2008
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January 31st; Would have been mother's birthday. Meet Franc, drop in at his artist friend Luca's exhibition opening. Then we go to Daniel's guitar session, and on to Franc's for wine and Stilton dinner. Here's a sculpture commissioned by British Airways.
January 30th; Work + Italian page: thanks, Francesco!

January 29th; Idle day in Budapest. Late lunch with charming Alina. Write to-do list. Listen to more of this.
January 28th; Early flight out of Rome takes me on a walk of at least a mile through part of the rather confusing Leonardo airport at Fiumicino. But even the security guards checking our baggage at six in the morning are laughing and enjoying life. Once in Hungary, normal gloom settles back into place. After a midday sleep, I visit Heikki & Isabel at their office. Isabel says I look so relaxed I seem stoned. This is probably a compliment.

January 27th; More wandering around Rome with Bob. Our hotel is near the Spanish Steps. The area where John Keats died from tuberculosis is now filled with prosperous, tasteful boutiques. Department stores have made very little headway here. It is still a town of small, elegant specialist shops - the idea of buying things anonymously without meeting shopkeepers probably seems odd to Italians. Even in bookshops, Romans chat and laugh in small groups. The police kerbcrawl down pedestrian alleys in powder-blue Alfa Romeos with go-faster stripes. We visit the Museum of Oriental Art and see some lovely Persian ceramic work. We enter an odd church that looks as if chunks from several different centuries have been grafted together. Inside, a glorious Baroque false ceiling hangs low over rows of red plastic chairs.
January 26th; One peculiar aspect of my hotel room is that the lights only work if you leave the keys in a sort of control slot near the door, and conversely you cannot switch all of them off unless you take the keys out. This means waking up at night and finding the time is tricky, and involves stumbling through complete darkness to the door with the keys. Roman centralisation taken to a slight extreme. Very good breakfast nearby with Bob. Quite striking that the simplest food items you get here are both good to eat and reasonably priced. All Romans want to do is dress well, eat well, chat each other up, stroll around among dramatic architecture, and fuss over beautifully groomed fluffy dogs and adorable toddlers. That and a bit of stylish driving. Hard to argue with. Delicious lunch just outside the centre at a restaurant just above the beginning of the tram tracks as Bob tells me about vindictive students. Later we revisit the Pantheon and later the Colosseum. As dusk comes on, we see an extraordinary sight while I finish some [predictably good] roast chestnuts. At "the typewriter", a monument to Italian unification, first it looks as if wreaths of smoke are billowing above the square. Then we notice they are moving fast for plumes of smoke and changing direction too quickly. These are clouds of thousands of birds, wheeling and turning together in the air to form pulsing balls, columns, and ribbons of dots, all moving in perfect unison. At a rough guess, there must be about ten thousand birds taking part in this display at least, always forming three or four rival plumes of rippling pseudo-smoke, each made up of at least a couple of thousand birds. Hypnotised, we watch this for about twenty minutes as night falls.

January 25th; Early morning flight to Rome. As the aeroplane waits on the runway, I finish Robin's copy of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' by John Clare. Each month is headed by a woodcut from David Gentleman, working surprisingly well, though done in the 1960s. Clare's writing has a convincing elegaic quality. He mourns the disappearance of Northamptonshire country customs even as they were still alive. Clare was a farm labourer, and his writing shows a detailed love of the land as well as a sense of what tiring physical work feels like. He imagines how fairies & sprites "thro each key hole pop and pop / Like wasps into a grocers shop" - saying goodbye to a Richard-Dadd-like time when earthly and imaginary lived side by side. Clare uses no full stops and keeps his rhyme schemes [AABB and ABAB] straightforward, only introducing some complexity in November so that we feel the arrival of dark, disturbing storm weather. Haunting to realise that Clare's declaration of love for the rhythms of country life was at the printers in 1825, the year the first steam locomotives on steel rails in a few parts of England were changing everything. At the airport various Italian men in different uniforms all give me a shrug which translates roughly as "Yes, I'm good-looking. So?" Rome's metro has a faded 1970s retro-fascist feel, with grubby cream marble, white concrete, and fibreglass panelling in brick-orange. Find the hotel, get a note from Bob, and locate Flavia at her gallery. We chat, and she tells me something odd about Rome traffic - that it's not as bad as London driving. On my way to meet Bob, I start to see what she means. Everything is negotiable. Roman drivers with their sunglasses on their heads are simply too cool and vain to actually kill anyone. Pedestrians and cars mix at various speeds on all roads, and it works rather well. Back in my strange but comfortable hotel room, if I walk across the terracotta-tiled floor in bare feet, I can feel where the underfloor heating pipes are laid.
January 24th; Luckily, the friendly computer shop in the village last night let me use their hot spot to buy myself a cheap train ticket online. Travel down to London, intrigued to see how much National Express has changed since the bad old days - they run train services now, and this one offers free WiFi on the train! However, it doesn't work, so perhaps not so much has changed after all. This forces me to socialise with a real person, a doctor in training in the next seat who wants to specialise in plastic surgery. He tells me about his volunteer work in Cambodia where apparently paying people to throw sulphuric acid in someone's face is rather common. Disfiguring a Cambodian costs five dollars he says, but melting the face of a foreigner is usually twenty dollars. Meet Piera briefly, but I must cruise outlets of the 3 firm in a continued struggle to make my modem work. Kensington 3 direct me to Oxford Circus 3, and the latter put me on the phone to customer support again. As the clock moves towards 8pm, their closing time, I see I am still getting nowhere. Some of the old edge comes into my voice at 7.50pm, and customer support suddenly put me on the phone to another Indian, who knows exactly what the problem is. At two or three minutes to closing time, with a ring of retail staff standing [fairly sympathetically] around me, the Indian down the phone who has seen the problem [or "issue" as we have to say now] before directs me to download new drivers for the modem from the Irish Republic website, not the UK site. The third file, missing from the British download page, does the trick, and the modem finally works. The Oxford Circus staff seem happy for me. I go straight to Charing Cross for a train to Gatwick, having decided my flight is so early I need to sleep at the airport. A cheery group of Londoners on the first train are talking about hitting a rat on the head. "I felt sorry for it" says one, "I couldn't kill it, so I carried it outside and let it go." He adds that he went back to the place where the rat had appeared, ate a lot of food and "felt pleasantly sick". I ask them if they realise this is going on the Internet, and they all laugh.
At Gatwick I find myself signing into a slightly sinister windowless hotel named 'Yotel' to indicate its youthful hipness. The corridors have violet lighting, there is lots of curved white plastic, and it feels rather submarine-like. I am in the disabled person's sleep cubicle, where I accidentally pull a distress cord and set off a piercing alarm noise. The coat hanger is very design-awardy, with a closed loop instead of a hook, so I have trouble hanging it where I want it. All a bit THX1138, though very convenient for 6am check-in a couple of hundred yards away.

January 23rd; Go back into Manchester to ask the 3 team why their modem is no good. Spend another hour in their showroom on the phone to customer support to no avail. Cheer myself up by buying a short Muriel Spark novel on the way back to the Yorkshire village, called 'The Finishing School', nicely written, slim, easy to finish before my evening bath. Rowland teaches creative writing in a modern-day Swiss finishing school he helps to run while struggling with the novel he is writing. He becomes gripped by obsessive jealousy when it seems one of his students, 17-year-old Chris, is also writing a novel, probably better than his and destined to be published at once. I'm not really a Spark fan, but the story-telling is elegant and her touch couldn't be lighter. Not bad work for a woman of 87 in 2004, when she wrote it apparently. The handful of rich, brittle adolescents is well portrayed: characters like Princess Tilly are depicted in a handful of words. The fashion show they organise is especially enjoyable. One or two mild echoes of the weekend past.
January 22nd; Train up to Manchester. John K meets me in town. He has a keen interest in local history, so we look at some paintings in the art gallery partly recreating an exhibition that took place in 1857. It seems that the paintings thought in 1857 to be Giottos are now known not to be Giottos, and the paintings thought in 1857 to be Duccios are now known not to be Duccios. We dine in an almost empty restaurant opposite the town hall, getting a bonus free sponge pudding, and John shows me two of the trading signals he likes. Afterwards John patiently waits while I buy a modem device to go with my laptop. At one point we are queueing in a brightly-lit telecom store full of pink, orange, and lime green, and I ask if he has ever tried magic? He says do I mean conjuring, and when I say no he eyes me carefully, asking "so this would be magick with a k, would it, Mark?" Back in the Yorkshire village, I find that my new "3" modem does not work. I spend two hours on the phone with some earnest Indian people at customer support trying various options without success.

January 21st; Monday. We prepare for the journey back to London. Breakfast. Someone in a small office off the side of the hall gets "regressed" in a special one-to-one session with The Master, Piera burns a legal document in the fireplace, and Nora tells us about a man called Sepp Holzer, a self-taught gardener and agriculturalist helping to cure a disease affecting some trees in Spain. Katharina drives at impressive speed along country lanes so that Piera, Nora, & I can catch the right train. Piera & I regroup with Eugenia & Pablo at Piera's in London. This morning I missed a lovely downward movement in the FTSE, but you can't have everything.
January 20th; Helping out with other people's constellations today I act [or at least stand still as] someone's murdered Spanish royalist great uncle from the Civil War in the 1930s. If I cannot quite imagine I am in touch with this dead relative, it is clear from the tension in the room that others feel strongly affected. Then am asked by The Master to stand in for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, shot in Sarajevo in 1914, who it emerges was someone's father's uncle. While standing still & silent, I try to feel suitably historic. The therapy is a blend of Jungian psychoanalysis, spirit channelling, sacred geometry, charades, and ancestor worship. Some people here seem to really feel emotions and moods belonging to the people they are standing in for, and the therapy is clearly helping one or two participants a great deal. In the afternoon I do my own constellation, with special reference to a dead brother and a polygamous Gypsy grandfather. While kneeling at the feet of some dead relative of mine as instructed I feel the powerful grip of The Master kneading the back of my neck - still trying to get those cathartic tears out. My inner resistance to his healing must be stubborn! [What other explanation could there be?] The whole weekend reminds me a little of the enjoyable HRF Keating novel 'Zen there was murder'. Another tasty meal. No-one seems to like the delicious treacle tart left over from several meals, so for pudding I have some again.

January 19th; The method is interesting. The Master explains that emotional crises reverberate through families over generations, and that often people take on grief or guilt on behalf of another family member. An individual "constellates" their family's systemic problem [not traumatic problem - that's a different kettle of fish, apparently] by explaining the bare facts to The Master, and being invited to choose from the ring of people some participants to act out family members. That person asks each person in turn to be their mother/brother/uncle/whoever and gently pulls them into the ring. Then they move them by their shoulders, standing, to an arrangement that represents how the family members related to each other. Then Norbert asks the actors how they feel in their roles, and moves people into different arrangements until harmony is restored, sometimes asking the main plaintiff or patient to bow to this grandfather, speak to that long-dead sister, asking their forgiveness, inviting them back into the family, and so on. Everyone feels that at a certain moment all is in balance again, and that person's constellation is finished and set in a final, healthy formation. During the three-hour midday break, from 12 to 3, a group of us walk to the chalk drawing of a giant man on a nearby shallow hillside. George finds he has started out on our walk still carrying his mug of coffee. The drawn man, with his cheerfully erect phallus, might date from the Bronze Age, or might only date from the 1650s, the sign says. Rudolf reveals that last night he had a dream inspired by my teddy bear swinging on a string. I am thanked for helping Rudolf to articulate an inner idea with my image. Until we are joined by a new couple, I find I am the only English person in the house. There are two Italians, several German speakers, an Austrian, two Spaniards, plus someone part French part English and part German. Discussion frequently switches into German, because only one Spanish girl and I do not speak it. Despite the Dorset countryside outside, it feels strongly as if we are in some Austrian or Bavarian schloss or perhaps somewhere low-lying in Switzerland. One of the new two people is English, and the other French. Over dinner I ask her, a rather right-bank Parisienne, if Lyon is the true centre of French cuisine. Smiling, but also bristling slightly, she says "One of the centres!" Today's exercises included a baby regression exercise, in which we all have to lie on our backs in the cream-carpeted work room with our legs & arms in the air, screaming for Mama [who, naturally, never comes] to the accompaniment of loud music. At one point, under my eyelashes, I watch one of the therapists coolly surveying the roomful of bawling adult infants. After a few moments, feigned baby pain becomes sincere grown-up pain as the strain from leg and arm muscles begins to bite. Our screaming gradually grows more authentic.
January 18th; Wake up somewhere beautifully quiet and rural in Dorset. Several of us spent the night in a cottage a hundred yards away from the main building where we walk over a four-foot long flagstone to cross a little gurgling stream. Our cottage is called The Pink House. If I squint at the outside carefully I can just see a very faint pink tinge to the rendering. Obviously I've been too long on the Continent. In the main house there are deep pink carpets and some pink wallpaper though, as well as roughly 150 numbered and dated bambi skulls mounted on small plaques. These are crowded together along one wall in the main hall. In the morning session, we do some exercises, such as rebirth. I am reborn between the corduroy-trousered thighs of a likeable German called Rudolf. Lovely food for lunch after our first three-hour work session from 9 to 12. Big green trees outside sway and shush in the wind, sounding like approaching traffic to my city-conditioned ears, but there are no cars anywhere. In the session where we are asked about nursery rhymes and memories from early childhood, I can only recall that I used to get my mother to swing my teddy bear [attached by a long string to bannisters two storeys above] and sing a song. Apparently this indicates a spirit twin in the womb strangled by an umbilical cord. No nursery stories come to mind. Perhaps just as well.

January 17th; Fly to Luton, with some turbulence making me feel a bit icky. Get coach to London and feel a bit poorly on the motorway. Reach Giacomo & Piera's half an hour late and enjoy tea and cola with their Spanish friends Eugenia & Pablo. Then around four thirty we drive off in Giacomo's car to the West Country as night falls. My travel sickness returns, but we break the journey at a motorway service station. Finally we drive up the gravel path of an early 17th-century country house after dark, just in time for our welcome meeting in the work room - a ring of chairs in a cream-carpeted sitting room. With Austrian hostess Katharina interpreting, The Master, a muscular bald man from Munich called Norbert, explains the therapy to us.
January 16th; Last night, could not wash my clothes until I found that the supposedly competent washing-machine man left the water inlet shut off without telling me. This morning I buy air tickets to London & Rome, meet Daniel the guitarist, do half an hour of sound work with Kalman & Sam the film-director [voicing over Chinese and Iranian weightlifters in a film made in Thailand], have tea & cake with Robin, visit an art-exhibition opening where we meet Peter K, the artist who recommended Robin read up on Osman Spare, and have more tea & cake with Isabel.

January 15th; Robin and I drive with my boxes back to Budapest through chilly fog, after a brief trip to a giant Tesco branch outside Kecskemet to buy him a new mobile phone. We reach the Siberian pine timber merchants just as they are closing at 3pm, so no kitchen table for now. In Budapest, we eat pizza in a small empty restaurant. I sit next to the giant wall mirror in the shape of a cut-out palm tree. Later we meet Istvan and Miki. As we get out of the car near Gresham's Palace, Miki says something within earshot about putting chocolate into a hole until it melts and then licking it out. I ask if I can quote him on the Internet, and he says yes, adding that it is most important there should be no nuts in the chocolate. Inside, Andrea is holding court with three friends and a dish of olives. Miki explains his business in Germany. Piera sends news of an intriguing gathering in Dorset this coming weekend.
January 14th; Robin makes an art portfolio with big pieces of cardboard. More browsing about symbols.

January 13th; Lots of lazy sitting around indoors with books, log fires, and local white wine. Finally get a video of Grant Morrison sent me by Vanese to play with sound.
January 12th; Wake up in Robin's library with my nose almost on a low-shelved blue book of mid-1970s pen sketches by Jean Dubuffet. Thaw begins and snow starts to melt. I bring half my boxes down from garage attic. Robin makes bird table, and is particularly pleased with a pair of second-hand bellows he gets cheaply and is able to mend with some little strip of copper tape he has been hoarding for several years. Explains plan to obtain 1000 moles for covert purpose, part of which involves a boat drawn by swans. By evening I find an article about Outsider Art. Apparently Jean Dubuffet was an early champion of these artists.

January 11th; Wake out of vivid dream about pieces of cardboard manifesting as easily as clicks on a URL invoke new browser windows. A majestic figure arrives to save me, and I wake up as he is writing I Am The Legislator in red biro on a candle-wax-smeared piece of paper. Am ready just five minutes before Robin turns up in Zita's old green Benz. Drive to countryside. We lunch in Kecskemet and visit a delicatessen where Robin tries to buy some Appenzell cheese for reasons unrelated to Appenzell being the last Swiss canton, in November 1990, to give women votes. The shop is out of Appenzell, so he buys a similar cheese. Snow, mist and avenues of absurdly photogenic frosted trees line the drive into the Great Plain. As the light fails in the late afternoon, we don wellingtons to walk round the outside of his fields, and find deer tracks in the deep snow. Next to them, rather oddly, is a bloody detached deer's foot. At dusk, Robin & I drag a sledge full of rooftop 'ridge' tiles across thick snow to stack them on a spare pallet. As we do this, grey sky is underlit by a horizon strip of sunset salmon cloud. This is edged by a trembling pencil line of red gold. Indoors around a roaring fire we watch James Bond film 'Octopussy' with the boys on video: O herself calls the plural of octopus 'octopi' [rather than the technically correct 'octopodes' or the obviously English 'octopuses']. Then Bond throws the glamorous girl down onto an expensive-looking mattress and 8-year-old Bela sagely asks if that's a waterbed? In garage, I glue my split shoe with a tin of Evo-Stik. At the urging of Vanese Robin & I read web article about Grant Morrison.
January 10th; Man from washing-machine service people comes round to replace the broken foot of my Polar PDT 519. He has bad breath but is fast, friendly and conscientious. He quickly and expertly unplugs the machine, gently wrestles it to the floor so we can look at the feet together and has it all back in the wall niche in my flat before I remember the spilt washing powder back there I meant to sweep up while he had the machine out. I suppose if I was a woman, I'd have made him remove the machine all over again so I could do a moment of self-important cleaning, but I'm not, so I'll deal with it later.

January 9th; Go to dumpy, cellar-based white-goods store and rage at muppets. Skype my bank and find that - again - NatWest's security "team" have noticed me making withdrawals in Budapest, and blocked my card as a result. Apparently, they do not recall our conversation of the autumn where I revealed to them [as I regularly do] that I have lived here several years. "Press for action", as we used to jeer whenever the NatWest trader stepped into the T-bond pit... Relaxing Italian dinner with Robin.
January 8th; Check washing machine. To do this, I have to climb over machine into cramped space behind it. Find one foot is not only not fixed, but is cracked and damaged, making it unfixable. Fume quietly. Go out to cash machine, and three machines tell me I am not allowed to withdraw money. Since I phoned the bank this morning and found I was comfortably in credit, the problem must be the card. Three other cash dispensers are not working. I go back to the kebab place and apologise, saying I cannot buy the two pistachio-flavoured things I had ordered. The Turkish owner insists on giving them to me on credit, despite the fact that this is only the third time he has seen me. Racism perhaps - he trusts me because he knows I'm not Hungarian, but a fellow foreigner like him.

January 7th; Slightly groggy. Roads less slippery. Do a couple of bits of editing for friends. On one discussion forum Mr P urges us to discuss spoons. Chat goes from absinthe spoons (thesis) through more spoons to revenge of the forks (antithesis) to cutlery glasses (synthesis).
January 6th; Streets very dangerous today, the rain-melted ice like greased glass. I walk at half speed, inadvertently carrying out Coelho's 'Speed Exercise'. At swimming bath I do have to walk barefoot across ice to get into pool, because the snow has melted and refrozen, and then it starts to rain. This persistent, irritating rain brings to mind a sci-fi story I read when I was small about a planet where the rain never stops, and astronauts are occasionally driven insane by the drumming of the rain on their helmets. It takes all 20 lengths for me to lose the maddening feeling that someone owes me an apology for the fact that cold drops of water keep falling on my head while I swim through the warm water. Out of the pool, I walk gingerly down an icy path and find Jeremy & Zita and their child at the bus stop. We chat for a couple of bus stops until they get off. Franc drops by at my flat, but I have no kettle yet, so we repair to his square and chat in the cafe next door to his flat, and then more over a lovely dinner and some beers. We talk about Rwanda, glue, and I get drunk enough to start banging on about demurrage-based-currencies again.

January 5th; Swim at outdoor pool again, this time after dark. Quicker today. Meet Marion & Paul at 6.30pm for a charity evening concert at the Music Academy to raise money for a Liszt-focussed annual event in Esztergom. One of the pianists is wearing a rather nice shoulderless frock, though Marion tuts at me gently when I describe her as tasty. Something to do with her being "only" 17. The three pianists play Bach, Chopin, Liszt, and Brahms. I rather enjoy a Dohnanyi piece and a slightly flashy Bartok number towards the end. I meet Jutka afterwards who is a potter, and also knows Istvan Bartha, whose studio I used to pop into years ago to play with his clay.
January 4th; Swim twenty lengths at the outdoor pool on the island in the Danube again. Since I was at Robin's, snow has covered Budapest's streets and frozen into a ridged carpet of lumpy ice. Quite grateful at the pool that someone swept paths through the snow across the tiles to the pool edge so I don't actually have to walk barefoot across ice to get into the water. The strange high returns in the afternoon: I feel as if, should I wish to, I could bend metal bars with my bare hands. Franc spots me on the street, tracks me down to the photographic studio, and shows me inside the gallery he is sharing with Stephen before a quick fruit juice with Tomi & his girlfriend. Meet Marion for mulled wine afterwards, and lack of sleep from last night starts to hit me during the second glass of warm wine. Since I have to stay up for Terri's party later, I finally allow myself a coffee, and alertness returns. Marion & I talk about duty, love, and the difference between private and public. Get to Terri's. She is looking rather slinky in black, and talking about what outfit she should have worn to be rescued from a dragon [one of her guests is a Sir George]. She introduces me to Ronan and Buba, and I start downing glasses of wine. Ronan has an identity-card book idea for me inspired by something he read during his Tantric phase. With two flamboyant interpreters we get talking briefly about sleep deprivation. Terri has a Ruthenian friend called Inya who tells me that the human sciences are still Aristotelian in structure. Handsome escapologist Mr Merlini turns up and, when Terri mentions bondage and catsuits, recommends me a pretty full-on S&M website. Since his job involves being padlocked inside tanks full of water and ice, he should know, I suppose. At this point, Franc reappears at my side like the fancy-dress-shop owner in Mr Benn and says it's time to go home.

January 3rd; Robin & Bela drive me to Lakitelek to meet my train. I have a worrying moment in the car when I cannot find my keys. Life tests us every day. We arrive at the snowy station as darkness falls on the Great Plain, and we munch a pizza while waiting for my train. In the small pizza restaurant at the station, Robin & Bela change the television channel to watch an extraordinary cartoon called 'Count Duckula'. A Donald Duck vampire in a cartoon version of London is helped or hindered, I couldn't tell, by some animal dressed as Sherlock Holmes. The cartoon's closing credits include script by Mike Harding [the man has to make a living, I suppose] and someone in charge of make-up. Last night's curious Maslow high returns - people seem to be looking at me, waiting for me to say something to them, waiting for me to transform their lives. I miss my train, and one five minutes later turns out to meet the same connection. This train changes at Kiskunfelegyhaza, a new route. The station has a quite smart early-modern pre-war ticket hall, with comfortable park-style wooden benches of the kind they withdrew from Kecskemet's ticket hall so you can only sit down there if you sit outside in the cold. A curiously deserted train into Budapest.
January 2nd; Robin & Georgina sweep snow off the frozen pond. I now cannot remember when the three of us watched a repeat of 'Flashmob the Opera' on television. 31st? 30th? This was filmed in October - made up of bits of different operas sung by choirs dressed as policemen and football supporters wandering around the concourse of Saint Pancras station in London on the station's re-opening night. Supposedly the flashmob people organised much of it. A romantic aria brought tears to my eyes again - the same one that Ilan played me off YouTube in the summer. Must think again about classical music.
Mid-afternoon, Robin returns late having picked up Letty from somewhere. They describe finding a 19-year-old girl stumbling in the snow by the roadside. She had taken an overdose saying she wanted to die. She was trying to cycle to a neighbouring village, but had grown tired in the cold. The nearby village was where the father of her child lives. Apparently she wants to die because the Hungarian equivalent of Social Services are going to take her two-year-old child away from her. Robin phoned for an ambulance and drove her back home. Shocked, Letty described how the girl's father opened the car door and pulled her out by her arm, shouting abuse. Robin said the girl, a Gypsy, was one of the most beautiful women he had ever seen. They had to keep her awake in the car so that she wouldn't slip into a coma.

January 1st; Thick snow lies on the ground. Muffled quiet outdoors. Perhaps Robin's friend Zeno was right. He predicted a long, cold winter. This is because he saw wild boar snuffling around in the woods late in the autumn, looking for some nut-type-thing to fatten them up for the coming cold.

Mark Griffith, site administrator / contact@otherlanguages.org

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