2015
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August 31st; Monday. Zsuzsi kindly drives me to nearby Kunszentmarton where she has to wait an hour in an airless government building to get "her papers in order", while I wander the heat of the high street in search of cheap magnetic compasses and plastic funnels. Then I eat an ice cream in a cool empty cafe full of mirrors while the sun bakes the empty street outside. Apparently seeing your own doppelganger is dangerous. These sound more like out-of-body experiences than seeing doppelgangers, but nonetheless not hard to imagine they're very distressing if you're not expecting one.
August 30th; Sunday. I take a train out in the thick warmth to meet Robin and family on the Great Plain. Have to wait an hour at a town called Szajol, where the railway station, though large and recently renovated with new concrete ramps and tunnels, has no sandwich bar or cafe. I ask the two motionless men in the air-conditioned signal room staring at their computer screens why not. They say it's not reasonable to expect a cafe to be open at that hour (half past eight in the evening), so I point out there's no cafe here at any other time of any other day either. Two other men in overalls outside in the dark laboriously watering around 20 plants in cement pots have no idea. This is the effect a large state sector has on people, as if sitting with a small till next to a fridge of canned drinks and a glass box of 8 overpriced sandwiches (the form these bars usually take) would be an enormous imposition on one of these employees. From those able to travel further afield, a nice touch of history from Our Man in Bucharest, who recently visited another part of the Balkans: Four Englishmen in Albania.

August 29th; Saturday. Seems that Louis XIV invented France's dominance of fashion, a success right until today. A sort of pre-Industrial Revolution by Minister Colbert pushing rich French people to buy more local goods and fewer imports.
August 28th; Friday. In Britain, a whiskery true believer from the olden days of British socialism looks set to become leader of the Labour party. He's called Jeremy Corbyn, and it's widely said his leadership will keep Labour out of government for many a year to come. Mr Corbyn's colourful, ill-matched ties promise a sort of minor-key sartorial reprise of the much-missed Norman St. John Stevas.

August 27th; Thursday. Here in my part of Budapest, a certain tension simmers among The Daughters Of Wolves (such as petty power struggles over how cold this one can set the air-conditioning to punish that one). Best not to go into detail. But appropriately enough, a well-known magazine writer in Britain has kindly sent me his review of Bram Stoker's 'Dracula'. So it's thunderbirds are go on our forthcoming collection of vampire articles.
August 26th; Wednesday. Pornographic political cartoons from the 1780s, defaming "Austrian bitch" Marie Antoinette. Not really the social-justice narrative some revolutionary apologists still claim.

August 25th; Tuesday. Lovely egg-shaped squeezee street map (of Budapest, indeed). But is it real? Darkly suspect these are pretend images showing how it could look if we paid Denes to make one.
August 24th; Monday. Mr Dentist inserts 2nd new filling. An unmistakeably 1960s tune: Scott Fagan's 'In My Head'. Fascinating to look at that rumpled hair and fresh-but-lost face in the photo. It's as if every generation of young US Americans find themselves cut loose, roaming round their spacious half-continent, not quite sure how they got there.

August 23rd; Sunday. The evergreen question of why & when the chicks go wild.
August 22nd; Saturday. 5-day-old filling falls out. My split thumbnail on the other hand (accident with some scissors) seems nicely stabilised by the disc of thin metal I cut from a vitamin B6 pill sheet, superglued onto the split and sanded down smooth. And now, a mildly novel answer to where all the aliens are.

August 21st; Friday. How many drowning children should you rescue?
August 20th; Thursday. The Day of The Hand. I can still hear Nina firmly & Dutchly declaring in the crowd, gathered there to gaze on the glass-boxed right royal hand of Saint Istvan many years ago this day, that pouring hot lead into people's ears didn't sound very Christian or saintly to her. The Hand was of course Exhibit A supporting her claim that "Hungary is a cross between Twin Peaks and The Addams Family".

August 19th; Wednesday. Having had kind Mr Dentist two days ago replace my front filling which fell out on the last day of painting with Heikki, and now fully recovered from my eerie brush with hyponatremia in the heat of July, this week I have the mildly irritating condition of blocked ears, just as happened last summer. My new habit of taking 3 or 4 cold baths a day is probably to blame, doubtless encouraging my ears to become waxier, or something stylish like that. Everyone sounds muffled, and I keep having to ask people to repeat themselves. Tonight join Robin & Sara at a small Italian-run pizza shop on Nagymezo street called Pizzica. When I nibble the corner of one of Robin's slices like a large mouse I discover it has deliciously light pastry. Cuisine of a southern Italian region, apparently. 3 days ago heard 4 people on the underground train talking some strange language. I asked what they were speaking. Neapolitan! they declared in chorus.
August 18th; Tuesday. Having gone into some detail about how surly most Hungarian customer service is a few days ago, it seems only fair to mention the honourable exceptions. Out looking for a recharger a couple of weeks ago I was treated in a couple of shops to men waving a hand at some expensive all-in-one device, sneering in my direction as if they loathed me body & soul. Until I entered a mobile-phone accessories store where two amiable techies rapidly diagnosed my problem and offered me a cheap recharger, tested it, then suggesting an even cheaper option for me to also consider. They kept apologising for their new colour scheme and website being still in their early days. Hello again, Balu GSM! Meanwhile, there is that new Spanish perfume stall in the shopping centre. Those sales ladies shminked up with the strange go-faster-stripes make-up vanished almost as soon as I mentioned them. They were replaced by standard non-weird-looking girls. Perhaps there exist crack advance units of special-forces sales bitches, flown in to establish new business beach-heads early on in difficult campaigns. Ready to move on & hand over to the normals once base camp is up & running? Just a few days ago in the supermarket in the basement exactly beneath (almost to the nearest foot) that perfume stall, an extraordinary sight greeted me. I was looking around for one of the smaller red plastic baskets. A male employee had collected all of them in one place, in the middle of an aisle. He had built them all into one single stack. The stack of baskets made a tower taller than any person. The plastic edges fitted so flush under their own weight that in the first two seconds I thought I was looking at a smooth four-cornered column of solid red plastic, leaping vertically out of the floor like a time-lapse photo.

August 17th; Monday. A couple of nights ago went out for a lovely evening with Zoe & Mark, not too squiffy: Les Murray came up, alongside more scandalous topics.
- To go home and wear shorts forever
   in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
   to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
   a fishing line and matches ---
August 16th; Sunday. People now angry with much-praised boss who cut his own wage so as to pay staff more.

August 15th; Saturday. KGB spies saw Tony Benn as a fantasist.
August 14th; Friday. More evidence that torture doesn't get good info.

August 13th; Thursday. You think there are no new colours to see?
August 12th; Wednesday. A new type of irregular pentagon that tiles the 2D plane has been discovered, although it isn't aperiodic, which would have been more fun.

August 11th; Tuesday. Someone suggests that fears AI might kill us all reveal our self-hate. While this observation is psychologically spot on, it isn't actually evidence AI won't kill us all, something the wise & witty sceptic appears to have overlooked. Of course, the danger is more likely to be large software systems no-one understands than genuinely intelligent software systems, which I'm increasingly unconvinced can be built. Mind you (gedditt??), machine intelligence gets people going, and danger is danger, intelligent or not. So if this is how a big topic at least gets discussed, it might not matter.
August 10th; Monday. Weather continues to be hot & stifling. Essentially it's like being inside the airless closet containing the boiler and some shelves in the house I grew up in which was called the "airing cupboard", although it was really the warming & drying cupboard. A wet towel placed in there would be hot to touch and bone dry within minutes. Being outside on Budapest's streets at the moment feels like being inside that cupboard all day. The cheap fitness gym a few streets back into the poorer bulk of the district plays these days what sounds like one or at most two techno/club/house/rap mix tapes or radio channels as we labour away on the black metal machines. These soundtracks have helped me to recall just how much I always disliked Eminem: his special blend of whining and ranting angrily expresses self-righteous self-pity. The black signs for 'Brutal Nutrition' (as in nutrients that will make you into a brute) painted at a jaunty 30-degree tilt on the yellow brick walls in a packing-crate-stencil font have gone (one remains in a back corridor). A fresh layer of yellow paint has simplified the look a bit. This yellow is distinctly yolkier than before, throwing the tired custard-powder yellow of the fake-leather cushions on the exercise machines into a sharper contrast now. The gym is in the ground floor of a ten-storey apartment of council flats (the Hungarian expression 'panel building' captures the shoddy kit-assembly feel of 1960s and 70s architecture better than English) and most people in these streets live in one. What's interesting is that many of these buildings (and mine, albeit a newer, smarter five-storey 1990s structure) appear to be sheathed in polystyrene in turn coated with something like sandpaper. In one or two places low down around child shoulder height on the street the outer rough-textured render (often that bricky mid-orange popular as a sandpaper colouring) has been punctured and ripped off to reveal a kind of small pit eight or ten inches across. These little caves go down into a two or three inch deep layer of - yes it really seems to be white polystyrene - gouged out by some curious infant. One or two of these pits on other buildings are a bit larger, and show that below the packing foam layer is a normal brick or concrete wall. Considering how poor and bored most people in this district are, it's remarkable how little of this damage there is, and how the existing gouged holes don't grow larger over months or years. Irritated British children in low-income families surrounded by a material like that would have acres of it stripped off within days. People round here seem to lack the energy or initiative to do proper vandalism.

August 9th; Sunday. Have almost given up on the well-stocked greengrocer's just past Corvin metro partway to the river that offers a big range of fresh & tasty fruit & vegetables, though not cheap, because their staff are so consistently rude, sighing heavily and glaring at shoppers whenever anyone asks them to do anything. Even in a country with customer-service standards as low as Hungary, people know them. When I neutrally mention the shop's location to Hungarians, they will say in their flat, calm voices "Oh you mean the greengrocer's with very rude staff?" putting only the slightest weight on the 'very' along with a fractional flicker of the eyebrows before a brief bored glance into space. Once Hungarians confirm they know the shop, the subject is closed, no further comment being judged useful. Simply another rude retailer, another wearying detail in their low-key lives. Meanwhile, the office block on the corner built a couple of years ago, still has big crosses of black tape in ground-floor sheet glass windows on either side of the entrance lobby, with men sitting around looking at bags of cement and boxes of rubbish. Upper storeys look a bit smarter (or it's harder to see if they are still unrented). However, there are clearly some firms in there renting some space, because small groups of 4 or 5 office workers now gather on the pavement at certain times during the day for their cigarette breaks. A smartly-decorated lobby with a internally-lit red reception desk made out of glass adds a touch of professionalism mid-block between the two unfinished street-level spaces with the black-crossed glass walls. I sometimes walk past the lobby at night and see a sad fat man watching television by himself lit only by the screen and the glowing red reception counter.
August 8th; Saturday. Old TV documentary on 15th-century painter Hieronymus Bosch.

August 7th; Friday. Aeon magazine on several topics: (1) Hume, Einstein, & Ritz on cause and effect; (2) Most violent people feel morally driven to commit the violence (of course): the final paragraph is laughable, but it's good to see social scientists get to the obvious eventually, even if it takes them a century; (3) The restlessly busy David Deutsch has a nifty idea about how life emerges.
August 6th; Thursday. It became a routine so quickly in just one week am now already missing (as aching arms recover) the chatty breakfasts with Heikki, and our days of ceiling-rollering the cream paint. Catch-phrases included "Why did you leave the organisation?" & "These monks were narrow."

August 5th; Wednesday. That very warm weather is creeping back, or perhaps building up momentum again is a better way of putting it. No longer summery yet cool like last week. Lots of rest. Could Saudi Arabia's day in the sun be finally ending? To coin a phrase?
August 4th; Tuesday. Final day painting his flat with Heikki. Magdolna sends over some spaghetti & tomato sauce for our lunch from across the landing. One interesting discovery when working with cream wall paint close to the colour of the underlying off-white: it matters where the sun is. At certain times of day (like evening, especially up near the ceiling where there are shadows) it's impossible to see where you have painted. At other times (like in the cooler {bluer?} light of morning up until lunchtime), the gaps show up clearly. Part of it is angle of course, which windows the light is coming in through - still, I wonder if anyone has ever developed a lamp (perhaps with filters) painters can use to show up easily where there are different subtle shades of a colour? In our rolling six-day seminar we haven't so much set the world to rights as roughly agreed very hazy outlines on where to start.

August 3rd; Monday. Back to old camera angle, Russian-girl-DJ's radio show: #340.
August 2nd; Sunday. More wall & ceiling painting with Heikki. As well as our decorating singsongs, we chat about all manner of other topics, from Finnish/Swedish evangelical cults to clan politics. Multilingual Heikki has a fantastic memory: I mention the Portuguese Nobel Prize winner and he names him at once, even though he hasn't read the man's sci-fi novel about Iberia floating away like a big raft. (Neither have I, of course.) He can quote English, Finnish, Swedish & French writers as we range through our multi-room-painting talkathon: tape skirting boards, paper floors, paint non-woodwork, strip off tape & paper.

August 1st; Saturday. Dr V. planned a parallel Greek banking system. Not so odd.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / markgriffith at yahoo.com