A week in the tropics

After a rather hot, but pleasant last weekend which we spent mostly outdoors, this week we spent mostly indoors hiding from the tropical weather outside. For the first time ever in my experience we lived through several days of tropical rain, cloudbursts, in some places (thankfully not here) hailstorms and no corresponding drop in temperature. I thought I was back in Toronto, which tends to be hot and very humid in July/August, unlike over here where the heat is mostly desert dry. This high humidity lasted until Thursday/Friday, by which time it started getting comfortably cool by the late afternoon. Unfortunately that only lasted a couple of days and with the heat returning for the weekend, it is back to hiding indoors.

This picture shows the underpass stairs having upgraded themselves to ornamental waterfall by the Western Railway Station in Budapest. On one day there was a month's rainfall in an hour in the city. Thank goodness that in Bér we survived the downpours OK, although we did discover a nest of nasty large black biting ants, which I am sure got into the cracks on the back wall by the terrace to get away from the rain.  Roy has been waging an all out war against them ever since, especially that one of them managed to nip me on a finger, which was extremely painful!!

Of course, another way of making use of having to hide indoors is inventing things to do that are useful.  Roy started frantically cooking and preserving.  As the pepper and tomato harvest is still in full swing, he made some tomato juice (bottles at the end), lecsó (like ratatouille without the aubergines and courgettes) and in the middle you can see his piece de resistence, a massive bottle of pickled onions. The sack in the front is full of last year's walnut crop, which is just as well, as there will be very little this year.

Another harvest which is pitiful this year is that of the plums.  This solitary, lonely barrel contains all of them, which is a 75% shortfall for a proper amount of pálinka, as the still has vats that take four of these barrels for every distillation.  I am working on trying to get some plums from elsewhere, as everybody in this village is in the same boat. Failing that, perhaps we could team up with others whose harvest was as bad as ours and share the end product. As a last resort, we could put it away until next year, although I am not sure if it keeps that long, but we might not have any other option! :-(

The other activities we were forced to indulge in last week included a slightly larger amount of TV watching than normal.  Roy is still devoting a couple of hours daily to his beloved MASH. Good scripts, acting and directing will never date. We both wee ourselves laughing at times, it is still so, so funny.

After waiting for it for months, finally Who Do You Think You  Are? is back. It is in its 12th season and once this series is over it will be exactly 100 episodes since 2004.  They kicked off with a memorial program in which they had quite a few of the subjects of the last 10 years on, talking about how the program changed their lives etc.  It was fun.  The first actual program was about Julie Walters with lots of downtrodden and starving Irish ancestors, which always make a good program.  Julie was suitably horrified at the cruelty and greed of the English landowners and  was equally proud of her ancestor who was one of the founding members of the Irish National Land League. Roll on the next 7 weeks!

I have been also watching The Honourable Woman ever since we came back from Canada.  Brilliant mini series and very topical.  In fact, I agree with some of the criticism that it is a bit in bad taste to have it on while hundreds die in Gaza, but I am still looking forward to every episode.  Maggie Gyllenhaal is as good as her brother. Both very talented and good looking. Brokeback Mountain is still one of the best films I have ever seen and the last two episodes of The Honourable Woman are also awaited with much anticipation.

And finally, has anyone reading this seen Inspector Montalbano on BBC4? I found it by accident and am enjoying it a lot. On one level, the Sicilian countryside and seaside shots are absolutely glorious and the inspector has a rugged charm and sex appeal, I suppose.  Even the stories are OK, especially the one I saw today with that glorious large black dog in it. What is hilarious though, is the stereotypes from about 50 years ago, that seem to inhabit the police station: the overexcited idiot policeman, the lazy detective, the detective with the problematic lovelife etc., etc.  Even the inspector's girlfriend is the little, but very pretty, woman who gets ignored when detective work calls. Well, one can laugh at all this silly stuff and anyway, as soon as the weather gets a bit cooler I'll be outside and nowhere near the TV.

And finally finally, some pretty flowers from the garden: mostly roses, but also the hollyhock looking ones by the Kottage, which I am not sure what they actually are. They look more like camelias, but they grow like hollyhocks.  Still they are pretty and that is the main thing.

Bozsa, Árpi and Glenn

Quite a long and hot week, when most of the time we were hiding indoors. Roughly about half way through the week the weather showed some willingness to change, but it only produced a few thunderstorms and then it was back to the heatwave. The grass grew like mad, as it was downpours at night and fierce sunshine during the day. Thankfully the storms did not damage the vegetables and we started harvesting the peppers and tomatoes. Even the sprout seeds have started sprouting. Roy gave me the old shower tray and I made three lines of them. Admittedly, after filling the first trench I realised that there were not too many seeds left, so the other two lines are a bit sparser than the first one.  That sachet cost me £1 and I don't think there were more than about 2 grams of seeds in there.

The cefre barrel is still only about 80 litres full, so even with the grapes and the pears later we should only be able to fill one barrel this year. Thankfully, I managed to get hold of the guy in Guta whom Juci talked about and he said that his son-in-law has a big plum orchard, so when he gets back from his holiday I'll ring him and hopefully agree an affordable price for his plums. Half way through the week I managed to buy the air tickets for our next visit to Stephen & Co. They were reasonably priced and we'll be there for 6 days.

On Friday we went to Hatvan, first to the market then to Tesco. We took Nelly with us, so we had a jolly threesome. The shopping went off quite well, I bought lots of beautiful fruit and some veg at the market and all the usual stuff at Tesco.  We even discovered that they keep oat milk, so that makes life much easier, not having to chase organic shops everywhere for it.

You must be wondering what these two pictures mean.  I was going to call this bit "The flasher and the shoplifter", but didn't want to shock you too much.  The story goes like this:  As we were going into Tesco Roy was just ahead of me (he stayed in the car while were were in the market), I looked at his shorts and thought that they looked a bit funny, but then my attention was drawn elsewhere and didn't return to his nether regions. After we got home I heard him giggling his head off as he was coming out of the shower waving his underpants in the air. Well, the truth is that instead of putting on a pair of underpants and a pair of shorts he actually put on two pairs of underpants. Thankfully nobody picked that up in Tesco, or we might still be sitting in the police station trying to argue the toss about him not being a paedophile. The only mitigating circumstance is that he does have a pair of shorts that look very much like the underpants he wore as shorts!

The second picture relates to shoplifting.  Well, actually market stall lifting. After Roy put away the shopping he asked me why I bought two marrows.  I didn't! - was my answer. Oh yes you did! - he said again. No doubt that I came back from the market with two marrows, but don't ask me where the other one is from! Perhaps somebody else put one in there by mistake, or it rolled off into my bag and I didn't notice it, or perhaps (and this one is the most likely explanation, albeit a total guess) because the stall holder was at another stall and I had to walk over to pay her I somehow put in a marrow both before and after paying her without realising it.  This just shows how easy it is for absent minded old ladies to get done for shoplifting. To this day I have no idea how two marrows ended up in my bag and I am just grateful that nobody else spotted it there. Interestingly, my sister was back at the car packing up her shopping at the time, as I am sure if she was with me then, she would have spotted it and told me.

And now to the star event of the week.  This weekend Bozsa and Árpi came to stay with us and it really rounded up the week splendidly. They were supposed to arrive sometime between 11 and 12am on Saturday, and by midday the latest.  When there was no sign of them by 12.30 I started to get worried.  Finally they rolled in at 12.45 explaining that the GPS sent them into the hills above us to make the last 8k on rough, earthen roads full of potholes. They even got stuck at one place, but Árpi managed to get some branches to put under the tyres and pulled them out. Salutary lesson never to believe a GPS!!

After lunch on Saturday I walked them up to the andesite columns and managed to take this lovely picture of them, although Glenn, the dog did not oblige us with her best profile.  She is, by the way, one of the nicest, best behaved, clever dogs I have ever met. She is a border collie, but unlike most of them, not black and white, but Australian red and white. Because of all the rain and the high heat the forest was full of mushrooms.  We none of us knew enough about them to risk picking any, but I took a few photographs over the weekend.

On Saturday, while at the andesite columns I finally managed to investigate what happened to those ugly horrible concrete structures that they were building last autumn.  Well, I have two reasonably good bits of news to relate on this topic.
1. the geological rock exhibition actually looks quite aesthetic, although any man built structures in the middle of a forest still bother me.  I studied the exhibits and relating information tables and can see that there is at least some justification for educating the hiking masses about rocks.  There were many examples, both volcanic and sedimentary. I recognised andesite, sandstone, limestone, basalt, riolyte and a few others. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture, so that'll have to wait until next time.
2. The second bit of good news was that - as far as we could see - they have NOT built the planned look out tower above the columns.  Obviously, even the prayers of an atheist are sometimes answered. Last autumn I was so hoping that due to the only likely reson why they built this whole thing (ie: the intention of stealing half the EU money they got for the project) they might get so greedy that they nick at least two thirds of it and there will be nothing left for the tower, which to my mind would have been an abomination, causing wholescale devastation on or near a rare geological phenomenon like our bendy andesite columns.  And my prayers have been answered.  All they managed to "build" was a small platform near the top of the rock field with a sign which told you the names of the mountains you could see from there.  Totally unneccesary, as from the top of the columns the view is much more magnificent, being a lot higher and without interfering tree tops.

In the evening we made a fresh lecsó together from our own peppers, but with bought tomatoes and onions, as ours are just turning red. We ate outside in the pavilion as the sun went down and with Roy having rigged up an inspection light chatted until it got completely dark.

On Sunday we decided that Bozsa, Árpi and me will walk up to the Eagle's top lookout tower, while Roy stays at home and cooks Sunday dinner. This is an arrangement that suits everbody as Roy is not a great hiker and we all like his cooking. Thankfully the weather, while still well over 30 degrees Celsius, was a bit less humid today and occasionally we even had a small breeze. The route was my usual one, which I managed to totally miss last time with Pete, but we were spot on today both en route there and back. However, there were several interesting discoveries made by me, which will stay with me forever. As I have done this walk many times before, something new is always of premium value to me. The first was a magnificent bramble bush, which was already full of large, juicy and deliciously sweet berries.  I had to stop making a pig of myself, or I would have been in trouble. Bozsa doesn't really like blackberries, but she still busied herself picking for me and Árpi.

I am sure I will be back there in the future, although it is doubtful that blackberries will ever be this early again. The second was an even bigger adventure. On our way back I heard a rustle across the path, Árpi said something, I looked up and saw a large stag with magnificent full antlers crossing the path.  I was told that there is red deer in the hills above our village, but never really believed it.  Now I do. He looked a prime specimen, I hope he manages to avoid the hunters!

After picking a nice lot of blackberries and what felt quite a long climb at the end - we arrived at the lookout tower, which was built as a hunting lodge in the 1920's and which has been renovated about 10 or so years ago. A lovely guy from Buják was there to supervise and take the entrance fees and this time I didn't go up to the top as I was rather tired and preferred to chat with him at the bottom. Bozsa and  Árpi enjoyed the views and looked down on us from on high.

On the way home - after my sighting of the stag - we stopped at Virágos for some water, got Roy to come up with the car and drive us home after a beer, which, of course, made me drive the mile down the hill instead of him.  Dinner was an absolutely delicious mixture of an English Sunday roast with Hungarian adaptations.  Roast pork with apple sauce, but there was gravy as well, plus roast potatoes, roast peppers, onions and garlic, boiled sprouts and then lots of salad stuff, like grated carrots, beetroot, lettuce, cucumbers etc. We had some white wine (or at least I had) with it, and the feast was wrapped up by some strudel and gateau at the end for dessert. I could hardly move. Bozsa and  Árpi left at 5pm and we both agreed that they are delightful people whom we must have again sometime.

Enjoying the country rest (sort of!)

The week started with no rest, as we had to go back to town for my second visit to cardiology and the car had to have its MOT. Or as Roy would have put it: the car and I had to have an MOT! I passed the bycyle stress test with flying colours and the results of the Holter were quite OK as well, although there were small extra beats between the main ones here and there on the printout.  Nobody seems to be worried, least of all the doctor, so I went away happy. I wonder what the family doctor will say when I show her the results in about a month's time? She is on holiday until then and I am having a good time in the country anyway.

The 72 months service and the MOT came to just under £200, which was great.  They even cleaned out the air conditioning, all inclusive.  Next year, however, the service is going to be a bit more expensive as a total brake pads and disc change and 4 new tyres will have to be got. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  If we do, that is!!


Roy is awaiting the return of Who Do You Think You Are? with impatience, but he will have to wait until the week after next.  In the meantime we are still enjoying our two absolute favourite property/architecture gurus: George Clarke and Kevin McCloud. I do love Channel 4, I must admit.  Not only because some of my favourite programs are on there, but recently I enjoyed their news coverage of the Gaza crisis, so much more truthful, balanced and sensitive than any of the others. Kevin's Man Made Home and Grand Design are such joys to watch. So are George Clarke's Restoration Man and Amazing Places. On the reading front I have returned from Canada with half a ton of Heather's books, so I am having plenty of reading matter well into the winter this year. I started reading a fascinating book about Salt.  The history of salt is a history of humankind. It can be approached from every angle: economic, scientific, health, culinary, commercial, military and it will produce a riveting read. I am definitely having fun.

The belated birthday bouquet

Roy bought me a belated birthday bouquet of gerbera, which I love a lot and I supplemented it with a few roses from the garden. It looks really pretty on the big pottery stove. The plum harvest is pretty poor this year, we are picking them up every day, but we will be lucky to have one barrel, never mind four. In this district everybody is in the same boat, so other than the lovely lady in the next village, who has already promised us her equally small harvest, we will not get any more from anywhere.  Juci came up with an idea that in a village 15k away there is a large plum orchard where she worked last year and if I ring them they might have some surplus. Who knows?  I'll try, I have nothing to lose by trying!

The odd patch

This picture shows the result of stubborness by Roy, as he insisted on buying lawn seed to re-seed this bit, rather than our usual sports grass seed. I can't see how this patch will ever match the rest of the garden, but at least it gives me an excuse to get at him any time I like. (I can hear him say: "You do not need an excuse dear!")

As the word got round that we are back half the village made their way to our gate begging for work. As we got rather fed up with weeding, a little bit of it could be passed onto Marci and Kacsa and both of them were rather grateful.  So was I, as it kills my arthritic back doing too much weeding. I ought to learn to do it with a hoe, like the local peasants do, but I am not too good at that.

Daniel Ricciardo, the winner of the Hungarian Grand Prix 2014

Our Dutch friends have arrived complete with son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter. We visited them to return the paddling pool they kindly lent us last year and had a lovely hour and half chatting to them.  Today they have gone to the Grand Prix, I hope they didn't get too wet.  Talking of the Grand Prix: it was really boring at the beginning, as the weather caused lots of accidents, so for ages they were stuck behind the Safety Car.  Finally, it got going and much to my joy Lewis managed to end up on the podium (3rd place) in spite of starting from the pit lane. Rosberg finished 4th, so Lewis is still 11 points behind him in the championship, but it was still a fantastic achievement to make up 19 places. Roy and I are beginning to think that Lewis's so called bad luck is nothing of the sort. There must be some skulduggery going on in the Mercedes garage, as it is getting silly how often he has a mechanical break down, or a fire, or a slow pit stop etc., etc. There is a 4 week break coming up now with Spa the next one at the end of August.

I am off to the garden, as the watering and mowing is still our work.  Roy had done some short cut mowing in the back and I have done some watering last night and probably will not need to do any today, as we had a little rain earlier.  I have to inspect it and see.  Just back from inspection and no, I don't have to do any watering tonight.  Yippeeeee!! While out there I picked up all the fallen plums and put them in the lonely cefre barrel, then I got my camera out to make a record of what's out there in the garden.

A rose of unusual colour and shape.

This one (petunia?) was blown in last year and seems perennial, as it came back this year too.

My first success with parsley from seed straight into soil.

My beloved basil.

The best crop of yellow peppers I have ever had.

The first (almost) red tomato.

The old and sick pear tree is still producing them.

One of the new plum trees produced 15 plums. 6 of them look very picturesque in this photo.

One of only 4 apples on this tree.  All the others had 4 less than this one.

Holiday over, gardening begins ....

The final leg on EasyJet was as uneventful as all previous legs of our trip. Stephen took us to the station and we made it at such speed that resulted in sitting around for nearly 3 hours at the airport. I like to be there in good time, but Roy is getting positively neurotic about it, ala Bumbi!! :-)

On account of feeling absolutely done in, for a first time in years we decided to catch a taxi to the flat, rather than fuffle around with bus, metro and tram.  What a wise decision that was: for two major reasons: 1. there was an enormous fire reasonably close to the flat, which caused terrible disruption to traffic AND 2. a suspected fire at one of the undergound stations of the very metro line we would have caught.  The taxi driver cleverly avoided all traffic jams and we arrived home quickly and in one piece.  And the fare was under £20, so we couldn't complain.

The flat was immaculate, I knew Ian would leave it cleaner and tidier than he found it. The heatwave returned and we started struggling coping with it in town. There was no choice until Thursday, when I had to pick up my Holter monitor, which I then had to wear for 24 hours. However, we decided that as soon as possible afterwards we would be on our way to the country. In the meantime we tried to go for lunch one day in the Jelen and found it full of builders.  It is being renovated, although the guys said that it is due to reopen on 1st August. Even if it isn't, we will hopefully find it open by the time we are back in town which according to current plans and with the exception of a couple of days next week (more about this later!) will not happen until the end of August/beginning of September. The good thing about this, however, was that it gave us a chance to have lunch in Buddha Express, a Thai fast food restaurant, which opened near the flat a month or so ago and it proved quite nice.  It is tasty, cheap and really fast.  The service is good and it is really close. We'll be back!

On Thursday I had the Holter monitor (see above!) fitted. I did have this investigation done once before a few years ago, but then it was just a belt around my ribcage with a built in gadget as part of it.  This time I had something like this one in the picture except that my gadget was in a shoulder bag, rather than attached to clothing.  It was not easy to sleep with it for sure.  I have a terrible feeling that it will produce no useful data, like the one 4 years ago, because arrhythmia is like a naughty child: when it is monitored, it behaves itself!!  The clinic keeps a short day on Friday, so I returned it early morning and we were on the 1.30pm bus to the country. We only went a short while when I made a solemn vow to NEVER AGAIN USE THE BUS TO AND FROM BP AND BER IN THE SUMMER!!! There are some nice buses on some routes, but not on ours.  The one on Friday was an old, tatty wreck with hermetically sealed windows and NO AIR CONDITIONING!! I was so sick by the end, that I had to ask the driver to let me out only a couple of miles from Ber, otherwise I - and the rest of the passengers - would have been in trouble. I must have had a touch of heat stroke, the like of which I don't remember when I had last, if ever.

And then we arrived to a beautifully cool house and a seriously overgrown garden. The temperature outside was about 35 degrees Celsius, but inside it was only 23 degrees. For July, a difference of 13 degrees is pretty good, I suppose once we are back and keep going in and out, it'll drop to a difference of only 10-12 degrees.  Even so, this is still the cheapest air conditioning that I know!! :-)

The picture above is the pepper plot, which, as you can see, developed beautifully. It looked as if our gardener had been to water, but not to weed or mow the grass.  We did find out later that he had a rush job on somewhere else and had no time for anything other than watering.  So, the garden looked like an absolute jungle. We are still working on it, watering and weeding as much as we can every day, but the heat is now nearing 40 degrees in the early afternoon, so we can only do it between 6 and 9 in the morning and after 7 in the evening. Other than the peppers, the tomatoes are looking great too, the herb patch was wild, but beautifully alive, the roses and geraniums suffered a bit, but will recover.  The peas were all gone, and when Sanyi turned up to mow the grass on Saturday, he brought a couple of pounds of frozen peas, which his wife had frozen for us.  We are having it today with our fish/chop and potatoes for Sunday lunch.

There was one very good side effect of coming down early because of the heatwave.  As Sanyi was planning to mow the grass this weekend, had we not arrived on Friday, all the fallen plums would have been churned up by the mower and lost to the cefre (palinka).  As it happened, no matter how absolutely worn out we were, we managed to pick up all the fallen fruit in time for him to start mowing at 8am on Saturdy.  Roy's cefre barrel is already half full, but there is no chance to fill 4 barrels this year. I managed to get hold of the lady who let us have her plums last summer and she hasn't got too many this year either.  Well, we will fill as many as we can and that'll have to be it.

I thought I would include one rose picture, so that we have a flower as well as all those vegetable a herb pictures.  Unfortunately the roses have all produced their best flowers while we were away and deadheading and weeding under them took me about 4 hours so far.  I haven't yet done the ones by the upper terrace and in the Kottage garden.  Slow and painful work, due to the enormous thorns they all have.  Not to mention the forest of weeds round them.

The weather forecast is for rain, but not until Tuesday.  Today (as you can see above!) it is in the 30's again, so after an early bout of weeding in the strawberry and pepper patches and after watering the strawberry plants I have retired to indoors. I don't think I'll be out there before 7pm, but then I will probably be out for 2 hours watering.

Tomorrow we have to return to town, but this time by air conditioned car, which I intend to use for the rest of this summer for ALL trips!! The car is going in for its MOT and I have another test, this time on an exercise bike.  Let's hope that the results from both that and the Holter will be available on Tuesday, so we can be wiser about the state of my ticker. After that we intend to stay down in the country until we depart for the Hungaria Kupa on 20th August. Hopefully, as soon as the garden is straight again, we will actually have some rest. God knows we need it!! :-)

Back in Blighty

The return flight was shorter in time and even more relaxing than the way there.Thankfully, this time Stephen picked us up from the station, so we didn't have to drag the cases half a mile over massive potholes on the private road to their house. Friday was spent trying to recover from the jetlag and playing with those gorgeous little fellas: Elian and Xander.

On Friday night we babysat while Lucy joined Stephen at the Komedia. As a consequence of this I managed to sleep until 11.20am on Saturday and miss a visit to the farm where I have been before and which the children love. Still, it was necessary to overcome jetlag and exhaustion.  On Saturday afternoon we went to a local garden centre to look at garden furniture.

I never realised that nowadays they put totally indoor looking furniture out in the garden, but what do I know? Xander seemed to enjoy his sojourn in the wicker basket, though! Saturday night we babysat again and watched an Endeavour marathon on ITV3. I love Shaun Evans and Roger Allum. The series is beautifully written, acted and paced.

On Sunday - my 66th birthday - Stephen took us to The New Inn in Hurstpierpoint for lunch, which was delightful.  It was probably the best, if not THE best nut roast I have ever had in my life. In the afternoon we had a lovely time outside watering the newly laid lawn and playing with the children.

Later Lucy was blowing bubbles, which fascinated Xander so much that I just couldn't believe he is only 9 months old. The comprehension in his eyes, the fact that he doesn't miss anything, the clear resonse to all stimuli, proves that he is exceptionally bright.  He is also a very sweet, even tempered, patient, brave and happy little soul, so you can imagine that this besotted grandmother was having a whale of a time.

Unfortunately, all this fun and games came to an end when I started feeling ill, realising that I probably was going down with yet another bout of gastric flu. On top of this Xander's cough was getting worse and he had a crying bout while we were babysitting, so we had to call his parents home.  I wouldn't normally do anything like this, but I felt so unwell myself, that didn't think I could look after him properly. Thankfully, after some medicine and cuddles he went off again, unlike his poor grandma who was up half the night, feeling definitely at death's door.

And then came Monday, which was full of things to do, like picking up my glasses, meeting Ros and Ian in the Basketmakers (see above), visiting the agents re: 41 and finally the solicitors too. I wasn't sure if I could face up to a whole day, but amazingly I lasted until nearly 5pm. We started with the opticians, which was no hassle and very quick. The ridge of my nose is a bit sore, but otherwise the glasses are great. Then we hopped on a 5B and got off at the Co-op(as was), walked around the new Open Market,  which looked a bit empty yet, but hopefully all units will be finally let and life returns to it. Then walked to the Basketmakers to arrive about 20 past 12. Ros and Ian got in a few minutes later and we had a lovely lunch together.

After we said good bye, we walked to see Petya, our good friend at his place of work, had a good chat and moved onto to the agents. Jim appraised us of the situation re: 41 and now all we need is a bit of luck for it to go through this time. At the solicitors we signed the contract and transfer document, hopefully not in vain. We got back to Hassocks about 5.30pm and now I am resting.  Let's hope that tomorrow's flight is also uneventful and we get home safely.