November 30th;
At Robin's in the countryside, Georgina, his wife, comes back from a couple of days
in hospital. By day, I notice two orange tractors parked together near the gate, their
front wheels turned the same way like a courting couple unconsciously crossing their
legs in the same direction. Everywhere I look there are lots of holes rimmed with
heaped soil: sixty or seventy,
Robin says. Soon they
will get local-species fruit trees planted in them.
November 29th;
Finish
'The Weiser Concise
Guide to Alchemy' by Brian Cotnoir, a down-to-earth, sensible
prelude to the Great Work: what some apparently called 'terrestial astronomy' - the
'astronomy of the seven metals'. Lots of sensible warnings about safety in the lab,
some interesting herb stuff, and a choice selection of old engraved diagrams of
interlocking cosmic order complete this short breezy primer. Robin & I staple
bubblewrap to two of the studio's single-glazed windows after dark, also cutting
strips of off-white felt to close draughts round the main doors. The whole room
immediately feels warmer.
November 28th;
Drive out of town with Robin, breaking off to buy shoes for his
daughters in Kecskemet. This involves a wander round a giant Auchan hypermarket where,
though I cannot buy any rubber inflateables, a 2 lb 8 oz chunk of basic cheese
at ten quid shows someone's doing some inflating. Walking across
Robin's
garden at night I fall into a hole in the ground. Since he mentioned one new
hole at least ten feet deep no-one would be able to get out of unaided, I naturally
wonder, while I'm falling into it, if this is the one. It's only a couple of feet down,
however. A cold, windy night with a sea of stars: revealing what you might call
the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence, if you were so inclined.
November 27th;
Breakfast with Gizella. Revisit
plastics
office. Lunch with
Robin & Stojko, followed
by afternoon meeting with Robin, Hans, & Amin out at the printers. More
MGMT
{solid grey triangle}.
November 26th;
Visit plastics ladies, see
Akos for lesson.
November 25th;
In the evening an excellent
curry
with Rob. He mentions how at the
office he arrives
early one morning, and is slightly nonplussed when the cleaning woman introduces him
in Hungarian to her vacuum cleaner. "He's called Robert
too", she explains cheerfully. He relates enjoying the circus
when it came to town recently so much he went twice, and tells a
sad story about one bent employee over a few years near-bankrupting
one of London's most respected musical-instrument shops, in business at least a
couple of centuries. An
MGMT club
track {press the solid grey triangle next to the heart}
on the 'earworm' &
'hypemachine' sites.
November 24th;
8am breakfast with Martin at place new to me on Kiraly street which does croissants
properly, ie warm, squidgy, and buttery, the same way every bakery in France
seems to manage, but no-one anywhere else. He
tells me of his adventures in the Ghanaian telecommunications market last week.
By night with Mystery Friend 2 for some drinks with his friend Tamas who has theories
about girls, and seems to apply them fairly successfully - perhaps someone to learn
from. These include the red-versus-black-panties theory, the three-unanswered-phone-calls
theory, the crooked-teeth theory, and the
late-autumn-early-winter-boyfriend-gap theory. Mystery Friend
is worried about a call he got on his mobile earlier this evening: from the unusual noises
this might either have been a girl sobbing but saying nothing, or else he
might have been phoned up by an air-conditioning unit. Here's an American comedian I
haven't seen before: his fairly mellow
musings
on the Conan O'Brien show, and the
slightly
harsher stage act that made his name and got him invited onto television.
November 23rd;
Breakfast with Bob from Philadelphia, who momentarily describes himself as a bureaucratic
barnacle on the ocean-going hull of the US economy. He reminds me of the Dangerous Part
of Philly anecdote. Bob is looking at charming old buildings in a run-down part of
the city of brotherly love a few years back, when an agitated black girl sprints
down the street towards him and stops right in his face.
"You The Man?" she desperately
demands. Bob quickly weighs up the dangers of being The Man against the dangers of not
being The Man, then nervously shakes his head and says no.
"I need The Man." she says
grimly, and legs it off down the street. To
Bob's relief, no
axe-wielding pimp hoves into view before he is able to hastily get himself out of
the district. As our breakfast continues he shows me two Persian carpets he
has bought in Budapest markets this weekend, unrolling them on the cafe floor. He will
probably trade the larger one with an old dealer friend in Vienna for something more
portable to get back to Pennsylvania. We part as he takes the tram to catch his train
to Vienna to do a few days of teaching marketing in Austria. Delicious lunch at Franc's.
While wearing his puffin-lookalike oven mitts to do some food preparation,
Franc explains why
American universities dominate world sprinting, but not longer distances.
He tells me an extraordinary quote from a Czech runner called
Zatopek,
who, when asked how he managed to fight exhaustion over long, gruelling runs, replied
"I tired tiredness."
November 22nd;
Dinner with Eva P, who tells me about a chain of restaurants in Spain called 'The
Argentinian Cow', and explains some of the Spanish property bubble. Out late with Martin
& friends, bumping into Clemence, who now works at a local United Nations office. Fail
to meet Bob, but some cavorting and revelry at various hepcat locations.
Rich graphics
site.
November 21st;
Lunch with Mystery Friend 2, where I bump into Orsi from the Vista days - as
demure as ever, she is working at Castro's now. MF2 & I chat about psychology.
Visit the two chatty old biddies
with wrist-mounted pin cushions for shirt fitting, and then drop in on two other helpful
ladies at the industrial plastics place on Izabella street Robin took me to.
Together we discuss three possible light, strong
materials, including one they show me that is 1/8th of an inch thick, appears to
weigh less than a pound a square foot, and seems to be supernaturally strong -
I cannot even get close to being able to bend a sample. It is a
new
composite material they got in from Germany that afternoon that they have not even
decided their retail price for yet. Visually, I am more taken though by a sheet of
transparent square plastic channels, effectively a bonded layer of tiny box girders in
see-through PVC.
Finally meet Bob in the evening, tired from his
travels. After admiring my flat, he & I repair to the Turkish [or is it Kurdish?] place
round the corner for a warming snack at around 9pm.
November 20th;
Thursday. Getting serious about building a bookcase again, I set off for the nearby
home-improvements discount warehouse,
OBI
- a retailer whose
style tone is set by its orange-overalled German cartoon beaver mascot thing.
I have been here
before.
Looking
around at the limited choice of lengths of wood, I realise I need to sit down over a cup of
tea and redo my calculations. In a handy teashop outlet just past check-out I ask
about some cakes I see behind the counter.
I : Good afternoon! What kind of cakes are those, please?
Assistant : They're cakes.
I : Aha! So what kind of cakes are they?
Assistant : They're cakes.
I : Right. So... what k-i-n-d of cakes?
Assistant : Honey and walnut or chocolate.
I : Thank you. The honey and walnut please.
Assistant : So the chocolate cake then?
For the record, the [honey and walnut] cake is delicious, and
the tea very reasonable. I go back in, get the man at the sawing desk to reluctantly agree
to cut a board up into smaller pieces.
What are these?
he asks where I have written
numbers with "mm" afterwards. I say they are sizes in millimetres.
No, no,
he says irritably,
I need the sizes of the pieces.
I repeat that they are sizes in millimetres.
No, no, in centimetres,
he wearily explains to me with the sorely tried patience
shop staff here use when patronising customers. I rewrite 833 as 83.3 and 250 as 25 and
write "cm" after them. He looks down at my piece of paper and sighs despairingly at my
continued stupidity.
What's that then?
he asks me waving his hand at what I've written.
Those are the sizes in centimetres that you asked me for, I respond, staying calm [after
years of practice]. He makes tutting noises, remarks that "cm" can be an abbreviation
for other things, and rewrites what I have written as 25,0 cm and 83,3 cm.
Silly me. I forgot it's a decimal comma here. You probably
think I make all this stuff up, don't you? Or that I speak Hungarian with an
incomprehensible foreign accent, because surely no nation
could really behave like this on a daily basis? He warns me
there will be an inaccuracy of a few millimetres - I say fine, no problem.
He tells me to come back two hours later. I come back more than two hours later,
and he has not done the job.
You see, I warned you,
he starts off,
that these sizes won't be exact because of the blade.
We won't be able to do it, you know?
I reassure him that, honestly, there is some leeway, and
I fully understand it won't be perfect. He insists on bringing the circular blade
to show me that it is at least three millimetres thick itself, and I say fine, really,
I trust him to do the best job he can, absolute precision is really not so important,
please don't worry.
Then I leave him to it, walk around the store for another fifteen minutes, enjoying a
Bjork song
on the in-warehouse radio, and being pleasantly startled by a stack of folding
ladders with the wood all stained an intense, lemon yellow. I get back and he has cut
the board perfectly well into 15 identical rectangles, exactly as I wanted,
all with beautifully clean edges. I'm reminded of
Annabel's
remark about preferring to work with Hungarians than
Slavs because Slavs start off saying they are your lifelong friend and anything is
possible and then everything goes wrong, whereas Hungarians start off totally negative,
protesting the job is impossible, but, if carefully and patiently coaxed, will finally
do the work, and it will in fact not be that bad at all.
Carrying the slabs of resin board home on the tram, 7 under one arm, 8 under the other
arm, I realise I have been hugely stupid myself. These will just be the shelves. The
same weight again would be the structure. I am proposing to make a bookcase that will
weigh like something cut out of rock. After staggering home, arms and hands
in some pain, I place the wannabee shelves on my floor to get an idea
of scale and further realise that 1. the structure might well not be strong enough
for its own weight, and 2. though mounted on wheels, this bookcase I intended to be
easily transportable will not fit into the lift that
is eight feet from my front door, and that I could easily have measured before starting
out this afternoon. I go in the lift with a ruler to check, and the answer is that,
sure enough, my structurally unsound design is almost a foot too long.
For 5 minutes I toy with redesigning something smaller and then think, no.
I must find a lighter, stronger material:
something completely different.
November 19th;
Wednesday. Jim & I meet at the gym along with Gordon, and we do a fairly light session
since we all feel a bit feeble. I show Jim the article I read yesterday in one of the
Hungarian women's fitness
magazines lying around near the exercise bicycles. This article explains a book
written by an American woman, a former mannequin, about handling men as if we are dogs.
Be kind but firm, reward him for compliance, show him who's in charge right from the start,
and so on. What's amusing is most Hungarian girls don't need
telling this - they already seem quite set on trying to obedience-train men - yet as a
nation they are atrocious at training dogs. Four days in a row instructing a puppy is
more discipline than most Hungarians are capable of, which is why the streets are full
of angry locals tugging on leashes and snarling at their untrained hounds.
Perhaps there's room for a Hungarian book showing women how they could at least succeed
at something - training a dog - by using on their pets what
clearly
doesn't work on their men.
Back to the Chinese market past Orczy square again, this time with more success. Yesterday,
following Jim's instructions to go straight on at Orczy square, I double-checked with a
Hungarian petrol-station attendant. I asked him if I was going the right way for the
Chinese market, and a strange, chuckly smile oozed onto his plump little face.
No, no, he explained affectionately, the "Josephtown market", he corrected me,
was up to Orczy square and then left for about
five minutes. I wondered if the Chinese market and the Josephtown market were the same
thing, but said nothing. Instead I asked if I was ten minutes' walk away and he positively
beamed as if he were about to cuddle me, the way some people do here when they think they
are being cleverly sly, saying
Oh yes, easily ten minutes even at a gentle stroll -
don't forget to turn left at Orczy square!
As I walked on he was watching me,
still smiling, twinkly-eyed. I got to Orczy square a hundred yards on, and found a Chinese
woman with a baby. I asked her if the Chinese market was to the left?
No, straight on,
she said, one tramstop,
with the frank blank look of someone who would never even think of
trying to lie about something so trivial. Doubtless, the man at the petrol
station had taken it into his head that he was doing something patriotic by diverting
me from the filthy chink immigrant shanty town and sending me to the proper higher-priced
Hungarian market instead. One tram stop straight on it was. Along the left of the road is
a quarter-mile stretch of bustling stalls. This Chinese market is a grid of about twenty
alleyways covering an acre or two - perhaps the equivalent of a mediaeval market town in
England, something like the centre of Lincoln or Shrewsbury in size. Just one of these
Chinese markets is doing more business than the whole of Budapest city centre put together.
This is because the Chinese retailers are not pathologically greedy, and charge realistically
low prices. Therefore Budapest's shopping plazas and high streets are all but empty of
customers while the Chinese markets are packed all week long. About half to two thirds of
the stalls and shops seem to be manned by Chinese, with the rest evenly divided between
Vietnamese, a few Hungarians [though they might be employees of Chinese owners], and a
small scattering of former Soviet Asians. On the right side of the road is a similar
length of barrack-type warehousy buildings adapted into spartan but clean shops, plus
stores upstairs. For a moment I drink in the intoxicating atmosphere, so unusual in this
city, of shop staff actually moving around, some of them even working, hauling boxes,
cleaning things, then I head into the supermarket I've been sent to for a herb that
supposedly boosts your immune system. Using the Chinese ideograms I've scribbled in my
notebook, a shop assistant quickly finds it for me, a neat bagful of woody slivers of
sliced root. I retreat from the puzzled stares of the Chinese supermarket assistants,
part-shy, part-suspicious, part-tired, and walk back into town. I get the pack home and try
chewing some. It tastes a bit like fresh liquorice root.
At night I finish the book
'5-minute
NLP' by Carolyn Boyes, though she doesn't even get
her name on the cover or spine, because this is a handy pocket-sized book in the Collins
gem series. Though NLP uses quite a lot of offputting jargon, like 'calibrating'
[this seems to mean 'noting carefully'], 'anchors', and 'swish patterns', it looks very
useful. NLP [neuro-linguistic programming] seems to be a set of techniques for noticing,
breaking, and remaking habits - especially habits of thought that shape how you see
yourself and the world. Obviously this stuff has to
be practised, but it is refreshingly straightforward and practical in tone. It looks like
it really does make changing yourself easier for everyone.
November 18th;
Tuesday. After dark, try to pull some money out of the wall, confronted by more
highly-paid people's thickness. Card goes in, and then four stages - 1. What language?
2. enter PIN 3. What service? 4. How much money? - before we get to the bit where
it explains this machine cannot take my particular kind of card, which of course
could have come before all four of those requests. Extraordinary.
Not just one person, but several people signed off on that piece of self-evidently
shoddy design. Are none of them embarrassed? As if.
Dinner at Franc's.
I use his gimlet to work on papier mache project while his spherical cat waddles around
in the background and we drink some excellent red wine. As we chat, he starts to
get transatlantic text messages from Paula in a Manhattan
post office believing he has sent her something which has not arrived.
We contemplate teasing her by texting back worried questions about the valuable
"package" she thinks is missing.
Leaving his place around midnight I get on the usual night bus
which starts its journey, as always, with paying passengers [4] outnumbered by
overweight ticket inspectors [only 6 tonight]. Night crisp & genuinely chilly.
November 17th;
Monday. Get up early for landlady's son. He & I carry my ugly wooden cot bed down to
the cellar together. A typical communist object, it opens on hinges for no good reason,
and is heavy, impractical, & fragile. Looking online for inflateables,
I find this
page.
November 16th;
Sunday. Clear my desk and tidy my table. Am directed to this
creepy
television
advert that says that appearances are what govern life.
Worryingly convincing.
November 15th;
Saturday. Ethnography Judit takes me to a trendy little
tea house, which involves
clambering around on carpeted platforms with music from the likes of
Supergrass
playing softly in the background. She tells me about a good novel she is
reading in Swedish.
November 14th;
Friday. Spend day doing whatever it is I do with my time these days. Not sure what
that is any more, to be honest. Last night put ad in local
Russian-language newspaper.
November 13th;
Sleep right through morning appointment, but meet
Jim
instead at 3pm for my first gym
session for perhaps a month. The credit crunch is already affecting sales
of Jim's paintings. Over tea afterwards meet his friend, Football Steve. Jim gives
me directions for a Chinese market near my flat, and they
are discussing line-ups of the football team on a piece of paper as I leave.
November 12th;
Slow, late-morning idleness eating pastries and drinking coffee & tea with
Politics
Judit at the patisserie behind the yellow church. Extensive gossip before we retire
to another nearby cafe for the actual Tarot reading.
November 11th;
Take train to Manchester early to catch midday flight to Budapest. Start to feel
better once I am inside airport. Dark in Budapest as we land. In bus from Budapest
airport heading for town I finish an interesting book called
'The
World Without Us' by Alan Weisman. Weisman looks
at how quickly various human structures like cities, petrochemical complexes, dams,
canals, farms would revert to the wild if people disappeared tomorrow. There are
fascinating accounts of the wilderness now filling the no man's lands between North
and South Korea, between Turkish Cyprus and Greek Cyprus, and around the abandoned
nuclear power station at Chernobyl. Within a surprisingly short time, trees start
to grow through buildings and roads, various wild animals return, and so on.
Intriguingly, he says stone buildings and bronze sculptures might last longer
than any modern, high-tech objects [apart from the hated plastics, of course].
Weisman moves from curiosity towards the eco-nihilism familiar
to readers of James Lovelock and more particularly
David
Benatar, concluding that
if people disappeared overnight, it would be good, because lots of beautiful
animals we are driving to extinction could revive and thrive. The "exhausted"
earth could begin to "recover" from the "burden" of supporting humankind.
He's American, so we have to read thumbnail sketches of each biologist or
engineer he speaks to. He seems obsessed with greying hair: he tells us lots of
experts fall into the fifty-but-no-grey-hair-yet category. In
one moronic passage near the end, Weisman suggests a one-woman-one-child policy
for the whole planet, and applauds how quickly this would force human population
down to "sustainable" levels. He seems to have never given a second's thought to asking
why it is that only a country as fascistic as China ever tried such a policy,
a policy it will be paying dearly for through decades of demographic
imbalance to come - as if it could
ever be enforced anywhere else. How long before this kind of anti-human
thinking spawns a full-on terrorist movement? At least on page
197 he quotes zoologists Temple and Coleman on how cats often kill for
sheer fun, and spares us the Rousseau-esque Lorenzian Deep Green delusion
that only humans kill or destroy pointlessly. Would have been nice to see him
refer to the interesting picture book from the 1990s called
'After
Man', which tried to illustrate how some animals might evolve to fill
ecological niches a modest
50 million years after we go. It was done deadpan, with full-page colour
sketches of the type
in natural-history books. I recall a very convincing drawing of a tree-climbing dog
that had evolved long, sloth-like, curving claws.
After I finish Weisman's elegy to a non-human future, I revert to looking
out of the number 93 bus windows at the suburbs of southern Pest by night. I've
inadvertently got on the bus taking the long, scenic route through lots of
streets which are still part suburb, part village. Something like a full moon
has followed me all the way from Yorkshire. As I gaze at lights of
small, dumpy shops and quiet people wrapped in bulky coats,
engrossed in their lives, a thought about rotational
symmetry twinkles tantalisingly half out of reach in my head. Not forcing it,
I wait. In sudden calm it clicks into place quietly but firmly, like a final
jigsaw piece or Lego brick.
November 10th;
Sleep late in Yorkshire. Open a court summons, four days hence, for not paying my
council tax, which I thought I was exempt from. Several people I spoke to
at the
council last year had told me solemnly that "of course" they would keep in
touch with me by e-mail, which of course they didn't. I phone up and pay the ransom.
November 9th;
Breakfast with Paris before he sets off to his dying aunt's hospice. I get to King's
Cross, and catch my train to The Village. This is in fact three
trains
and a bus. Due
to repairs on a Sunday, our train goes London to Grantham. There we have a bit of
rain to keep us from getting too comfortable. Then a bus takes us from
Grantham to Newgate. Then another train to Leeds. Then a train to Mytholmroyd. In
Yorkshire there is more unnecessary rain and darkness. The house is waiting for me,
still smelling of dog, still full of heartbreaking clutter, still there to be cleared.
November 8th;
Early to airport
for long weekend in England. On aeroplane find myself sitting next to buoyant Bella from
Nyiregyhaza. As her phone is not working well, we take the coach together
from Luton into London and have a green tea with her friend Nikoletta when we at
last find her in the vastness of Victoria station. Later I make it to ParisinLondon's
house, an hour late, due to me forgetting that London is big and text messages don't
work in underground stations here. Paris is exhausted, due to the imminent death of
his much-loved Swiss aunt. He is at the hospice each day all day. They were only told
a week ago that she had cancer and will die any day now. I go to Karis's party
around midnight and find it impressively packed with people dressed as rakes or
reformers. I go as a vicar and people look at me oddly on the bus there and back
- perhaps my dog collar and respectable casual outfit looks just a tad too
convincing. Karis is much more spectacular
in a cinching red corset, much decolletage, dramatic make-up, and a wonderful toy
knife with retractable blade pinned invitingly close to one breast. A loyal friend of
hers chides me crossly for not knowing that our hostess is very
clever and works at a "hot-shot law firm". In another room we are wedged
almost to a standstill by revellers.
A very pretty girl yells ecstatically at someone by my head "God,
fucking Hannah's here! Oh fuck!!" She is extremely
excited that Hannah is there. I chat with a couple of fellow men of
the cloth. The whole party has quite an Oxford feel to it.
This could almost be a scene in a 1920s Waugh novel - nearly 100 years ago now. I
get back to Turnpike Lane to find Paris asleep on his sofa in front of his widescreen
television, where something BBC about romantic heroines in literature is on for the 2nd
time this evening.
November 7th;
To Martin's in the evening, where we watch the early 90s film
'Bob
Roberts' on DVD. Though slightly earnest, the film is a worryingly
convincing comic portrayal of how politics works in the US. The maker, an admirer of the
spoof documentary 'Spinal Tap', has had to yield to the literalness of American life, and
explain his jokes as the film goes on. Otherwise, American audiences wouldn't have got
them. Some clever moments, nonetheless. An uncanny foreglimpse of the right-wing folksiness
of the younger George Bush.
November 6th;
Sleep late. Oddly warm weather for November continues.
The Nigel of Light sends me this amusing story.
No2id campaigners have obtained
Britain's Home Secretary's
fingerprints
and, we must hope, her DNA as well, off a drinking glass. Appropriately this appears on
Guido Fawkes' weblog just the morning after his special day. The plan is to mass-produce
stamps or gloves enabling lots of people to leave Jacqui Smith's fingerprints wherever
they wish, following the
bold
lead of some
German
hackers. The Germans already did this
March.
They showed the stupidity of Interior Minister Wolfgang Schauble
and his biometric identity database by publishing his index-finger print
in a magazine. Each copy of the magazine included a free gift of a rubber
version of his fingerprint enabling anyone to fool a biometric scanner into
thinking Wolfgang is everywhere.
Big Mojo track
'Downside
Away Blues'. Bongo Man version of dance number
'Mojo Tribe'.
November 5th;
No Guy Fawkes Night
here on the Continent, of course, since almost the whole place is
given over to popish knavery anyway. US presidency and vice-presidency go to Godless
believers in
evolution
in the small hours. Concrete shells of buildings now rising rapidly in the nearby
building site, which has been a massive pit full of cranes [presumably making deep
foundations] for over a year. In the last couple of weeks, 3 or 4 storeys of cement
walls have sprung up with oblong holes where windows will be.
The 19th-century four-storey building
taller than it is wide, rendered in mint green with one sad general grocer in
its ground floor, no longer stands alone in
an empty space like a good tooth in a hollow mouth. With four floors of bare cement
on one side and two storeys of stacked Portakabin/prefab site offices on the other,
it now increasingly looks like a good tooth surrounded by cheap dentures. Mystery
Friend 1 pops up on the Skype text chat in the afternoon. Late night
drinking and eating out on the town with Mystery Friend 2.
November 4th;
Surprisingly easily, phone another post office, and track down my parcel from the US.
Take tram 28 out there to pick it up. The same place I visited with Ilan
a
year or so ago. Back in flat, rewatch famous
'mindlock'
scene in THX1138, with the
humans toiling away in front of monitors, plus Lucas'
original
film-school version,
only 15 minutes long, all with lots of Apollo-Mission-style crackly voice-overs intoning
numbers. Suddenly occurs to me I have been, of my own free will, sitting in
front of a glowing screen for several hours, watching numbers in several separate browser
windows, pressing buttons, moving between tasks in step with the machine. After dark,
due to a misunderstanding, fail to meet Nora in Buda, but bump into
Ilan down on the
underground metro platform. Perky as ever, he tries to push me under an underground train
to see if I react. I react.
November 3rd;
Go with Robin to
printers, where we meet Istvan the printer, who seems so cheerful we suspect he
sleeps under the machines in the screen-printing room with the intoxicating,
dizzying ink smell. Afterwards we dine at the pizzeria Pauline showed me, then
I trek to the post office to try to track down my package from the US. At 2 in the
morning, I get a message from Martin online, and we meet for a beer round the corner.
He tells me about Lee Atwater, who inspired
Karl
Rove, and Atwater's end-of-life
change
of heart, renouncing all he did for the Republican party as devious and wrong once he
found he was dying of cancer.
November 2nd;
Bright, warm sun around lunchtime fades into another smoky, autumn dusk on the
Great Plain. Robin describes a dream last night in which he, I, and his friend Clive
owned a train which we were driving at night and trying to pull into a siding with
the help of a friendly Hungarian railway controller. Some hunters pass through the
village shooting things, and he reports finding deer, pheasants, and rabbits all
taking shelter down at the pond. As darkness falls, we take the two girls
back to boarding
school in Kecskemet and drive on to Budapest.
November 1st;
Quiet day in the countryside. A little bit of wood-chopping, like yesterday. As
dusk falls and light fails in the studio, Robin finds the spare bulb for the
intense stage lamp that burned out last night.
Georgina makes pancakes for supper. Last night in the studio, when
Robin went to bed
leaving the radio on, it
played an eerie choral piece by a Polish composer.
Ethereal voices stream out of the barn shadows into the one big light next to me.
The voices seem to urge the wax tablet on to completion in the small hours as
I gently melt, recongeal, and remelt the surface under the powerfully hot lamp.
The bulb fails around 3am when the saints are fused into the surface at just the
right depth, and I measure the biscuit tin with Robin's spirit level and leave it
to cool.
Mark Griffith, site administrator /
markgriffith @ yahoo.com
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