SIMPLETON PLEASURES

We did it. We're here! On the back end of a week of chronic social discomfort and headspin, I'm reclining in my Euro-tastic new apartment in the Erzsébetváros. Although I had planned to document the initial adaptation process, inside-outside anthropology-style, I (with a characteristically drippy excuse) simply couldn't find the appropriate notepad.

We now live off an ochre-ish courtyard in Budapest's VII district, in a studio apartment with a bath in the middle of the room. Now, armed with a 18HUF yellow exercise book, allow me to take you on a tour of our new neighbourhood. Roll your eyes heavenward as your host - very definitely the awe-struck provincial - marvels at the 24 hour supermarket (0-24 élelmiszer) at the end of her street, the utterly decent bar across the way and the mack-off (second biggest in the world) synagogue down the road.

This is Szimpla Kert, a gigantic romkert (ruined garden) and almighty jawdropper a stone's throw away from our pad. Entered through an unassuming set of industrial strip doors, it's an abandoned building transformed into a late bar and cinema, festooned with all manner of picturesque debris, de-tuned televisions, heeeeavy fag smoke, car parts pot plants, grafitto, flotsam, jetsam, &c, &c.

For future reference, you can view pictures of confectionary, buildings and fairground kitschery, as well as pseudo-exploitative photos of my boyfriend, Joe, (amongst other things) at my Flickr here.

* And the relevance of the picture at the top of this entry? Well, I like to sample my cultural difference at the supermarket - here the milk (tej) is sold, udder-style, in bags. You slide it into a jug, snip the top, then chill in the fridge.

PHWOARING AND POINTING

Thanks to the BBC's cultural strand I think I've just found my ideal man. I'm suspicious, though, that he was concocted in a lab, so just so is he.

He's Jake Thackray and floats so many of my boats I am truly ashamed that the BBC had to point him out to me at this late stage. A chansonnier with a Yorkshire brogue, a vaudevillian with a polo neck, Jake does saucy Northern grotesques every night at the Gaiety Theatre where Benny Hill and Georges Bataille meet.

Here's him doing Georges Brassens' Brother Gorilla.

GROSS APERITIF

A number of edible products are available to us in the woods:
Muscle-burning pie, locomotives to cook our meals and a curious black ink sauce.

The ocean has historically been a giant pantry
with newly-converted woods of muscles
and locomotives of pie.

An enormous storage room.
Great idea!
Welding your food-crust to the sweetest experience.
Fastening your romantic attitudes
to a usually ephemeral experience
to unusually brief ends.

BONFIRE NIGHT IN BURNT ORANGE

Teddies

This in-between time has me feeling a little like an émigré to Hull, when in fact I've done an eighteen year stretch. Nevertheless, as a old-newcomer, it's good to know someone with an ear to the ground. Enter Han, with whom I went to the third of the Seeds and Bridges 2008 contemporary music series.

We saw Nalle, who were just wonderful, and came off like fifteen year-old, multi-instrumentalist wiccans going hell for leather in the school music room.



P.S. And if, like me, you fear the Newsome effect, stick with it, I promise Hannah Tuulikki's voice is less babytalk and more word-chewing.

In the back of a chevy...

This is my Granddad, sporting a tee shirt commemorating 1985 Sonic Youth and Lydia Lunch collab Death Valley 69. My Nana (just out of shot) discreetly disapproves of this choice of shirt, too prim to admit why.


Ron has had it filed alongside Get Your Kicks on Route 66, as part of a stack of souvenir tee shirts from tourist jaunts to the States. In fact, it was collected by my Uncle Phil during his days as a security guard in the Smoke. My Granddad has been wearing it, nonplussed, since 1985.

News from Nowhere

By-the-by we left Norwich. Sad, of course, but muted by tussles with spiders, black mould, the silverfish that fed on our books' bindings and - worse, more wriggly and grotesque - lettings agencies.


I'm now in Hull, taking a fortnights holiday in being eighteen years old. Last night, I went to the Adelphi (which is, strangely, alongside the English Department of the University of East Anglia, one of the places I feel most at home) to see Han's band The Rocky Nest. With the sudden departure of a guitarist and a drummer, they were reluctantly forced to perform as a trio acoustic-style.

Han is channelling Francoise Hardy a little at the moment, I think.