begin to feel strong enough to start ticking things off my to-do list. By the time I am in the photocopy shop half an hour later a curious mood of poise, energy and composure has me in its grip. I then proceed to methodically burn through a list of goals all afternoon & evening. I tell you, citizens, this stuff is the real deal.
Lots more old clips of 80s group Trabant have appeared on the internet {a sort of Hungarian version of the Young Marble Giants, with less backbone than the Leeds group but richer rhythms, richer melodies, and better-looking members}. Even this music can't make me feel gloomy. Bringing back various parties I was at with my Hungarian friends {at least until I got rid of them} who took exactly this view of life, here are: Rovid Seta {Short Walk} / Ez a Haz is Ledolhet {Even this Building could Crumble} / Maniakus Depresszio {...duh...} / Lo {Horse} / Fekete Otto {Otto Black} / Napszuras {Sunstroke} / Harang {Bell} / Kesz az Egesz {It's All Over}. There's plenty more where that came from. Bracing, inspiring even - at least it is if you're wired on headcold medication.

December 12th; Foul headcold continues. How dare this thing invade me? Rob sweetly phones me up, rather concerned by my online raging against the infection. Somebody cares! Recall both my former Hungarian landlady's frank astonishment when Nina was ill and I went round to nurse her {"No Hungarian man would ever look after a sick girlfriend," she chuckled, baffled by me as much as admiring} and an intriguing remark of my mother's many years before. Most girlfriends, mother warned me, wouldn't want me to nurse them when they were ill ...because that would mean I would see them not looking their best. I might stop finding the girl attractive. Actually, thinking over the landlady's claim, one Hungarian male exception: a mad architect I once knew who had a samurai sword {and showed me he could use it by attacking a shrub} was very caring about girlfriends and in fact ex-girlfriends. He was constantly popping round to hospital to see some girl he had gone out with five years before. I also remember that he had very powerful arm muscles because he hauled himself up a rope to the ceiling of a two-storey-high barn every morning, not using his legs. Meanwhile, someone in Britain I only know online who calls herself Morningmoon sent me this compelling shadow theatre clip. This is an American group of dancers who seem to have named themselves after a fungus that lives on horse or cow manure and has a sort of spring-loaded system for firing spores a yard or so distant from the mother mould. Takes all sorts.
Several times in the last fortnight, recalled how Andreas & Nuel in Cologne both had horizontal strips of blackboard paint over the tops of their apartment doors, with a formula scribbled on in white chalk. Apparently a rather lovely German Catholic custom where the home is blessed & protected by the initials of the three wise kings from the east {Casper, Melchior, Balthazar} - the three letters also encoding the Latin for "Christ Bless this House" {Christus Mansionum Benedictum}. The official magic is done by children who come round in costume. Andreas' lintel inscription read 20 * C + M + B * 09, showing he moved in this year, and he found Robin & me a clip on YouTube {wish I could find it now} of some German children dressed up as the wise kings singing a traditional carol to bless a brand new office. Wonderful stuff.

December 11th; Still ill. The strongest reaction I feel is sheer rage that my body has been violated by some filthy virus or bacillus, defiled again. I cannot do anything, I am at the mercy of some other organism choosing when I sneeze or cough, making my head ache, making me tired, working my body as if it was a puppet. How can I make sure this never happens again? The facts that I have a strain injury in my right hand and my laptops seem to be getting slower & slower are not particularly helpful either. This book looks quite interesting but pricey. Aniko at the plastics firm sends me an e-mail saying there are two more sheets of the 20mm sandwich in the storage room there - am starting to speculate on how to redesign book case to be both stronger ...and perhaps simpler.
December 10th; Last night's illness takes hold, damn it, and I wake at noon on the sofa, wrapped in a duvet, still coughing and sneezing. This is where I stay for a couple of hours, reading 'The China Study' a book about diet & disease. My head is full of muck. Especially irritating is the way snot moves around behind my face when I breathe, yet I cannot get it out by blowing my nose. Campbell & Campbell's book claims decades {even centuries} of evidence that many diseases are caused and exacerbated by eating large amounts of animal-based protein & dairy products has been repeatedly suppressed, ridiculed and sidelined by academic medicine and US lobbyists for various farming groups and processed food manufacturers. They recommend a diet of beans, vegetables, fruit, & nuts, and give data to show this austere {but evolutionarily authentic sounding} regimen slowing and halting cancers, curing diabetes & obesity, relieving autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis, curing heart disease - the list goes on. An interesting bit at the end relates how the older Campbell, the father Colin, found himself being smeared by industry lobby groups. He reveals that even the book editor asked if each chapter could have a different recommended diet for each disease please? Not just the same food suggestions each time? Reductionist complexity sells. Common sense that sounds just too simple to be true, doesn't.

December 9th; Wednesday. Robin drops by, getting phoned by one person for the first 20 minutes he's with me. Here's an almost alarming party sound from Dj It0, a remix of remixes, percussively rich to the point of fidgetiness. Intriguing cover art suggests some kind of Nouvel Art Nouveau reclaiming sterile modernism for leafy curviness. Part of the same tune {'Hooked' by the 99th Floor Elevators}, one mix earlier: Ben Preston's version.
Extraordinary photographs from the sky above arctic Norway early this morning. Most observers so far think the startling effect comes from "a malfunctioning rocket, possibly an ICBM launched from a Russian submarine." "A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern." From spaceweather.com.

December 8th; A club track celebrating the yappishness of girlies: 'I See You Watching', remixed by Paul Rincon. Bernie Madoff's gaolers are talking to me. Leggy Andrea is back at the fitness gym, pounding her way through her daily 7-mile treadmill run. She looks fit & rested after a couple of months' work in Italy. She is in a good mood, and immediately wants to know if I have managed to get hold of that fearsome appetite-suppressant she still misses the hit from.
December 7th; Journey out to A-plast, in the suburbs past Ors vezer tere, to buy see-through acrylic sheet to front Robin's print & a couple of other things. The place on Izabella utca wanted thirty quid for two sheets of plastic, while A-plast ask twenty three quid for those two and six other sheets of plastic. On the suburban HEV train I finish one of mother's books, 'Life in the French Country House' by Mark Girouard, a generously illustrated book about furnishings and organisation inside chateaux over several centuries. The 15th to 17th centuries are the most interesting part - somehow the country life of the 18th century gentry is already a little hard to take seriously knowing the French Revolution just a few decades later will cut lots of their heads off. Some interesting themes show how different France is from England - for example the basse-cour, a kind of adjacent courtyard full of chickens, sheep, geese, the odd goat or cow, was unembarrassedly right in front of many a grand chateau. Effectively a kind of giant fridge for live food, French nobles saw nothing odd in it for some centuries, then gradually it crept round the side of the chateau from the front, and after that moved a few hundred yards away over another century, sometimes behind some trees, influenced by fashion following English prudishness about farming, workers, and food. This work area - sometimes in the form of a model farm - was a common preoccupation among progressive landowners, making Marie Antoinette's experiments in dairy farming not as strange as later centuries thought them. Likewise, French nobles saw both bedrooms and bathrooms as social spaces for conversation and intimacy, while the English tended to regarded them as specialised areas only for sleeping or only for bathing. Whereas French chateaux never quite embraced the long-standing English fixation for centring a country house on the grand hall, even as it slowly mutated into the still-pivotal entrance corridor.

December 6th; The extremely slim cashier girl in the grocery across the road looks absolutely mortified to have been made to wear a pair of furry red horns and silver tinsel ribbon as a rather obscure gesture to St. Nicholas's Day. Later, green tea & quick chat about bullion, contango, and backwardation, with Ilan, who is on his way to a Steve Reich concert with his wife. Ilan is very happy with his new suit.
December 5th; Surprised last night to get a call from Inese. Also invited to a party by 3-Chick Tamas in the labyrinth of caves and tunnels under the Castle District, but get bored after ten minutes in the claustrophobic tunnel system, and leave after saying hello to Tamas and Carl. Today I reread the New Scientist article about shortsightedness, laze about a bit, and spend an hour training at the gym. Then after dark meet Inese, her friend IT Zita, & Howard. We stay out late talking of this & that.

December 4th; Mock interview with the 3rd student I should have seen yesterday. Mulled wines with Marion afterwards, hearing about her new blog and the successful launch of her 2nd autobiographical book about life in Hungary. On the bus travelling to do the mock university admissions interview {this time I manage to be early} I finish a remarkable book of Mike's, Robin's mysteriously vanished Geordie sculptor friend. At least 100 of the books in Robin's library out on the Great Plain are Mike's. At first a slightly offputting title, 'Secrets of the Great Pyramid' by Peter Tompkins turns out to be too impressive to be cranky, quite convincingly overturning some academic prejudices not just about Egypt, but about the whole ancient world of the Eastern Mediterranean: Greek, Mesopotamian, Persian, & Roman, and even later. This is effectively two books in one. Tompkins reviews a string of investigations of the Great Pyramids from early Arab digs in the Middle Ages onward, and his text is richly accompanied by wonderful old engravings and monochrome diagrams - mostly from the original explorers & archeologists, as well as from the artists accompanying Napoleon's expedition to Egypt. After that a long appendix by Livio Catullo Stecchini really forms a second book. Stecchini explains how Tompkins' review supplied a last missing piece for his own thesis, that all the measured dimensions of the Great Pyramid at Giza justify interpreting it as a scale model of the northern hemisphere aligned with north, marking - in a certain interpretation - the geodetic midpoint of Egypt, and encoding data the Egyptians were proud of and regarded as of sacred importance. These include values of pi and phi, vital for the golden section, as well as their units of cubit and foot, measured by star observation as subdivisions at various latitudes of one degree of rotation by the earth/sky. The argument is fairly persuasive that the Old Kingdom was aware of both the precession of the equinoxes {marking the 20-minute difference between the solar year and sidereal year} and the slight flattening of the earth's shape at the two poles, subtleties of calculation only equalled again in the 19th and 20th centuries. From this emerges a completely different history of old measurement units such as the foot, inch, ounce, gallon, mile etc throughout ancient and mediaeval history. Stecchini argues that fractional variations in the length of the foot across the ancient world depended on the latitude at which the earth's rotation was measured, and hence the linear measure {and measures of weight & capacity derived from it} calibrated against the earth's rotation through a single degree or minute of geographical distance. He adds that the French metric system actually underperformed European and Asian ancient measures since those built in time as an integral component by setting lengths with regard to the earth's rotation, while the metric system failed to incorporate time, to the regret of its founders. Stecchini complains that classicists have woefully patronised the ancient world, ignoring those cultures' passion for measurement & precision {in favour of a romantic post-18th-century view of the ancients as myth-dazed dreamers with an intellectual world built out of fables & legends}. He is also scornful of more recent fairy stories, such as the English foot being fixed by King Alfred's own bodily foot, rather than by exact astronomical methods.
Stecchini also claims the English loss of certainty over the English foot, and the corresponding loss of French certainty over the pied de roi, both emerged comparitively recently - since 1500 - from monarchical absolutists aiming to enlarge royal power {Queen Elizabeth I on one hand, and Colbert on the other}, legally restricting the privileges of the guilds. The guilds had been guardians of the proper measurement of those standards for their respective latitudes, not unlike the way that observatories set local times for time zones a couple of centuries later. Published a couple of years too early to incorporate the well-reasoned speculations of Davidovits & Morris in the 1980s that the early pyramids were built from blocks of a very superior kind of concrete even now hardly distinguishable from granite, Tompkins & Stecchini cover all the other major theories, from sensible to silly. They stop just short of mentioning von Daniken's wild-eyed case that "aliens built them". An excellent book, which could nonetheless be improved by a little proof-reading {one or two typos, and mistakes such as suggesting that bat dung "thickened" from 16 inches to 28 centimetres - of course that's a reduction} and a couple of pages each simply introducing basic terms and ideas in geodesy / geometry / metrology / astronomy. Many readers will wade in, tempted by the gorgeous illustrations and the twists and turns of each century's adventurers measuring their way round various ancient monuments. Still, the broad, restful margins would be a perfect location for more explanatory notes to smooth out parts of the numerical discussion.
December 3rd; Do mock university interviews with two students at Marion's school, one applying to Cambridge, one to Oxford. I get there embarrassingly late, due to just missing the tram, then just missing the 1st bus, then just missing the 2nd bus. Sigh. Some oldish but still cheerful Hed Kandi-ed Gadjo.

December 2nd; Make surprising progress building bookcase, sinking extra holes on the balcony with hot skewer then hot screwdriver. Franc drops by for tea just at the right moment to hold the whole object straight while I change boards. Restart papier mache, and mix cinnamon into the glue water. Later on, schnapps with Neighbour Katalin, who is very sweetly apologetic for killing every single one of my herblings bar the cactus and what she thinks is nettle but is actually the 3rd pot of lemon balm. The other fifteen dried-up plants look at me reproachfully. Katalin offers to buy me new plants and seeds.
December 1st; December: year almost over. Robin drives out to Tiszainoka just in time to pick me up and drive me to Lakitelek to get my 11.30am train, the last one today that gets me to Budapest in time for the 4.30pm philosophy talk by Rob Hopkins. Martin & I meet, and hear Hopkins outlining his account of why he claims photographic pictures are more 'factive' than hand-made pictures.

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