The sixtysecond week of the pandemic

I was right in suspecting that neither of my caching hikes would happen last week. Friday, because apparently we moved that one to next week some time ago, just I forgot. Saturday because Anna didn't answer, so I assumed she was too busy. As it happens, this last week since my last post has been a bit on the sad side. I am beginning to feel rather abandoned and/or being taken advantage of. My new friend Anna has somehow gone off the boil, my good friend Feri seems to have family problems, details of which I don't know. Mariann might condescend to let me go caching with her around the time of the Festival and Race in the Mátra, but she is not being very cooperative either. 

The new door screen

The vaccine saga has stalled, with me not even knowing if my last letter got there. My fault, I posted it registered, instead of confirmation registered. The latter is more expensive, but in return for the extra money, they actually send you back a signed card acknowledgeing receipt. With this dreadful uncertain feeling of not even knowing if the letter got there, as well as no means of contacting the department dealing with it, as you can't phone them, you can't e-mail them and the only thing to do is to book an appointment, which I did and the date they gave me was the 9th July. I suppose if nothing had happened by then, I will go and ask what they have done with my documents. If then they deny receipt, then I am stuck, but let's try to be positive and hope things get sorted before the 9th July.

Singer at St. John's Passion at the Sheldonian

Most of you know my love of classical music, and apropos of that I had some lovely and some less lovely experiences this last week. Suddenly there were lots of online concerts, none of them costing me any money at this time. Partially because the Bartók Spring Festival had started, totally online and totally free. The other part is also a series of online concerts, and these are in recompense of all the cancelled ones on my subscription tickets. Presently the tickets cost between £4 and £6.50. Those of us who have subscription tickets from both 2020 and 2021 will get these concerts free for quite a while yet. They are deducting the cost of these concerts from the value of our subscription tickets, so in a way we have already paid.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner

The negative experiences were partially problems with bandwidth, which mucks it up on occasions. Others were the ticket agency website being utter crap and crashing every five minutes. Very frustrating when the concert is due to start any minute, but most of the time I managed to sort it, I only lost one concert. Composers covered last week included Mozart, Bach, Chopin and Liszt. The performers included Sir John Eliot Gardiner, conducting Bach's St. John's Passion at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford. That was heavenly. So far, miraculously, there have been no clashes between the two series of concerts, but this weekend, unfortunately, one of them has been moved from Sunday to Monday, and therefore there is a clash there. I haven't yet decided which one I will listen to, but I will have to soon, because they are only available at the time of the concert.

The Sheldonian Theatre

I have a friend who every week sends us a list of things we can watch online, these include theatre, opera, concerts, musicals, old films, book readings and a few other events. Perusing one of her e-mails I came across another free performance under The Shows Must Go On, a very old performance of Cats. It was superb. I think the date was 1998, Elaine Paige was still in it and a brilliant multicultural cast. I saw Cats in London in the 1980's twice: once with the boys, once with Roy. It was superb watching it again after all these years.

The cast of Cats

I am still reading Shelley Winters' autobiography, currently I am on the second volume, which is even better than the first one. She was a very naughty, but very lovely, talented big mouth, who had also a very big heart. I like her, all that name dropping, jumping into bed with a different bloke quite frequently etc. amuses me.

Shelley II - old paperback

Another trauma that hit us a few days back was a night time fright of strange noises. First we thought we must have some animal in the attic, but then the noise moved to the Bunkhouse across the yard and became so noisy that we were beginning to think that it might have been a burglar. Roy wanted to go out to look and I screamed at him not to. He could have been attacked, but he was too stubborn to listen. I went with him into the yard and we found nothing. But the noise carried on.

The Bunkhouse, source of the noise

Finally we called the police and they came, and they couldn't find anything either. Finally, we reckoned that one of the pheasants, from the rearing pans nearby, must have escaped and got through to some tight place in that attic using a hole in a broken tile, and was unable to get out, therefore started flapping in panic. That could have made all that noise for sure.

The Cottage, no noise from there (we think)

We have no idea whether it got out finally or it died in there, in which case we will have a rotting corpse in our guesthouse attic. Since then Roy seems to be hearing noises in the night again, but back in our own building. I really don't know if he is imagining it, or is it real? I think we will go tomorrow to Palotás and buy some rat poison. Put it out in the eaves and hope for the best.

Prawn and vegetable curry with all the trimmings

 

Needless to say that both of us are like zombies for lack of sleep. Every time I start reading I nod off. But I cannot really sleep for too long, so hopefully, by tonight I should fall into bed happily. Whenever we are a bit down, I try to cheer us up with cooking interesting things. This week had many interesting meals: prawn and veg curry with rice, dhal, puppadoms, naan bread and mango chutney. Then we had roast dinner on Sunday: Roy had roast pork with all the trimmings, I had roast Californian peppers with all the trimmings. Yesterday was leftover day, it had anything between braised marrow, roast potatoes and leftover pork, plus our usual dry red wine for Roy and dry white spritzer for me.

My vegetarian  Sunday roast

I have spent a fair amount on the phone this week as well. I managed to get through to Dr. Dános about my blood works, as I had written last week, but there is still no sign of that dreadful hospital management coming up with this year's version of the yearly health card. I know Dr. Dános said that I have nothing to worry about, but I still need her advice on quite a few things.

Roy's Swedish meatballs

 

I managed to talk to another geocaching friend, the one you may remember I went hiking/caching with in January when he also brought his wife with him. I have not talked to him since then and I wanted to propose a geocaching set of trips after the 20th anniversary caches are out next month. He seemed interested in it and I put together a few plans for him, to see if he likes them. He is a very nice man, whose company is very enjoyable, good sense of humour and fun to have around. He also has a rather large car, so if I won't have to drive myself, as I usually do, that in itself will be a bonus.

The geocaching club is 20 years old and we will celebrate with two lots of 20 new caches. 20 of them will be hikes in the hills and forests, one in each county plus Budapest. These will be 20km long and have various points en route to find. There will also be another 20, which are aimed at families, so they will only have a kilometre or so walking, but fun for the kids in the form of aerial walkways, playgrounds, narrow-gauge railways, lookout towers etc, It is these family ones I have tried to make into day trips. I think it will take about 4 or 5 different trips to cover the breadth and length of the entire country. It should be good fun, if me manage to find dates suitable for everybody.

Event Centre for Festival and Race

There are two official events run by the geocaching club coming up. On 5th June there is going to be a Festival and Race, which this time is quite close by. I am not entering the race, but might pop over on Saturday, which is the race day, to log the event cache and have a little chat with some people I haven't seen since last October. Hungary is opening up from lockdown currently, but those of us who understand that this whole game is, are not too happy about it. With the Indian variant close by, is it wise at all to open up now?

Cycling and geocaching in Kielder Forest

The other event is a geocaching bike ride in the Mátra, which foolishly I indicated that I might join. Looking at the profile of the ride, it has far too much climb in it for me to try it. I don't know, I haven't decided yet, but we'll see how I feel nearer the time. It is planned for 12th June, so I have about 3 and half weeks to decide.

Alex and his beloved BBQ

Another great and good thing was to get some photos from Alex, as finally this weekend past he and Meaghan managed to get down to the trailer park and see how their nice new deck looks like and put together the BBQ. They also took some stuff from home to make the trailer better. There is a small amount of relaxation of regulations in Canada now, so they might be able to go down thre on weekends, even before they can take guests. That, I suppose will come later. 

The Fire Pit

Looking at the world outside, one never knows whether everything is a continuous unmitigated disaster, or perhaps there is hope for people yet. The negative event this last week for me was the blatant racism, xenophobia, and downright brutal attitude of the British government and its immigration and border control. There were two events, one happened in Glasgow, where the Home Office did an early morning raid and picked up two Indian guys, the other at various airports, but most of the cases were at Gatwick.

 

The Grant family trailer

The most despicable thing of the last year at least in my opinion was, when I was reading in the Guardian that Border Control are deliberately fostering a hostile environment in relation to visitors from the EU. Anyone who arrives without a visa is deemed as an unwanted visitor, someone who is likely to come to work without a work visa and gets detained, occasionally put in cuffs and almost always locked up in Covid infested immigration detention centres, before removed from the country. I cannot think of any other reason for this, but to create a deterrent, that nobody comes in future. I suppose if I would have to fear for my life, just for wanting to visit friends or relatives, I wouldn't come either. This is so low, that after I read the article, I made a vow. I will boycott that country, until it mends its ways or I have no choice in going. I hope I will keep to it.

The other event, the one in Glasgow, apart from the nasty raid, had a fantastic corollary. As the van was leaving that part of Glasgow, with the arrested men on board, one local guy spotted them, and acted quickly. He threw his bike and himself under the van, to stop them leaving. In a few minutes large crowds gathered in solidarity with him and against the arrest and detention of those two Indians. In no time the crowd was enormous and chants of "Let them go!" were louder and louder. Eventually, they let the guys out, because they knew that if they didn't, the crowd would have overun both the immigration guys and the police present.

The Glasgow liberators

GOOD ON YOU GLASGOW! This is the only way working people can force the powers to back off. Salutary lesson for the ruling class. There's so much more of us than of you. Watch your step!