.
May 26th;
Wake late. Zeno tells me about the forest of saplings and I set off to see the seamstress
in the next village. Selecting from one of Robin's range of bicycles I choose one with
no gears, no brakes, but good tyres, while the puppies, still delightfully puppy-like a
month on, patter out from the shade under a pile of logs to watch me test the bike. Making
small squeaking sounds, they crowd round my feet, bottoms wiggling with curiosity. Under
quite a hot sun, I cycle to
Tiszakurt,
find the seamstress, pay for my green cords, and give
her some new work. As I get back into Tiszainoka a bit over an hour later I find the first
shop [there are three] has a delivery truck outside. The woman who owns the shop is just
finishing with the delivery driver. As it is hot in the sun while I am tired & sweaty, I politely
ask if I can go into her shop for some shade [I should have just walked in]. She shakes her
head and says no, quite matter-of-factly. I stand in the heat another minute, then when she's
ready she lets me in. I look round, decide not to buy anything, go back out into the sun and
walk on with the brakeless bike. Just how bright do you need to be to realise how not to treat
a customer? Is it really so mysterious for her? The village bar with
brown-and-cream
rubber strips covering the walls is also empty, but the woman there takes a different view.
She says hello, tells the person on the phone to wait, and cheerfully gets me two
cold drinks. Back at Robin's, he & Zeno are off somewhere buying bricks.
I do some editing, then doze through a hot afternoon, feeling both a bit feeble
yet also oddly empowered.
May 25th;
Finally myself, as it were. Move the herb garden to a shadier part of the main room in
preparation for a couple of days at
Robin's.
Buy more gigabytes for laptop, catch train.
On the tram to the train at half past 5 in the afternoon, the streets still oven warm, and I
look at my phone. 2 messages on my phone reveal that I completely forgot
a work appointment at noon today. Oh Lord. Once out on the Great Plain, I give the 1st
pair of silver ear studs to Georgina, then Robin, Zeno, & I retire to the kitchen for a
candlelit dinner. Eerily quiet out here. Once darkness falls, you can hear
mobile-phone buttons or cash-dispenser keyboards beeping at fifty yards.
May 24th;
Adjusting to heat, seemingly. I usually adore it - perhaps because it came late this year,
and suddenly. Sleeping a lot.
Vivid dreams.
May 23rd;
Still feel a bit peculiar from yesterday. Mild heat stroke? In the cool of the small hours
I do some new graphics for a game of 'Concentration' I find the
Javascript code for online,
turning it into a vocabulary game.
May 22nd;
Wake up at 2am, and start on craft stuff. Round dawn have a near miss heating up an ear-ring with
the blow torch. A loud bang. I cannot see where the metal star {which was hot enough to
be glowing yellow} jumped when the dried-clay block under it exploded. I imagine it 1. down my shirt about
to brand my skin any second now, or 2. sizzling quietly somewhere in my room fallen to the bottom of a box
waiting hours to start a plastics fire while I'm out of the flat. Luckily, I find it doing neither. I shall be
using a brick to heat things up on in future, silly me.
Very hot day. Hungarians are using that word 'kanikula' that Austrians use. Someone told me once
it comes from the Latin phrase for bakingly hot summer's days that gets anglicised as "dog days". Does it?
Says here
yes - from an era, the ancient world, when Sirius the Dog Star rose at sunrise in July & August,
so an astronomically outdated expression for high summer. In the morning pick up bigger terracotta
pots from gardening shop for pumpkin & cornflower seedlings, and fetch rose-cross photo print from
the digital printers.
Lunch with Martin. Just before we choose our table, I bump into Imola {Martin likes her
restaurant} looking a bit subdued,
then we tell the waitress what a shandy is, chat about adverts
a bit, and finally Martin starts on
electronics.
May 21st;
Afternoon drink with Mystery Friend 2, back from exotic travels. He is slightly bemused by
my proud talk of herb
garden & bookcase-building experiments.
May 20th;
The strudels {why am I surprised?} will not
accept the A4 piece of paper they gave me in December as proof I bought a new Apple hard drive
off them {though, since I reported the original hard drive going wrong first in July while still
under guarantee they should really have given, not sold, me a new one}. It says in big red letters
in the centre of the page 'PAID', and lists the price, model number, my name, and the date. No,
says Balazs the maintenance strudel, that is only the "work sheet". I must give them the cash-register
receipt, the small 2-square-inch piece of paper that came out of their till when I paid. Otherwise, no
valid guarantee on the 2nd hard drive that they sold me, even though they should have given it to me.
Really, you have to admire the stubbornness of these people in the the face of their own stupidity. I
spend an hour registering online with websites like
Apple Quality
Complaints,
Ripoff Report,
Consumer Affairs, &
Apple Insider. Round off by
expanding my Twitter lists to include a few self-styled Apple gurus who might appreciate tips
about how some iStyle
Hungary staff make extra cash on the side.
May 19th;
Tea at home with the Roffers. One
astutely remarks "You're one of those guys who never left college, aren't you?" Fair point. I am, really.
May 18th;
2 Roffers reach town, on their
romantic train ride to The East.
May 17th;
After an afternoon doze yesterday I'm up all night getting a great deal done. Trying to
sleep between 6am and 7am unsuccessful so I get up and finish off
this stage of the silver work instead.
Working with silver clay has some of that drug-movie dynamic as you crawl around on the
floor trying to save every little fragment of the expensive pale-brown putty-like substance.
It dries fast too, as a couple of websites warned me. Keeping it with something wet in the
fridge 3 days since unsealing didn't stop it getting very crumbly by today. Moral: use all the
next batch within an hour of unwrapping. Out in already hot sunshine at 10am to get cash
from the cash machine and for a few seconds I'm walking behind a slim Gypsy man in his
20s, about 5'4" or 5'5" in height. Tempting to use a police term like 'young male'. He is built
like a flyweight boxer, walking quietly, quickly, and with a very slight swagger - in a brown
sweatshirt top covered in alchemical symbols printed in gold. Not just a few
in a repeating design of six or ten symbols, but in half a block's walk I see at least 20 or 30 different
symbols: moon, phosphorus, Jupiter, arsenic, sun, tin, woman, iron, Scorpio, potassium.
Each about 2 inches high, they're spaced out in regular polka-dot formation across the fabric.
The sweatshirt hood, though down to reveal slicked black hair in a crew cut, adds to the
wizard mood. Still feel alert at 11.30am, when I meet
Eva at a cafe
on the leafy street that meets the City Park. Sleep in afternoon - now to finish reading the
71-page .pdf tutorial on gluing techniques the Nigel of Darkness sent me.
May 16th;
Starting to feel tenderly protective of my little herb garden - nine tiny terracotta pots and
saucers arranged in a row just inside the French window door onto the balcony. I now
realise that the outside of each pot feels different if the soil is dry or wet. If there is enough
water the terracotta is cool and slightly tacky to the touch. The pumpkin seeds have grown
almost comically fast. One bud on a tall stalk still has its half-open seedcase
wedged on top of the top leaf, carried five inches vertically out of the soil it was buried
in 3 or 4 days ago. It's as if a complete bishop had burst downwards out of his own
mitre, body and legs growing out of the bottom of an enlarging head. I plant some more
seeds, and now there are 15 pots of soil & seeds, 5 of which are showing green shoots.
Tunes from Justice, rather
rockist
for a French Christian synth duo, even when sounding like MGMT.
Forgive them their pompous graphic, they know not what they do:
1
2
3
4
5.
For those who must have moving pictures, 2nd & 3rd clip to Phantom Pt 2 - a
worship-raw-power video and a
something-nasty-in-the-cafeteria video.
Tad Triumph-of-the-Will in places, but some good bass lines. Doubtless
under the influence of this stuff, up all night finishing rosy-cross clip-art project.
May 15th;
Pathetically proud of the two
favicons I made a couple
of days ago, I find they sometimes don't show. Perhaps filtered out by the Vodafone
wireless dongle? Finally, I buy some transparent 20mm board from the
plastic-roofing firm out past
Sashalom. Give up on trying to finesse direction of air channels for
different pieces in my cutting diagram and wait quite a long time as they
slice it up for me.
May 14th;
More work in silver, more work on book.
May 13th;
Three pointless trips to three different self-important specialist wholesalers all in one day.
I'm getting to know how public transport works out in the 20th district though, so
that's all right. At one point, I'm on a tram and I make the mistake of checking
the name of the terminus with another passenger, a parcel-shaped man in a dark-grey
suit bearing an uncanny resemblance to a giant basset hound. He turns out to be a
lonely Transylvanian architect who has lived more than half his life in Hungary, is
very much into striking up conversations on trams, is sure he knows where I and he must
get off, and won't shut up. I keep trying to check the names of tramstops on the placard
next to his seat while he tells me there is no problem and Amsterdam Ajax is a great team.
I suggest several times that we have gone past the terminus on a big loop while he insists
we have not reached it yet. What a surprise: he is wrong and I am right. I walk back down
the tram track rather crossly not even saying goodbye to the basset hound, who is earnestly
asking directions to the tramstop for the reverse direction {of course on a different street},
and I spend the next 20 minutes walking back to where I originally wanted to get off. A few
large drops of summery rain fall on me, but no shower arrives. On this walk, I pass a
building so curious, I have to cross the road to look at it. On the
southernmost corner of
Jokai Mor street and Ilona street, the facade of a one-storey building on Jokai Mor has some
strange grey pillars in bas relief that look strangely Aztec, like squared-off human figures holding
up the roof. The flat stone or plaster pillars are only two inches proud of the render at most, and
as I go close and see how much of it has crumbled away, I realise it is all polystyrene,
painted a quite convincing dull grey, glued to the flat surface of the cottage, and very persuasive
because battered & aged. Most odd. About an hour and a half later, in the leafier area of the 16th
district, I see a boy of about fifteen in a black tee-shirt and black shorts on the rather suburban
Erkel street practising on a matt
black Segway.
He silently rolls the stand-up scooter thing around, doing three-point turns, and slow figures of
eight under the trees in the middle of his empty road.
May 12th;
Lunch with Martin. Evening lesson with Olga. Take my Apple Mac in to see
the strudels,
now that the second hard drive is dying and the keyboard gives me electric shocks.
Ever since I shouted at him in the autumn, the maintenance strudel has looked at
me like a loyal dog I once kicked who still loves me and is still prepared to forgive me.
May 11th;
Hot sticky bus journey out to meet the
transparent
plastic people, who decide to go home half
an hour early, ten minutes before I find their address. Drink in evening with Agnes.
Use blowtorch on first run of earrings. Partial success.
May 10th;
Swim & sunbathe at
pool on island with Magdolna.
May 9th;
3rd established author joins
book.
May 8th;
2nd established author joins
book.
May 7th;
1st established author joins
book.
May 6th;
Martin lends me a blowtorch. At lunch we discuss sailing,
Sartre,
& 'She
Came to Stay'.
May 5th;
In morning finish Jeremy 2's copy of the 1916 novel
'Greenmantle'
by what
some critics point out
was not such a jingoistic John Buchan as we remember. This
strikes me too. Buchan repeatedly refers to enemies with
respect, occasionally even admiration. In one oddly convincing moment the hero is
disguised as a German official and, having forgotten his own real identity
to an extent, becomes indignant at the attempt of a
Turk to involve him in a crooked deal. This is though England's enemy Germany
would be the one losing the funds. He actually gets himself into trouble by
refusing to connive in the mishandling of German munitions. Behind Buchan's
dated slang, the caricatures are actually quite fair-minded. He often
says things like "I must say I took a fancy
to the Turkish fighting man : I remembered the testimonial our fellows
gave him as a clean fighter, and I felt very bitter that Germany should
have lugged him into this dirty business." Yet, far
from depicting the Teutons in their turn as thoroughly evil, his
arch-enemy, Stumm, is 'impressive', and Hannay, the hero, praises
Stumm's unabashedly patriotic belief in the greatness of Germany. Perhaps the most
curious aspect of the book is the awkwardness Hannay admits to feeling
with women {as against the way he comments on his male friends' lean
physiques, soft eyes, and open faces in a way that for modern readers
verges on the homoerotic}. A villainous woman is referred to with awe as
demonically powerful, attractive, and brilliant.
When he finally meets this terrifying femme fatale, he's taken by surprise
and must accept a lift in her limousine to her house. "Women
had never come much my way, and I knew about as much of their ways as I knew
about the Chinese language. All my life I had lived with men only, and rather
a rough crowd at that. .... I had never been in a motor car with a lady before,
and I felt like a fish on a dry sandbank. The soft cushions and the subtle
scents filled me with acute uneasiness. .... This slim woman, poised exquisitely
like some statue between the pillared lights, with her fair cloud of hair, and
her pale bright eyes, had the glamour of a wild dream. I hated her instinctively,
hated her intensely, but I longed to arouse her interest."
Fascinating
as a sample of its time, and for surprisingly acute insights into Islam, Germany,
and, through the American character, the United States. More than that, we're now
in another world crisis where one or two semi-mythical prophet characters - like the
mysterious 'Greenmantle' - have been reviving militant Islam. Buchan's
broad-brushstroke generalisations about national character and culture now look
more perceptive and less comical than they did for most of the 90 years
between then and now.
Sunny afternoon. Trek out to the 20th district see
these
people, who prove to be
complete dolts. I phone ahead, then get there at 3pm {closing hour 4pm} to find
the front door of their house locked. I buzz, and am reluctantly allowed into a
dusty front room with tired-looking 1970s sofas, frilly 1950s net curtains
halfway down the windows {it's a corner house facing onto two pavements -
why not curtain the whole of each window?}, scraps of samples scattered over
furniture and floor, and a general air of tragic failure.
A girl with quite an attractive body lets me in, glaring. Her face wears
an expression of Neanderthal suspicion. She is being bothered in her cave
yet again by an interfering customer. I ask about transparent sheeting, she
shows me one. I ask about sheeting that is transparent & blue and she shows me the
blue opaque sheeting, almost immediately seething with rage that yet
another person has to ask her a hard question. Why can't I just give her
my money and bugger off? Why must her life always be so d-i-f-f-i-c-u-l-t? I say I
am hoping to find sheeting that is both transparent & blue, and she angrily
points to the opaque blue and the colourless transparent in rapid succession, her
mouth actually hanging open at this point, her bovine face twisted with pain at
my sheer unreasonableness. I ask if the transparent sheet comes any
thicker? She mutters that this is number 6, and they have number 8. Unable to bear
me any longer she lopes out of the sun-drenched room, still filled with the spirit of
some old person now dead. A small, youngish, pear-shaped man appears bearing a swatch
of plastic films, proffering the number 8. He repeats they have nothing that is
see-through and blue, and does not suggest they could try to get any for me. I ask
what glues stick this stuff together, and the two of them laugh bitterly at my
stupidity, explaining that only a plastic welding machine can bond sheets of this
material together. I ask about the price of the tools for doing that, and he gloats
triumphantly as he tells me the equipment costs hundreds of thousands of euros.
Idiot customer may leave now.
May 4th;
Meet Mary for cappuccino, chat about editing, literacy, & children. Finish
'Alchemy
& Alchemists' by Sean Martin, a snappy little
history of the subject and some of the colourful characters
drawn to it. Includes a mention of Ibn al Haytam, the first writer to describe
the camera obscura, and speculates that he and - much later - da Vinci made
early photographs fixed with egg whites. Martin repeats the interesting suggestion
that the Turin Shroud is an egg-fixed photographic image made by da Vinci. Nice
account of Nicholas Flamel and his wife, adding that they were
"reported to have been seen" at the Paris
Opera in 1761, supposedly aged around 400 at that point, having completed the Great
Work at "around noon on Friday 17th January, 1382".
How do you recognise someone like that? «I've just seen a couple who look the
spitting image of a 350-year-old engraving I once glanced at in a book of made-up
stuff» ? Yep, must be them.
May 3rd;
Swim & sunbathe at
pool on island with Magdolna.
May 2nd;
Where am I going to borrow a blow torch from? The cutely named Hess is More
with 'Yes Boss'.
Germanic? Involves model trains.
May 1st;
Two bits of music with videos 40 years apart, both in monochrome or almost,
both by geezers on the up, and both using the slightly macabre
trick of wall-mounting girls' heads like hunting trophies:
The Animals;
The Audio Bullies.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith at yahoo.com
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