The ninetyninth week of the pandemic

Apologies for tardiness, but the reasons for it will be revealed later. These last 8 days are definitely characterised by a great deal to write about, but a dearth of photographs to illustrate it with. Perhaps I was so busy while out that I forgot, but more likely, it was that there was not much to take pictures of.

 

Back on last Wednesday, after I wrote and published my last post, and resulting from a rush of blood to the head, I ordered online, all the way from Portugal, 4 bottles of my favourite port, Cockburn's Special Reserve. I hope it is really the one I like, because there were various vintages available, but these were only £12.50 per bottle, including the tax and delivery charge. It was 4 bottles, simply because that was the maximum transported for the basic, minimum delivery charge of £12. I have been tracking it online, and in the early hours of this morning it went from "in transit" in Germany, to "out for delivery". Great, I thought, but I had no notification, either by SMS, phone call or e-mail, so I am not counting my chickens yet. PS: While I was writing all this, the postlady phoned that she will be delivering a parcel. And lo and behold, 4 bottles of port arrived. Yippeeee!! Mind you, I should have guessed it why I didn't get any notification. DHL passed the final stage to the Hungarian Post Office, and to be honest, on their past record, we were lucky to receive it at all, never mind getting messages about it.

Roy's collection on the windowsill

Last Thursday was an interesting day. First of all, the sun shone beautifully, then I noticed that somebody put a moving cache in Bercel, which is less than half an hour by car. So, I decided to go, especially that we needed to do a bit of food shopping too. Roy is occasionally difficult to shift, but thankfully, looking up at the sky, he begrudgingly agreed to accompany me and even do the driving. 

Saary mill in Bercel

This mill is over 100 years old

 

We found the cache very easily and I was very pleased, as recently there had been a run on moving caches in Nógrád, by some of the overly keen cachers, who previously ignored my county. Once we got the little box, I went to the Pharmacy in Bercel to fetch my medicines, which were uploaded into the cloud, so that you can buy them anywhere without paper prescriptions. Extremely useful measure, that is, and I did find the Bercel pharmacy extremely pleasant. Big, clean, well stocked, very nice and friendly staff, but mostly I was impressed by how well they adhere to and make everybody else adhere to Covid regulations. You could only go in one a time to shop, everybody wore masks and finally, their stock was pretty impressive, the only thing they didn't have were 2 boxes of was my Rytmonorm, which is the high dose one that no pharmacy keeps too many boxes of. This is the joy of the online prescription system, it didn't matter, I could later buy it at any other pharmacy.

Bercel Co-op

Next we went to the Co-op to buy some bread, milk and a few other things we got short of, followed by the greengrocers and then home. In the afternoon, I had a very nice chat with a new couple of online friends, whom I met through one of my FB expat groups. Jane and Lance Hattatt were a delight to chat to. We hit it off online, because we seemed to have dead identical opinions about a lot of things. The Zoom connection at my end was a bit fuzzy and the sound was pretty awful too, but we were talking, (or according to Roy, I was talking), for over an hour, and we parted agreeing to chat again in future.

Lázár Laci

Karesz on the left bending down

Friday was the birthday of two of my good friends: Lázár Laci was 74 and Karesz 77. As we didn't go to the birthday weekend at the Balaton for Laci, I sent him a present via his son, who was attending, and rang him in the morning to wish him a good weekend. Karesz only had a Messenger message, because I have seen him recently, so he knew what was going on. Apparently, it turned out that he had Covid, but by the sound of it, he only had it very mildly. I hope he has no complications with it, as he is not one to keep to notions of taking anything easy.

Alex

Alex rang on Saturday and we had a lovely long chat. There are times when he is in a rush, but this time it was me who rang off after an hour, as I had other jobs on. Next week I will miss him calling, as it is time for the winter IEC meeting, of which he is a member, and that lasts from early morning until late into the night for four days. It is only on Zoom again this year, but that can be even more tiring than in person.

The compere opens The Forge comedy club

 

Stephen's launch of his own comedy club was also on Saturday, and it look as if it was a resounding success, but when I exchanged Messenger messages with him a few days later, he mentioned a few complications, which means that the venue might not be a long term arrangement. He will have to work like a Trojan, (which he is very good at) to raise the profile of the club to get adequate listings to make it a paying proposition, even without full houses. Having said that, the launch was full, in fact the 200 tickets available were sold within 20 minutes. We are all keeping our fingers crossed that it all works out for him.

Also on Saturday, I sat down to fill in Roy's application form for Hungarian citizenship, which I was going to present for scrutiny in Pásztó Government Window on Wednesday. It was painful, as all stupid bureaucratic form filling is, but having attained a virtual PhD in form filling last year, it didn't take me long.

Cassie, Nick and Sam on the Good Witch

On Sunday, being at a loose end, I looked for something mindless to watch on Netflix and found it. Hallmark, the home of the sickly kitch, appealed to me in the form of the Good Witch. There have so far been 5 series, and having started on Sunday, I have recently started watching Series 4. It is really addictive, although I do cringe at times at the inane and predictable story lines and the sicklz sweet emotions all round. Mindless entertainment, as described by a dictionary.

Monday was spent on the telephone, and unlike most of the time, when nobody answers, the idiot answers, who knows nothing or hours later it turns out that you were told was complete b....cks, or when you are finally talking to someone with a few brain cells between their ears, the phone gets disconnected - this time it went like a dream.

3 of my 5 phone calls were to people and places where we were planning to visit on Wednesday, just to check that they were going to be there and in some cases the exact location and how to get there. All 3 were very positive and I got all the answers I wanted. One call related to some more medication to be put up into the cloud, and that was fixed with no bother, finally a long outstanding issue with our insurance agent was also sorted, although I haven't yet received the promised e-mail from him, but let's hope he is just slow, not totally forgetful, which is his main bugbear.

Bozsa and Árpi cutting the cake

Tudesday's main highlight was Bozsa ringing, telling me all about the concert that she took Árpi to instead of me. She is such an absolute darling, that I am lucky to have friends like her and her husband. "Salt of the Earth", is the exact English expression that describes those two.

And then we come to Wednesday. Roy has always preferred to fill an outing with as many things to do as possible, thus save on petrol and time. This worked for decades, but now, with him in his 80's and me in my 70's, this is quite a hard task. Wednesday was fantastic in terms of really achieveing practically everything we planned, but a disaster in relation to how thoroughly exhausted we got. We must revise our ambitions on how many places and tasks we can cope with in one day.

We left home at 8:15 am and got home 7 hours later. First stop was in Pásztó, where we managed to find the agricultural shop open and bought a 40kg sack of bird seed. Then we went to the Government Window, where we had a lovely interview with a lady who looked over the filled in application form for Roy's citizenship application and confirmed that I didn’t forget too many things. Those that I did, she suggested how to fill in.

Pásztó pharmacy

Next stop was the pharmacy, where I got a new set of ear drops, this time in the form of a spray, for Roy and bought my own outstanding medicines. A few days before going I managed to break my computer/reading glasses, so we also needed to find an optician. We searched for a while, but finally somebody pointed it out a bit further up the road. While driving there we popped in to the computer shop for a printer cartridge for my Brother printer. Having done that we parked at SPAR and I walked across to the opticians where the lovely lady squeezed me in between two of her appointments and mended my broken glasses. Next came a small food shop at SPAR, as we were going to do the major shopping at Lidl later, I just went to buy things I knew I couldn’t get at Lidl. 

Julia Organic Mill in Pásztó

Finally, we went to hide the moving cache I found last week in Bercel, and now we hid it at the Julia Organic Mill, in Pásztó. This place is fascinating, a veritable proof of what enthusiasm and bloody mindedness can achieve. This mill is now nearly 170 years old and it is still milling flour and an entire family with 8 staff makes a living out of it. 

The mill from the end

The current owners bought it in a poor and dilapidated state in 2004, took a year to renovate the building and then started milling flour using the existing 100-year-old machines. As they aimed at making at least half their produce organic, these old machines were perfect for the purpose. Over the years they had serious problems sourcing their corn and other seeds, selling enough flour to make a living, keeping to their principles of not selling through supermarkets etc., etc. But they persevered and now they are one of the only 10 family owned, small mills in the country that are successful and supply a wide variety of outlets. Thez deliver to most of Budapest's artisan bakeries, Micheline starred restaurants and the kitchens of five-star hotels. 

The mill with the shop on the right

I wanted to buy some bread, but apparently, they have ceased baking some time ago. So, I bought a kilo of organic rye flour, which should be good for my cooking, instead of wholemeal wheat flour, that I usually use in sauces and roux. Having finished with Pásztó, we journeyed North to Salgótarján, to submit a couple of documents for official translation, which is necessary for Roy’s application for Hungarian citizenship. Before leaving Salgótarján, we had a snack, Roy had a pork and salad roll, followed by a cherry strudel, I just had to cakes, one was the same strudel, plus a chocolate croissant. Yum, yum! I also took a photo of a communist era statue, which reminded me of Salgótarján's past or coal mining. The guy with the gun looked like a Workers' Militia man, guarding the mine.

The mill looking back towards the cache

En route home we finally went and did a couple of weeks’ food shopping in Lidl, and were home by 3:15pm. I tried to add up how much we spent, and guess what was the most expensive item? The Lidl food shop, but it only won against the translation by a small amount and once I paid the balance for the translation, I am sure that is the item that would have won.  I have listed the items here, just to illustrate the cost of living in Hungary: 1. 40 kg of sunflower seeds: £25; 2. Medicines: £16; 3. Printer cartridge: £10; 4. Opticians £ 8; 5. SPAR £14; 6. Translation £80; 7. Lidl £85; Total £238.

And finally finally: after we got home, put away all the shopping, had a drink and a rest, plus all the paperwork to do with the placed cache, Roy pointed out that he had been bombarded with ads for a mini chainsaw. Now, that is interesting, as we have twice already come into contact with one of those saws, as our Dutch friends, Heino and Manet, ordered one to be delivered here and we received it in the post. Also, the other day, when Roy was cutting back the jungle on top of Laci and Irénke's cellar, Laci came out to help with one of those small, very handy and sturdy little mini chainsaws.

The mini chainsaw

So, having had a look at the price and likely quality of the saw, I ordered one online. Or tried to, which is more correct. Just as I got to the paying stage, the website went to pieces. Didn't confirm anything, and nothing further happened. Having already put my credit card details in, I was starting to panic. What if this was a scam, and now large purchases worth thousands of pounds are already made using it by fraudsters. I always look in the URL, and the required 's' after http was there, but who knows?

Thankfully, I spotted a helpline phone number and rang it. A very friendly young woman was rather puzzled what could have happened, but offered to take my order by phone. This way, of course, I will have to pay by cash, but at least we will have that saw. Since yesterday I have been checking our credit card online and thankfully there is no sign of any suspicious spending on the card. The appalling nature of this is, that it should have given me an error message, if the bank's website was having problems, but nothing at all, is very disconcerting when you have already typed your credit card details in, isn't it?

Must go now, hopefully I'll post again next Wednesday to get back to the normal schedule. 💓