May 31st;
Gordon, Jeremy & I went to party at
Isaac
the Kabbalist's. As usual,
lots of drumming, naughty-cigarette aromas, & girls magnetised to Isaac's affluent hipness.
May 30th;
Woke up refreshed in
Tim's
house.
May 29th;
Exciting chance to wear pale blue shirt & dark blue tie. The shirt one-time
futures-trader
boss David gave me, possibly because he still owes me five hundred
quid, and the blue tie with white spots college friend
Dan sold me for one
quid in 1984. Sunny weather continues.
May 28th;
Dry, dusty day. I roll round
town like a salted peanut.
May 27th;
A peaceful breakfast with Belli, then another hot drive to
Szolnok. As we pass
through Nyiregyhaza,
Robin
points out swarms of Russian & other cars with
Ukrainian plates
parked round the horse market.
May 26th;
Robin, Bela & I breakfast in
Tokaj and meet
The Tree Man,
then later Belli, who jointly owns vineyards with two German-speaking friends from
Sud Tyrol
in Italy.
May 25th;
2 intriguing weblogs:
whump &
fintel.
After a hot day's drive, Robin & I reach Tokaj with 3-year-old Bela.
His first major adventure.
May 24th;
Robin
and I select some of his photos.
May 23rd;
I see a cementmixer called
Wopfinger.
Later, train chaos.
I make some progress sticking little coloured pieces of
paper into
Edina's
Arabic grammar while a carriageful
of perky girls mock the train delays on their mobiles, taking off their summer sandals to
wiggle their toes in the heat.
Robin
picks me up from Kecskemet. At midnight we eat cheese and
sausage in his candlelit kitchen.
May 22nd;
Esther invites me to
Miriam's new Afro-beat band.
May 21st;
Young
Kristina
gets stern with me.
May 20th;
Rob wakes from a dream (he says) today in which Andrei finds me in an
Internet cafe, persuades me to buy his cut-price airline off him for 99 forints,
I go to the airport with the documents, enter the cockpit of my aeroplane,
let friends on board, fly to
Brussels, land in an EU building, and give a
talk there about
micro-currencies.
May 19th;
A harmonious lesson with Hussam. Later
Gordon
hosts.
May 18th;
Rob and I encounter sporty student
vet Anke.
May 17th;
Ryan meets me for coffee, gives me a photocopy of a
Rorty article
about postmodernism.
May 16th;
My children get nervous on stage, but the event goes quite well.
Train back east, with a short rest at Vienna's
Westbahnhof.
May 15th;
More classes,
this afternoon the friskiest yet.
May 14th;
In a rather pretentious set of short essays in
Wired
, including
space space,
bush space,
and
dump space,
this
eerie piece about euro space asks to be read.
May 13th;
Much better. Lots of sleep and my charming class show me around
their town in the sunshine.
May 12th;
A long day. I'm in
Zistersdorf.
May 11th;
On the lunchtime train to Austria with Friendly Owl [Catherine, I should say], Bob, Dave, & Maurice
to Austria ignoring studied rudeness of
MAV dining-car staff.
May 10th;
I see inside Henry's
flat, and Robin encourages me to make the game-show idea with
Puedi
wild and theatrical.
May 9th;
Tamas
kindly lets Robin, Istvan
and me in through the stage door to see his extreme fashion show, involving
mirrored-sunglasses-wearing models snipping audience members' sleeves with scissors,
Jelena dressed
in a birthday-cake fairy-godmother ballgown, and a platform-mounted foetus girl howling inside a
stocking bag. Highlights included pairs of models in ripped black underwear walking
very carefully because of being attached to each other by a black, concertina-ing trunk like those
over wedding-photographers' zoom lenses
[one pair joined at the mouth, one pair joined at the breast,
and one shimmying duo joined at the groin].
Most fetching was a gazelle-like mannequin in high heels and a revealing frame-like dome-skirt
cage decked in candles showing off her legs to excellent effect.
Friendly
Owl SMSs me a work offer in Austria.
May 8th;
A money mix-up. Someone else called
Mark gets paid instead of me.
May 7th;
Presumably
this weblog,
A Flight Risk,
supposedly by a rich young heiress
fleeing an arranged marriage, is someone having a crack at
writing a suspense-filled, page-clicking novel in web-diary form.
Hooked?
May 6th;
How could
uberchick
not deserve a look?
May 5th;
It seems I am a
'Low-fidelity All-Star Hipster' with totally natural cool, and I know
all the words to
Kung Fu Fighting, reveals a
quiz uncovered by
parallax.
First warm, sticky day. Trees are filled with
some
kind of hyacinth-type blossom.
May 4th;
A
mighty Chinese dictionary found by
languagehat.
May 3rd;
Out in sun and cool breezes outside the kebab place, two Hungarian
alternative lads in
grubby checked shirts and dirty blonde dreadlocks are eating. I sit at
another table across from what looks like a strangely-shaped brown
rucksack on one of the white metal garden chairs. When it moves, I realise
it's a very large bird of prey with a leather hood over its head. A lot larger
than
Nina's Puppy,
the boys refer to it as a type of eagle. Wrapped in its
own enormous wings, like a brown Orson Welles cloak, it looked very big and
nasty, quite capable of pecking the eyes out of an unemployed translator
at a neighbouring table, were it unhooded and able to spot one. Then I notice
a second, smaller bird, only handbag-sized, perhaps a
hawk or kestrel, perched
on the edge of their table. Probably belonging to the smaller Hungarian male.
May 2nd;
Out for drinks with Richard. We chat about
Colombian women,
Adam Smith,
and the
Post Office internal investigation unit.
May 1st;
I pick up the things I left at
Vista from
Heather,
such as my handy guide to
Germany's parliament, then get over to Gordon's.
-
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
contact@otherlanguages.org
back
up to top of page
