THE BALLOON MAN

I was going to go to an art gallery today, but again the sun was far too bright, so I took a walk by the lake again. Of course, half the city had had the same idea. I get the sense that it's a weekly ritual. Anyway, it wasn't bad to be in the crowd. I heard a busker who was a bit different from normal. Dylan-ish, and peddling some light lyrics drawn from from the Perennial Philosophy that were perfect for this hazy cusp-of-Spring day: the simple things in life are what's going to get you through and they don't cost money; look forward to tomorrow and don't pore over a yesterday that's gone; happiness may be very close by. And as he went into the choruses, his two puppets (Jean-Paul & Mohammed) started clopping their wooden feet on a box-top in time. The light shone off the lake and I felt that, yes, everything was all right with life.

Between songs, Greg (his name was on his CDs) was exhorting people to smile: "never underestimate the power of a smile", "Every smile is beautiful. Some of the best smiles I've seen had no teeth at all." "Even if you've had trouble in your life, you can still smile." He was twisting up balloons for kids and he'd say "that's a great smile. That's worth a balloon. I know you're gonna get married with a smile like that!"

The marriage thing was just a joke, but of course set me off reflecting. It struck me how heavy my ponderous thoughts have become, and how melanchlolic my songwriting style is! (Five out of the two hundred-plus I've written are what you'd call happy. Hm, wonder why everyone always preferred the cover versions when I used to do gigs?) I'm good with friends and I seem to make friends for life - but still pretty hopeless at parties. I've always seen a new face as a potential challenge, and if someone (perhaps a girl) smiles at me, I think it's for the person behind me and miss the moment. I don't smile at women on the street or in bars in case they think I'm leering. (Why on earth should I feel guilty about just smiling?) Once, seeing me walking along the pavement to meet him, my best friend told me I looked as if I was about to murder someone. The funny thing is, despite feeling slightly lost (first and only time in Stoke Newington) I was feeling just fine. Maybe it was the Stoke Newington effect.

I don't know how it came to be this way! Hitting adulthood as the no-future ecological crisis exploded over me didn't help. But other students didn't seem to bother so much that their world was ending. This has a longer history; one primary teacher wrote in my report "Neil takes life far too seriously." I don't feel down. I'm pretty upbeat. But I'd give a lot to (re)discover levity, an easy smile and to write more happy songs! Greg remarked (lightly, with a smile) to the audience that sometimes to be able to do that is a lifetime's achievement.

FASNACHT IN LUZERN

I took the train to Lucerne yesterday - it's only 50 minutes away. Yes, that's 50 minutes exactly - both ways. It really is true about everything here running like clockwork. Normally, I just treat bus timetables as some kind of approximation - but the other night, after an Irish folk session, we turned up for the last bus at midnight, and there it was. It even waited till 12.02, the exact scheduled departure time.

Anyway, Lucerne - surrounded by mountains, and on a beautiful wide lake. I can't get bored of this. I've seen lots of mountains in Scotland, but they're not jagged and snow-capped. So first off, I got myself a Glühwein and just gazed for a bit. It's another very charming picture postcard town with a Middle Ages feel: all twisty lanes and embellished facades. Just to top it off, yesterday was part of the Fasnacht festival, the local Mardi Gras, so the streets were full of marching bands, each composed of around twenty people wearing themed heads with a slightly different expression. There were horned devils, green men, and other assorted bogeys, even a procession of white-caped nightmare Elvises. All of these creatures were beating drums or playing the kind of horns where the tube curls round your body and culminates in a huge funnel (?) above your rubbery head. Next to the band trundled a small truck, from which they dispensed goodies like overly-sweet Punsch. The effect of this, and the strange organ music from the trucks - not in time with the drums, but didn't need to be - was disorientating, like being in a kind of dream - half-in half-out of the jollity and mocking masks rearing up at every turn.

IMPRESSIONS FROM A HALF DAY OFF

On Friday, I had no input to do on the course so I found myself with a few hours free. I took the tram to town, thinking I'd go looking for some boots, but the sun was too bright in the sky and I ended up walking past the spires and clocks to the shore of the Zurich See...

It's the first real spring day and it feels as if the world has paused just here. People are basking on the benches and the wall at the water's edge.There are a lot of couples, but I'm not going to feel jealous - today, anyway. One teenage girl is bouncing a plastic bottle off her boyfriend's knees - she looks enraptured. There's an old couple, in their 70s, still arm in arm.


The water is very clean. A cormorant goes under, and I can watch its whole dive until it re-emerges half a minute later. It never seems to catch anything, though. There are hooting coots, a line of four swans, and lots of ducks, one with a big copper-coloured head and bright red beak. On the far shore, I can hear the engine of some kind of paddle-steamer hammering, slightly muffled. In the distance, behind a net curtain of mist, there are the mountains.

The sky is clear, with only a few wispy clouds and vapour trails. When I close my eyes, I feel the sun like an expert masseur relaxing all the muscles on my face. I must have been so tensed up before, and never knew. I have to take off my pullover because of the heat. I realise I've actually managed to turn off my thoughts for a few minutes, and just watch ducks.

LOST IN TRANSLATION

This is not a fake. I am typing this verbatim from the side of a Chinese box of battery-operated vibrating condoms. You might wonder how I came into possession of these. Well, they're not mine and I reckon the best thing about them is the box. Here goes.

In sex life deficient fervor? Is because had not discovered! The reproduction healthy expert intimate bird newly promotes the appeal toy vibration life jacket, crisply crisply itches, direct excited G. The comprehensive promotion sex life quality, lets you feel the unprecedented pleasant sensation with to satisfy!

Operating instructions:
1. Takes out the product in the packing box.
2. The wrap enters the life jacket wrap to enter the vibrator first (also to be possible again to wrap directly enters vibrator use)
3. Will vibrate the link wrap to enter to the male genitals root (vibration salient point forward)
4. Presses down the switch, vibrates 15-30 minute (to be possible sustainably to open, to close)
5. This product may the men and women use in common or voluntarily the DIY use.

(Not sure I'd trust it somehow, even for DIY use.)

ALLES IN ORDNUNG (Laundry room fun)

There's a washing machine in our small block, and you have to book time on it. That's the system in Switzerland, apparently. I signed up for a specfic time and, when I arrived, was mildly irritated to find that my name had been neatly crossed off - our neighbours wanted to reserve the thing for the entire weekend!

I'd seen their name there, but it hadn't seemed possible they wanted all days both days. Were they running an orphanage? Turns out they are both international tax and social security consultants for big business (I wonder what they actually *do*?) so work a 7-day week. Anyway, I negotiated my slot, and the guy was careful to point out that I also needed to reserve space to hang the clothes up to dry - and that I should inform my co-tutor not to hang his (black) socks on the same line as my neighbour's (white) laundry. Not because they'd be hard to distinguish from each other, obviously. Some control-freakery lurking?

POST-SCRIPT
Today, a week later, this same annoying neighbour has instructed me how to clean the powder drawer and dry the inside of the window to the machine. Oh, and the lint thing needs to be done, of course. I told him that, after nearly 40 years on the planet, it is the first time I have ever been told there's a need to clean the powder drawer, which gets a regular good soaking anyway! I told him - restraining myself - that it was "a little crazy".

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ZURICH

I'd only been to Switzerland once before - memorable because of driving through the mountains from France in an intense lightning storm. This time, I'm here for work, so I haven't had a lot of time to admire the scenery. It helps that, on a sunny day like today, there's a great view down the street that the school is on. Framed by buildings, the road descends towards the spires at the bottom. Behind these, dwarfing them, not sky but a backdrop of slightly hazy deep blue mountains, still snow-capped even though we haven't had anything like a winter. It's all very postcard-photogenic, but I have forgotten my camera lead so I won't be posting any till later.

The buildings are unformly pretty - neat houses (Play School design) with bright coloured shutters. No high-rise buildings in our part of town, but a forest of spires, some thin like rapiers. Everything is extremely clean, and ordered. I haven't seen any homeless people on the streets - are there any? Cars actually stop for you as soon as you approach a zebra crossing. Of course, the trams run like clockwork. On my first day, taking a funicular (?) up into the hills, I travelled ticketless and inevitably ran into a whole team of inspectors. (I argued, as much for the opportunity to use my German as anything, and wrung a compromise from them.)

I can't get the idea of this perfectly ordered state like Castalia (The Glass Bead Game) out of my head.

MORNING THOUGHT

I'm awake but only just
Thinking of the things I must
Accomplish in the day ahead
I'm so much better off in bed

THE EMERGING DYSTOPIA

Yesterday after work I went out for a drink with Peter, an "old" socialist (as opposed to a New Labourite.) You wouldn't think there were any of these beasts still around - yet there he was, and with his utterly convincing Tony Benn impersonation, and references to class struggle and "Maggie" Thatcher, it was like going back in time. He joined Labour in 1981 and watched as Neil Kinnock betrayed the Left. Of course, he had absolutely no mercy for Tony Blair and the New Labour project. Here are some of the facts - I wish I had time to source them all properly.

1% of the UK population own... could you guess?... 89% of the wealth.

"Between 1996/97 and 2001/02, income inequality rose on a variety of measures, to reach its highest ever level (at least since comparable records began in 1961) ... Since then, income inequality has fallen, and it is now at a similar level to that in 1996/97: the net effect of eight years of Labour government has been to leave inequality effectively unchanged."
Institute of Fiscal Studies

Even though there is greater wealth among the middle strata of society, the bottom decile (10%) of the UK population are worse off in relative terms than they were under Mrs Thatcher. This is the "underclass", whose benefits have been cut under Labour and from whose ranks the bulk of the prison population (which is double what it was in the 1970s) is composed.

And then here's one statistic that has stuck in my memory: Labour, during its term in office, is estimated to have thrown away £70 billion of public money (who else's?) on consultancy fees.

In response to the idea that Labour have kept Blair because he was media-friendly after Labour's years in the wilderness, Peter pointed out that, far from being a populist, Blair has been engaged in forcing through several changes which have been unpopular in many cases - not just support of Bush in Iraq (and whole neo-con agenda) but privatisation of the London Underground, health service reforms, tuition fees, ID cards, and so on. As for people's expectations of Gordon Brown, he compared them with the, now laughable, expectations of Labour's second term - remember those?

He had three questions to which he wanted a deeper answer than the usual one (that Labour were just desperate to keep the media on-side):

How did a man like this, a conservative, get to lead the party in the first place?
Why was he permitted to remain?
Why is there no realistic left-wing alternative?

Perhaps those "deeper" answers have to do with Thatcherism: the deliberate fragmentation of the working class, particularly their group identity; increased prosperity coupled with political apathy; the interests of capital "manufacturing consent" through control of the media. There wasn't time to discuss these further.

As with the last time I heard a real Marxist speak (in Hyde Park) I left the conversation feeling badly informed (not having these kind of facts and figures at my fingertips) and also wishing that more people were interested in what was really happening in the world, rather than the many distractions of gadgets, sport, home redecoration and Big Brother. I am convinced that continued lack of engagement with politics - with no grassroots left-wing political party in the UK - can only lead to a future similar to the one portrayed in the film Children of Men last year i.e. a deeply divided, and more violent society, where an authoritarian regime protects the "haves" against the "have-nots". Or maybe we're already there.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Some thoughts on happiness garnered from the last few minutes of a radio show on Christmas Day:

One speaker pointed out the fact that that happiness is a different thing from pleasure and that, realising this, we should be both more other-directed and focused on the achievement of our long-term goals; inactivity in the face of unhappiness was worst of all. "DO something, Mutley!"


Research apparently shows that happiness is largely a matter of temperament, and is generally affected only for a short time by events such as winning the lottery, or even being interned in a concentration camp, after which it eventually resumes its previous level! One speaker suggested that, if unhappy, we remember how earlier unhappiness faded over time, and things worked out - and have a drink!

I have been thinking this week how realists stand a better chance of being happy than idealists do. This is because, in the practical sphere at least, realists have adjusted their expectations in the light of experience to reflect an imperfect world, whereas idealists continue to strive for the unattainable, refusing to acknowledge, for example, the animalistic and tribal behaviours bred into us by millions of years of genetic selection. Realists are less often disappointed.

THE PARTYGOERS

As Hunter dropped his last few Christmas cards into the station post box and reflected on the fact that all the loose ends of the year had been tied up, he savoured the prospect of the journey north. The feeling first stirred when he bought his ticket, usually around Hallowe’en – for he was a creature of habit. Now, waiting below the timetable at Kings Cross station, he read over the times and destinations with a feeling of immense pleasure. What freedom! He would spend seven hours on a train. Out of reach of mobile signals, owing nothing whatsoever to anyone, completely unavailable, with a weightless mind, he would abandon himself to the beguiling decades-old acid folk music he loved, and get intoxicated as fields and silhouetted rooftops raced by.

The rolling fog on the fields was as high as a person, or a house, and the patches of ice looked blue in the golden twilight. Hunter let his mind wander to Christmases past: the sweet smell of the gum and glitter he and his friends used to make pictures with as a child; the snow dripping from the red lettering of The Dandy; first kiss to Last Christmas; the costumed Holly King and Oak King battling it out on a snow-covered hilltop; choirs by candlelight… There was still a lot of magic around, even if it was all ultimately empty. He often felt as if he were the only one who felt it, marooned in the kind of innocent excitement and imagery that had been long ago dismissed by everyone else he knew as irrelevant to their responsible plods through adulthood.


“Hi, Hunter! Wow, haven’t seen you for ages. You’re looking well, mate. Help yourself to drinks – they’re in the kitchen.” Giles, tonight’s host, gesturing to the phalanx of bottles and cans in the kitchen, and moving off to join his colleagues in the front room.

Hunter looked around for somewhere to put down the plastic bag that contained his present. Now didn’t seem as if it was the right moment. He filled a glassful of wine, took a deep breath and walked towards the door, from which he could hear a riot of laughter. How to enter, how to begin, how to smile at people he hardly knew – basic stuff he felt he’d never properly mastered.

Entering the room, he was assailed by a little gale of laughter. He’d just missed the joke. He greeted everyone hastily, raising his glass with an awkward movement and a forced smile.

“How’s life?” this from Catherine Wood, a former classmate whom he’d hardly talked to at school, her pinched face apparently overjoyed.

Here we go, he thought. The casual humiliation of questions.

“Great, thanks. Yeah, things are going really well in London.”
“What is it you do now?”
“Well, actually…” Hunter coughed, “I’m not doing anything much! I’m trying to work on a bit of painting, so I work part-time for a lecturing agency.”
“Oh, yeah, well that’s the right idea, isn’t it? Everyone works far too hard these days anyway, don’t you think? Where are you living – have you got your own place, or?”
“It’s just too pricey down south, you know how it is. I’m sharing.”
“Oh, I see.” Catherine tried to think of a positive spin to put on it.
“It’s a bit like Men Behaving Badly, if you remember that.”
“Oh, yeah. I loved it as a student, y’know, communal living! Look, I’m just going to get another drink and I’ll be right back.”

Deserted. Hunter let his eyes pan round the room. Look nonchalant, look bored. How the Hell should he look now?

Several unmemorable conversations later, he found himself sitting with Cameron Harris, a film enthusiast and the elder brother of a friend who no longer cared to return to this part of the world.

“I really enjoyed that remake of Death In Venice,” said Hunter. “Atmospheric.”
“Well,” Cameron made a groaning sound, “It’s not my taste. I wouldn’t go to a film like that.”
“Did you think it would be a bit slow?” asked Hunter.
“I read the reviews, but I’ve never liked that director anyway. I can’t stand the way he uses those clichéd camera angles. And the acting’s not going to be worth watching with Jose whatsisname, is it? What I always want in a film is three things: a bit of challenge, like a really good twist or something; actors with presence; and something with real passion!”
“I think you’d find it was passionate, at least. No one could say…”
“What you mean by it and what I mean by it are different things. Films are my thing and I know what I’m talking about. You can say whatever you like about it, but a solitary writer on some kind of self-destructive whatever it is will never hold my attention.” Cameron said emphatically. “And the director’s a dumb twat, like I said.” He laughed.
“What did you like, this year?” Hunter ventured, wondering where along the line he had lost his sense of humour.
“Well, now, there were only three films worth the ticket price this year – in my opinion…”
“Look, I can’t do this any more. It’s too boring.”
“Pardon?” Cameron thought he’d misheard.
“You are an opinionated old bore, so I’m off.” Hunter said flatly.
“Fine.” Cameron walked away, seemingly unruffled.

Suddenly Hunter noticed how noisy it was. He ran the gauntlet of random fragments of conversation which emerged bleating and whinnying from the cigarette smoke. Someone laughed; it caught. He would have loved to be in that little crowd at that moment, but he felt himself impelled towards the door. He apologised as he made his way through the now crowded living room, and stumbled on someone’s coat.

“Sorry, sorry!”
“Hunter, you OK?” It was Giles, interrupting his stream of jovial remarks.
“Yeah, I, er, I have to go soon. There’s a present…”
“Thanks. You shouldn’t have! Look, why don’t you wait and get a taxi?”
“No, I’m just a bit sleepy, that’s all. Anyway, I put it by the coathangers.”
“OK. Look, we’ll have to go out for a drink while you’re still here – next week?”
“That’d be good. Let me know. Actually, no, sorry, I can’t be bothered. I just want to hibernate this year.”
Hunter smiled briefly, but was sorry to see his old schoolmate at a loss for words. He made a “can’t help it” gesture with his hands, looked at the floor and moved off quickly.

In the hallway, he brushed past Catherine.
“Are you off, then?’ she asked, smiling.
“Yeah, I’m feeling…”
“Sorry we didn’t get to talk more. Parties! You know how it is.”
Hunter shrugged and looked for his coat.
Catherine’s eyes followed his movements, and then looked sadly back at the living room. She fingered her glass nervously. “I would have liked to know more about your painting.”
He rounded on her. “Don’t. Patronise. Me.”
She gave a half-smile of disbelief. “Wha-at?”
“Catherine: You don’t care if I live or die.”

Outside in the street, Hunter made a quick recovery as he made contact with the cold air. He gazed at the Christmas lights – so imaginatively done this year, the Twelve Days of Christmas sparkling in blue and gold. He reflected that tonight was Yule, and the return of the light – now there was something worth celebrating. He would light a candle to that before he went to bed, just as he used to as a child. To keep the magic alive in his soul.

Beneath the coats in Giles’s flat, bathed in a puddle of Tennent’s Export at the bottom of a plastic bag, lay a forgotten painting of a brightly coloured landscape. Giles’s wife discovered it the next day, cleaned the sticky beer off the front, and put it in a drawer in case anyone came back for it.

2006: MY LIFE ON HOLD

Here's a confession. I learned one new thing only this year - to make music on my computer. I still remember last January gazing at the time-lines and various buttons of the comparatively simple (as it turns out) software GarageBand and sighing about the learning curve that it was going to involve. With help from a couple of my friends, and a bit of encouragement about the initial results, I finally got to record an album of digital sound quality where pay-by-the-hour time was not a factor. (Never before.) There's nothing brilliant on there, but I'm not in my 20s anymore. It's a good enough album, and it's a start. Making it gave me hours of pleasure, and only a little frustration - it's much easier than old-style 8-track cassette recording. So now I have a technique, and I want to go looking for some inspiration, perhaps in some of the "nu folk" compilatons that have been released in the last year or so.

Suddenly, the kind of music I've always liked - and actually been making, since 1990 - more or less psychedelic acoustic stuff with a nod to folk tradition, has become, if not exacty mainstream, a genre that's written about in the music press. I think Devendra Banhart really got this thing going - it started happening in the States following his Golden Apples of The Sun compilation. Congratulations to people like King Creosote, Tunng, Espers and Joanna Newsom, as well as Rob da Bank and the Green Man festival (wish I could have been there) for carrying the torch! Maybe there will be enough fans of this kind of thing to come out and fund Roy Harper's pension?

With this, and Doctor Who being so popular in the UK now, I feel part of the cultural mainstream in a way I haven't for years. It's an eerie feeling. The last time was when I eagerly anticipated the third Oasis album and shook Tony Blair's hand in Downing Street (Spring '97) - neither of which I'm proud of now.

In 2006, apart from my album, I have achieved little else that's new. My life is on hold. The things I have most dearly longed for since I was a teenager, I have not got. I realise it's selfish to dwell on it. I don't.

I've managed to be unrelentingly upbeat ("unrelenting self-confidence and positivity" is a mantra I got from a friend in 2002) but sometimes it seems like putting a brave face on things. Against the backdrop of real, if not severe, disappointment, I've been getting on with it this year. Three things that have made me happy are positive feedback at work from our TEFL trainees (month after month, it's a shot in the arm); my unstintingly supportive boss; and Brindle, who keeps smiling through anything, and is determined that there's a spiritual meaning behind all of this!

I'm also happy to come home to "my" new flat in Budapest, where I can read, play, get online, and download at will. But it all seems a bit "adultescent", the Dylan period! I've often poured scorn on,

"...them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in."

feeling that I was something different - free, and for the most part happy. But I do wonder when I can comfortably begin to invest in the future in any way at all - I don't mean money and property, though that's part of it. In 2007, I would like to discover something of this, something long-term. If I don't succeed, I may turn the corner towards unhappiness and the beginnings of bitterness. There. I said it.

Best of 2006:

The best album was Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs. It's full of enthusiasm, and presses all the right retro buttons. I said that about the White Stripes before. Funny, that! "Good Ol'" MOJO picked it as album of the year too. I enjoyed every track but one, quite unusual in an album. I also enjoyed the incredibly hard-to-track down El Perro Del Mar debut (the tracks I've heard) for her lightness of touch and melodicism, and the unashamedly Hammond-driven grooves of Winner by Big Boss Man.
Some of the refreshed Beatles songs on Love were amazing - great to hear I Am The Walrus and Strawberry Fields in rounded digital brilliance. Love really worked - 9 out of 10. (My only reservation was the new ending of Strawberry Fields, which was a bit too much.) The best thing I heard all year was easily No Fit State by Hot Chip (actually from 2005) included on the Uncut compilation this month. It reminds me of the 1980s, not always a good thing, but is just such a effortlessly well crafted and well produced song, I never tire of it.

Films I liked were Knallhart (gritty realism), The Wind That Shakes The Barley (ditto), Children of Men (for the chillingly convincing vision of Britain in the future.) Best of all was Brokeback Mountain, for the reasons you've read elsewhere! And also because we've been ripping off the Texan drawl ever since in our office to mouth obscenities and let everyone know "Ah'm sick of beans" (sic?) The best TV I saw was Blackpool, a couple of years old now, probably? To me, it was just the kind of entertaining drama where you couldn't wait for the next episode. Nice to have that Dennis Potter-esque musical "commentary track" revived. The second Doctor Who series had its moments (notably, The Girl In The Fireplace) but wasn't a patch on the first.

The best books I read were (#2) Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works, where he deals neatly with Nature v Nurture and whether we should follow the ethical "dictats" of our genes - in the first two chapters! Then he goes on to discuss the mystery of consciousness... It's ambitious. Haven't finished it yet; the diagrams slow me down a lot. #1 was The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, which I read and speculated about for hours, while I was living in Minsk (June) and gazing over the forest of tower blocks in the morning sun.

Being in Minsk was the peak of the whole year for me because it underlined that you can have an unforgettable experience form something you think beforehand will be disappointing. The summer was breaking out day after day, and the reaction of the trainees to the experience of communicative teaching added some belief against the doubt about whether the job I do is worth anything at all. (When you've turned your back on the property option and have opted to earn less to gain more in other ways, you need this!) My big wish in 2007 is for something else like this, and to feel that my life has some real momentum behind it. I'm also ready to record some more, in a stranger folkier vein. So bring it on.

THE QUALITY OF AMAZEMENT


I remember reading (in Sophie's World) the part where her philosopher friend reminds her not to lose the ability to be amazed by things. He mentions waking up to the fact that we are on a planet in the middle of "outer" space, and that we are sentient and so can reflect on it, except that people don't. Doctor Who echoes these sentiments when he tells Rose he can feel the Earth spin beneath him. The same idea is repeated in a different way in Steven Pinker's How The Mind Works when he writes about the "everyday miracles" performed by the human mind. He quotes Confucius: "A common man marvels at uncommon things: a wise man marvels at the commonplace." Now, is that enough intellectual backing? I get a lot of flak from people at work for using superlatives all the time; they think it's charmingly naive of me or something. It's not. I am in the world and this is my response: amazement.

Take this, as a random example of why. On Monday, I was travelling home for the midwinter festival (bring back the old festivals! by the way) and had time to think. I had just come through the futuristically refurbished Kings X, and I was sitting on a vehicle moving at great speed along a steel rail linking that surreal beast of a city which is London to my old home town. I was listening on these great Bose headphones I have to a digital reproduction of some Romanian gypsy musicians playing cymbalom, accordion and, over this, a seductively wailed melody line full of joy and real swagger. This was on CD not MP3 so it felt as if they were there in the same room. (Remember CDs?) I could stretch my legs out (on a cheap first class ticket) - it was bliss. And that was even before the wine hit. For the light effects, see below.

Be amazed again. It's worth it.

MIDWINTER LIGHT - UNCAPTURED


On this season's much anticipated journey home, I had to take at least three photographs in my mind. This is because I forgot to bring my camera. In fact hardly any of my best photographs have made it on to a format which can be publicly viewed. Come to think of it, it's true of my best music, which is often lost in waking up, and the best thoughts I come across, which spring up in a conversation but are never recorded for later.

First picture. I woke up, hours ahead of everyone else, on Sunday morning at a friend's house in Kilburn. It was just beginning to get light. The window looks on to an area of greenery, but from my sofa-bed I can only see twigs, branches and part of a tree trunk, bare for December. The sun, starting to rise, makes the tree look pale blue with green shadows against the palely lit (cloudless) sky behind. Then, at once, the branches are touched with bright coppery light. It's all framed by the window and looks like a perfect cover for a wintry song collection. But not mine, this time.

Second picture (sequence of films). Seen from a train window. On Monday, the countryside north of London was shrouded in freezing fog. (Still is.) The lines of trees across the fields look like a two-dimensional scene made with (does it still exist?) tracing paper. Each strip of scenery is covered with a layer so that the trees receding into the distance are greying into white and out of view altogether while the ones close to the train are quite distinct. Suddenly as we career past Morpeth, the sun shows, ghostly behind the mist at first. It's teasing, peering, gone again - then suddenly, and this is just as my first glass of wine kicks in, the clouds are gone as we emerge from the fog, and the scene is suffused with golden light, the white layer of frost on the fields accentuating the blueness of the shadows. Later as the sun sinks, it is all Christmas card silhouettes. The smoke and other vapours have turned dark blue against the sky which is still alight, its orangeness reflected by the pools of water (or ice?) on the ground. Now the freezing dark mist is low on the fields and as high as a person, or perhaps a house.

Third picture. Walking along Aberdeen beach putting off a bit of time before the James Bond film. Airbrushed sky (bright orange again, through green, to dark blue.) I can see the impossibly thin neo-gothic spires of Marischal College, the tower blocks winking at Bridge of Don, and a couple of cranes which must be at the harbour. It is all - and I'm not kidding - a keener pleasure, a more sumptuous memorable thing, than the film itself. Or is it only me? We should rate sky scenes and window scenes higher than we do.

Happy Solstice to all light lovers. Tomorrow the sun returns to the cold fields.

CHRISTMAS RUSH


Last weekend I went to Vienna on what's become a bit of an annual pilgrimage. I've always loved the pre-Christmas atmosphere anywhere - well, anywhere cold! It must be to do with childhood, an apprehension of magic that never quite materialises. Anyway, I went round the Christmas markets and took so many pictures of stalls that I could give you a virtual tour - but bought very little. There's something about a Christmas bauble that makes it look good in company, but throwaway on its own. Judging by the heaving crowd, it will have proved worth the stallholders' while taking all those hours to set up. In the - very - gentle haze brought on by some mulled wine, it was a perfect winter's day. The only disappointment was that there wasn't the least trace of frost in the air.

MORE STREET TROUBLE IN BUDAPEST

I knew that something would erupt yesterday on the anniversary of the 1956 uprising in Hungary. The first signs of this were when I was recording some music in my flat and I could hear a lot of shouting - with additional reverb - coming through the headphones. I stuck the microphone out of the window to record some of what was going on. The crowd - or elements of it - were very angry, chanting "You fucked it up!" (presumably a comment on the governing party's handling of the post-1989 era). I could see people carrying, as well as lots of normal Hungarian flags, the version of the flag adopted by the wartime Nazi-supporting Arrow Cross.

Later, I assumed it had all blown over and thought nothing of it when my friend invited me out for a drink. Of course, the streets were still full with the commemorations. I heard the sound of an orchestra and saw people laying candles on the pavements as tributes to the dead. Some of the main junctions were impassable, so I had to make a big circle in order to meet my friend, trying to arrange everything on a jammed phone network. The first I knew of trouble was when he phoned to suggest a different bar after having run into the middle of a riot and having had a tear gas canister going off nearby him.

We met in a central bar which is usually packed but yesterday almost deserted. I was born in 1968 and, being a true child of the 60s, have been waiting all my life for some sort of Green revolution, so I felt guiltily like an armchair (non-)activist, not being in the thick of things, but reading about it on Reuters and BBC News instead, and sipping beer! But it's not my cause and I have no reason to object to the government here. We were told it would be safer not to leave the bar.

Of course, we did leave. It was like walking into a scene from Nineteen Eighty-Four. To begin with, there was the tear gas that made my friend's eyes stream. Drifting clouds of it were picked out by the orange/pink of the street-lighting. It smells acrid like the waterproofing spray for shoes. The exits from the area where I was and the route back to my flat were blocked by ranks of helmeted riot police. People were wandering about aimlessly, trying to get away from the rioters and avoid the police. You could hear loud bangs going off (rubber bullets, I later learned) and helicopters were circling overhead. Again I went a circuitous route, and ended up going right past the stand-off at Ferenciek Tere, where a few minutes later the barricades went up and all hell broke loose. I noticed that a lot of the paving stones had been ripped up, a sure sign that people had come equipped for trouble.

Got home, watched the rest on TV. Phoned my friend whose flat overlooks one of the flashpoints. It's his photo that's attached. As he described the battle below, the call was interrupted by the report of a gun going off, and he saw someone collapse. Amazing to think all these incredible scenes were just streets away.

This morning, looking from the tram at Nyugati (West) Station, the street seemed immaculate; no sign that there had been any trouble there at all. The atmosphere is still highly charged, but I have a sense that the organisers who wanted to unseat the government have lost their big opportunity and that things will settle down as everyone returns to work.

Pestiside's leading article on Monday's events
Riots in Hungary blog

I was sent this poem by email. The warmth in the air is just starting to decay here in Budapest, so it's been on my mind.

THE SEVEN SORROWS TED HUGHES

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.


And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

STILL DELUSIONAL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

“I am with you always, even till the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20) Jesus's farewell to his disciples.

“Whatever you do, I'm always with you.” Tony Blair’s farewell speech. He can't have missed the reference. This is a better joke than the one about Cherie and the bloke next door.

You read it here first.

ECONOMY OF STYLE

I was talking to my friend, a Graham Greene expert, who said that his style is noted for its economy. The following excerpt, from The End Of The Affair, is a wonderful example of this. It’s about the amateur rationalist philosopher Richard Bridges, who has a deformed face, and seen through the eyes of one of the major protagonists.

“I had an idea that he was a man who really loved the truth, but there was that word love again, and it was only too obvious into how many desires his love of truth could be split. A compensation for the injury of his birth, the desire for power, the wish to be admired all the more because the poor haunted face would never cause physical desire.”

The ironic comment on rationalism is insightful, and nothing new, but you have to admire that GG is able to sum up in one paragraph what it took Freud (on sublimation) and Nietzsche (on Will To Power) whole books to say!

POLITICIAN COMES CLEAN, PROVOKES RIOT

I can’t pretend to know a lot about Hungarian politics. Even in my ignorance, however, I knew that both main parties lied about their future plans in order to win the General Election in April. And the government talked up the economic situation pre-election, while the opposition rubbished all their achievements. Big deal.

The irony is that there are riots now because Mr Gyurcsany, the PM, was inept enough actually to tell the truth about the political process! Which everyone knows anyway. I have a sneaking liking for the PM, just because he is such a maverick. Ever the politician most likely to slip on a banana skin, he actually loses patience with his party, upbraids them all for lying to the public, and publishes the whole transcript on his website. It's so blatantly the wrong thing to do, people here are hinting at some kind of conspiracy.

I'm all for less slick politicians and an end to tacit consent. If people were consistent, there’d be riots every day. Until the whole house comes crashing down.

UPDATE ON MY LIFE IN BUDAPEST, AND THOUGHTS ON WHY GROWING UP IS HARD TO DO

Last year, a close friend visiting from the UK told me I’m living an “alternative lifestyle”. Anyway, I’ve just returned to it – for a third year, and in a new (rented) flat. I don’t know why I feel I have to justify this to myself, but I suppose living here could be considered an irresponsible choice, failing somehow to grow up and grasp the nettle.

The flat is all high ceilings, double doors, large mirrors: the feeling of 19C opulence for less than £200 a month! The previous tenant, a friend and colleague, also left her entire video and CD collection behind, for the moment at least. This weekend, I’ve been finishing off a song on my laptop, and Brindle & I have started a new instrumental piece. It’s the same feeling a child gets when playing – pure, unconstrained fun. We also took the tram to Margit Island, for a burst of colour and to take digital pictures of flower beds and each other.

This afternoon I wandered down a narrow, deserted street where the only sound was the dull beat of my trainers on a dappled pavement, and past an old church into Raday utca, where I’m writing this blog. It’s a tree-lined old world style street, with wrought iron copper-topped lampposts and a parade of cafes. It’s also a perfect early autumn day and the sun is angling in spaces between the high facades. This is pretty normal for Budapest, but basically picture postcard stuff.


Tomorrow, I am back to work. It’s the most fun job I’ve had, and in some ways the least demanding. Not that I don’t have to focus on the work during office hours, but for the first time in my life I don’t often have to take it home with me, and I am not burdened by piles of meaningless paperwork.

Well, I have the nagging feeling that I should be making pension contributions and that I should be a property owner. But I hope this blog goes some way towards explaining why I’m loath to give up life in this beautiful city for a £200,000 mortgage in Bedford or somewhere, and the stale pleasures of trailing round HMV on a Saturday, or doing up the kitchen before settling down for another instalment of Changing Rooms. There is a painless alternative. I’m living it.