Abundance

There was a lot of twittering recently about a man from America who'd been at the Wheeler Centre  in Melbourne pointing out that food corporations make disgusting food. He was advocating a return to purer food sources, I think. What I dislike about both Australia and England in this context is the fact that, to buy food that farmers haven't been paid tuppence for and that doesn't come in sealed plastic boxes and so forth, you have to turn to trendy 'alternative' stores or get up at some appalling time in the morning and go to a so-called farmers' market.

Here in Hungary I've barely seen a plastic box containing food for weeks. That makes a change, particularly from Sainsbury's, where I used to shop when I lived in London - but Australian supermarkets are also pretty keen on putting stuff onto polystyrene trays and wrapping it all up in yards of clingfilm. These things may come, of course, but for now, despite the fact that Tesco's is engaged in a creeping invasion of Hungary, it has not yet conquered all before it.

As a result, for the time being in Budapest my choice is not limited to chain stores or upmarket 'wholefood' places. Here, I either go round the corner to the greengrocer - a kindly man with a moustache who is on such good terms with some of his female customers that, after hearing all the ins and outs of their family's ailments et cetera, as he measures out apricots and potatoes, and then carrying their groaning bags out to the pavement and ensuring they've grasped them firmly enough to get back up the street to their apartments, he receives  warm goodbye kisses - or I go to one of the local markets.

There's nothing especially exciting about any of the stuff on offer - it's not exotic like Brunei. However, I love the sheer abundance and the faces of some of the people behind the counters:

Uh oh, plastic boxes - whatever happened to those wicker punnets of my childhood

My husband likes this lady because she calls him young man - and indeed, if I go to the market without him, she asks where the young man is (I suppose youth is a matter of perspective)

Words and Phrases and Olympics Inspired Excrescences

I'd managed to forget 'medalled', such a loathsome usage, but, having just seen it on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's site, I'm shuddering all over again.

'We've medalled plenty of times in this blue-riband event ...' the ABC tells us, (something to do with rowing, in this instance, I think).

Blistering barnacles, to quote Captain Haddock - 'medalled'? Eeeergh, ugh, gneaeuu, yuk, triple yuk.

I don't know if this usage is confined to Australian commentators - if it is, I hope it does not escape our shores. Unfortunately though, our usages - eg 'uni' - have a disturbing habit of spreading. So, if 'medalling' heads your way, please, please, please, just stamp it firmly out.

London II

All right, so London's feeling pretty spiffy today, after its night of nights. And, sure, it is full of diversity and hospital beds and people with drums and tellies - but in which city in the world can you get onto a tram and have a man and his falcon (or possibly his hawk - there is some debate in our household about that at the moment) as your fellow passengers? Eh? Eh?

Not London, that's for sure - they don't even have trams. Plus, even if they did and you managed to get on one, someone officious would come along pretty soon to tell you that falcons aren't allowed on trams - or, indeed, any public transport - because of Health and Safety, innit.

In Budapest on the other hand (that's the hand not carrying the falcon, [or hawk, whatever]), we have true diversity:

London

With the Olympics upon us, quite a lot is being written about London and its distinctive personality. In this context, here is the passage I've just reached in Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst:

"Where Dickens differed from ... other writers was in recognising that London was not only a celebration of sociability. It was also a place that magnified loneliness. Although many people feel isolated from time to time, London seemed especially adept at transforming such moods into a way of life, like that of the pinched man Boz observes walking mechanically up and down in St. James's Park, 'unheeding and unheeded; his spare, pale face looking as if it were incapable of bearing the expression of curiosity or interest' ('Thoughts about People'). This was not a new concern: as early as The Prelude (1805), Wordsworth had been 'baffled' by the thought of 'how men lived/Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still/Strangers, and knowing not each other's names.' Nor was it solved by a growing population. William Booth arrived in London from Nottingham in 1849, and when he came to write his autobiography the notes he made under the heading 'London' amounted to a solitary word: 'Loneliness!' 'There is no place,' James Grant observed in 1836, 'in which the injunction, "Mind your own business," is so scrupulously attended to as in London.' More optimistically, there is nobody who more scrupulously ignores this injunction than Dickens. Whether he is describing in The Old Curiosity Shop those 'who live solitarily in great cities as in the bucket of a human well,' or showing in Bleak House how Charley Neckett 'melted into the city's strife and sound, like a dewdrop in an ocean,' his writing repeatedly zooms in on isolated individuals and keeps them company on the page."

Widespread Cluckiness

Having endured, from certain friends and relatives, a measure of perplexity about my interest in poultry and the recent poultry show in Canberra, I was pleased to discover, via Whispering Gums, that greater minds than mine have turned their thoughts towards our feathery egg-laying friends.

Social Life

I've been given rather a lot of hospitality lately, and it's time I reciprocated. Which is why I was going through the various people I owe a meal to, talking aloud as I did so, trying to work out who would get on with whom.

Listening to me running through a kaleidoscopic set of combinations, attempting to find the ones where no guest would be likely to attack another, no feathers would be too drastically ruffled during the course of an evening and everyone might actually get on, my younger daughter said, "Oh this is just like that game we used to play at school where you had to work out how to get a cow and a fox and a lamb and a snake and a wolf across a river, without allowing any of the dangerous ones to be left unsupervised with any of the ones they might attack."

So which of my friends are snakes and which are wolves and which are gentle sheep and cattle? And what will be the most entertaining gathering of them all?

Failure

Australia is generally seen by foreigners as a pretty good place to live, although some think we, its inhabitants, are a bit brash and far too smug - but, then again, on the whole, we have a fair bit to be smug about.

Except in one area, that is - and it's a big one. Less an area than a stain, really: it is the situation of our contemporary indigenous population.  As I've mentioned before, looking at the statistics relating to Australian indigenous health and life expectancy, it would be easy to assume we are all uncaring racists, but things are much more complex than that - few people, in my experience, feel anything but a hopeless, helpless, hand-wringing goodwill toward the original peoples of our island. Vast sums have been spent trying to make things better. The outcomes have rarely been lasting or particularly good.

It would be easy to ignore quite how appalling things remain, but there is one journalist, Nicholas Rothwell, who, writing, (perhaps surprisingly, given the recent criticisms of all things Murdoch), for The Australian, a News Limited paper, reports regularly on the subject, describing with compelling clarity the social disasters in Central Australia and the Top End that most of Australia's population never see.

His latest report tells yet another dreadful story - or perhaps provides yet another dreadful episode in the one long grim story. Once again young Aborigines are ruining themselves through petrol and deodorant sniffing. This is a continuing tragedy. Money has no effect. Good intentions have no effect. What on earth can be done?