Katalin Varga (film review)

So a couple of weeks ago we watched Katalin Varga, a film made by a British director, set near here and filmed in Hungarian (mostly) and Romanian.

There are actually quite a few similarities between this film and "Along the Enchanted Way" (which I just reviewed here), though they may not be immediately obvious. Essentially both are clearly made (written/produced/directed etc) by Britons who obviously came to Transylvania and fell in love with the whole mediaeval vibe thing here - the scything, the horse carts, the natural beauty, the wildness, all that stuff. This is overt in Blacker's book, and perhaps less so in Strickland's film. However, so lacking in action and events is much of Katalin Varga, that you can only assume that it must have been a vehicle for Strickland to indulge his desire to show long slow shots of Transylvanian landscapes, and storks lazily flapping over remote villages, and men in fields cutting hay, and horsecart journeys across wide open fields with mountain backdrops.

In addition both feature very much a local cast of characters - "Enchanted Way" with your actual real people, though some are pseudonymised, and "Katalin Varga" with local crews and actors (and as I mentioned here, some of whom are actually based in Csikszereda).

There are two major differences though. Firstly that Katalin Varga is fiction (at least I bloody hope it is), and secondly that while life in these pastoral villages in "Enchanted Way" is idyllic and romantic and somehow beautiful, in "Katalin Varga" it's nasty, brutish, and short.

It's difficult to describe the plot of Katalin Varga at all without giving half the film away (primarily because very little actually happens in it), so I won't bother trying. It's mostly filmed in Covasna county (in the town of Kommando/Comandau in case you're interested), and I guess it is somewhat atmospheric. But because the film appears to be actually a showcase for the scenery rather than the scenery forming a backdrop for the film, and because I live here and see all this scenery every day, I have to say it left me feeling a little bit ...well, bored, frankly.

But, I guess this is my problem rather than the film's. I've just started reading another book "Blue River, Black Sea" by Andrew Eames, in which he says, while he's explaining what brought him to this part of the world:

The final catalyst for the book was a trip I made to Transylvania, where I stumbled into an almost medieval landscape that I never dreamed still existed in Europe, of scything farmers and their fruit-collecting children, of horses and carts, of wells in the villages, wolves in the woods and bears in the hills. The storybook detail was captivating. The storks on the chimney stacks, clapping their beaks when their youngsters stood up. The chicks in homemade chicken runs on the roadside verges. the little smoking huts in every yard, breadmaking ovens for summer use. And the daily cow parade, when all the villagers' cattle brought themselves back from the fields punctually at milking time and wandered down the main street until the reached their owners' houses, where the gates would be standing open to welcome them home. Transylvania seemed a mythical place, one where you literally didn't count your chickens until they hatched, and one where you made sure you made hay while the sun shone

And he's right in that very evocative and very real description. That is, more or less, exactly how it is. And it is beautiful. But somehow living here, I have sort of forgotten. I no longer notice any of these things, so utterly normal are they. And that does make me slightly sad I think, that I live in this place which to an outsider seems almost impossibly exotic (in a very retro sense of exotic), but which has ceased to make me swoon on a daily basis as it obviously did Eames, and Blacker, and Strickland.

I haven't really reviewed "Katalin Varga" have I? To sum up, beautiful and evocative and atmospheric if you don't live in Transylvania, with a fairly slight (and very dark) plot.

[By the way, Katalin Varga, is actually the name of a famous Transylvanian woman who led a miners' movement. I presume the choice of her name for the lead character of this film is significant in some way, but I'm not sure what the significance is]

(Girl)friend in a koma

I went to a christening on Saturday, in which we (and a whole host of others) became godparents (I can only assume that the two actual parents have concluded they will just have the one child, as they must have godparentised pretty much everyone they know). It was a much better priest than the last one I saw christen a baby in this part of the world, but he’d have had to go some to beat that racist old bastard. (In truth he seemed like a nice bloke, for a priest, etc etc. He didn’t care that I, for example, am not, nor have any intention of ever being, a Catholic. Though he was apparently told that I am Anglican which is a little bit weird to me – in these parts you are what you were “at birth”, not what you actually decided to be once you were old enough to actually have an opinion of your own. Not sure if he’d have been more challenged to learn that I am actually a godless heathen rather than, as advertised “an Anglican”)

Anyway the post church bit party, featured the massed ranks of godparents (there were 11 of us for the record, I may have exaggerated a little for effect in the previous paragraph, but that’s still a fair number. An entire football team of godparents), and an absolutely (and dangerously) delicious apple palinka which I could have drunk all night, so smooth and tasty was it. As it was the few that I did have, were a few more than I should have had, as I discovered when staggering home.

During one (relatively sober) conversation with a fellow godparent, she used a word which I wasn’t really familiar with, to describe our relationship. As she had no idea of the English term for it, I called upon Bogi (my 11-year old stepdaughter, and occasional translator) to provide some help. “Koma?”, she said (for that was the word we were struggling with), “It’s, errm, someone you go to the pub with”. As a lapsed language teacher, I find this kind of circumlocution is very laudable, and I was proud of her way of coming up with a way of explaining something she couldn’t really translate. However, it turned out that this was a fairly loose translation, and in fact koma, in this instance at least, means the relationship that two godparents of the same child have with one another. I’m 99.9% sure that we don’t actually have such a word in English, so I could hardly fault her, and if it turns out that my komas become drinking buddies, then I shall not be complaining. (It also of course gives me a great opportunity to use a not-at-all-forced title for this blog entry)

We don’t have a word for that do we? Perhaps it’s that British way of remaining as distant as possible from people in case we suddenly end up with obligations or the necessity of a relationship. There is a slightly sickly expression “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet”. I suspect the standard English version is “A stranger is someone you might not like, who you haven’t met yet”. And of course, we act accordingly.

Fat Tuesday

This is what my Yahoo mail account lists today as in the little "important dates" thingy at the bottom of the screen. But it's not called Fat Tuesday is it? I know that's the direct translation of Mardi Gras, but that's not a term that is used in English (other than by Yahoo Mail, obviously). Now I do realise that Shrove Tuesday is a specifically British English term and so I don't expect Yahoo to go with that, but why Fat Tuesday. Nobody calls it that, ever. What's wrong with Mardi Gras? Or Carnival? Or Carnaval? Or, here, at least, Farsang.

Anyway, happy Farsang, one and all. And for those of you who will be giving chocolate up for the next 6 weeks in some kind of half-hearted attempt to emulate Jesus staggering around the wasteland for 40 days, good luck.

What the Mikulás brought

Friday was the day when the Mikulás came. The Mikulás, or St Nicholas as you may know him, shows up on December 5th with various small gifts and sweets and stuff for children. [I should note here that there is some confusion over this date. Here, he comes on the 5th, but apparently in Hungary he comes on the 6th. It seems that his Romanian counterpart, Mos Niculae, comes on the 5th, so perhaps that's why the Mikulás comes then here]

Anyway, he came, as usual, and brought various sweets and cakes and fruit and stuff, and also brought me safely home from Uzbekistan and - on that day - Turkey, which is apt, since that's where he (St Nicholas) is from. The other thing he brought though was of much greater interest and value. He brought our palinka. I mentioned some time ago about the abundance of plums that we have acquired as part of our new land-owning status, and that we would be making palinka from them. Well, on Friday, Erika (and a friend, since I was unavoidably unable to be there thanks to the Tashkent fog) carted our barrels of fermenting plum mash off to the village church for just this purpose. For reasons which are unclear to me, but perhaps related to the role of the church at the heart of the community and the priest as guide to the people, the distiller had set up his equipment in the priest's garage next door to the church. And so a few hours after dropping off our plums, we had a significant quantity of delicious 53% abv palinka to our name. On Saturday evening some friends came round and we sampled it (and continued to sample it for quite a long time, to really make sure it was as good as we thought).

Yesterday morning I woke up without the merest trace of a hangover, which I take to mean that thius is really top quality stuff, since these days, I do tend to get some fairly brutal hangovers if I drink too much, and for that reason do so less and less. The fact that this palinka was able to do the job without leaving me comatose for the day is testament to the skills of our distillers. I raise a glass in their general direction! (hic)

East of Easter

So, it's Maundy Thursday. No idea what that means, but it's the day before Good Friday. At least it is the day before Good Friday for some people. (In Hungarian it's "Big Friday" by the way). Obviously for people outside the christian world, it's not, and also for many people within the christian world it's not either. This is because the orthodox church in the various countries that have one has easter at a different time. It's a sort of strange weekend in Csikszereda and around, then, because while it's easter for "us", it's not easter for most of the country. As far as I can tell Orthodoxers (? - Orthodoxicals? Orthodontists?) refer to the easter that's coming up as "Catholic Easter", on the basis that all christians who are unorthodox are catholic or something. I'm not convinced everyone in Northern Ireland would be totally OK with that distinction.

Last year the easters coincided (though I spent easter in Pakistan, where it wasn't really much of a big deal), but this year the two easters are over a month apart, so while Monday will be pretty much a public holiday in this part of the country, the rest of Romania won't take the day off until sometime at the end of April. Though I read today that a large number of people and most schoolkids in Bucharest will be off for three days at the beginning of April for this NATO summit thing. No idea why. Are they expected to line the streets cheering the arrival of Gordon Brown or something?

We'll be off up to Marosvasarhely for the traditional easter Sunday family dinner, before braving the traditional easter Monday dangerous drive home. Dangerous because the tradition on easter monday is for men to go round visiting all the women they know, read a poem, sprinkle them with scented water, and receive a glass of palinka for their trouble. Thus negotiating the villages in a car on the Monday afternoon with dangerously legless blokes staggering from house to house is always a challenge.

Reunion

No, not the French island off East Africa.

I have never been to a school reunion. Not of my secondary school, not of my (excuse British-ism) VIth form college, not of my University. I have never even been invited to one, and have no idea if such things have ever been held. I have to assume not, since I can't be that hard to track down - while I have moved a lot and all over the shop, my folks have lived in the same place since I was 7, and I really honestly wasn't so unpopular that I would have been deliberately "forgotten" when invitations were being sent.

Here, however, these reunions are not only held, but have quite a specific format. I know this because on Friday we went to Erika's back in Marosvasarhely (Targu Mures). The whole thing kicks off with an "Oszi ora" (spelling very possibly wrong) in which the class reconvenes in their old classroom with their old teacher and says something about what they've been up to/cracks a joke etc. That is in the afternoon, and then in the evening there is the party to which the spouses, partners, etc get invited.

What's especially interesting about this particular class is that the vast majority of them have emigrated. Erika is one of the few of her classmates who still lives in Romania, while the others are in Hungary, Luxembourg, Germany, Canada, the US, Switzerland, etc. This, I think, very much reflects the time at which they graduated high school and the circumstances in which they found themselves. Marosvasarhely/Targu Mures was (for Hungarians) particularly hard hit by the Ceausescu years. This is obviously not to say that everyone wasn't hard hit by Ceausescu (well nearly everyone, people like Iliescu obviously did alright). Then in 1990, post Ceausescu, the city was the location for Romania's only serious inter-ethnic conflict between Hungarians and Romanians (Human Rights Watch report), and I think for many people at that time, especially Hungarian young adults, it may have been seen as a time to get out while it was momentarily possible. Obviously things didn't turn out for the worst, and the riots and attacks were an isolated incident and while the ethnic balance has shifted in the city (it is now majority Romanian), people's worst fears were not realised. But they have resulted in the emigration of a large section of the Hungarian population who were old enough to remember the 80s, young enough to not have built up a vast set of ties and responsibilities within the town, but adult enough to have been free to leave in the early 90s. (I susepct I have rather ungallantly given Erika's age away here, or at least led the reader to guess exactly which high school reunion we were celebrating)

Anyway, the party was very good, aside from the food which was bloody rubbish (a universally held opinion, not just mine). I'm even getting used to being at parties at which all the music is entirely unfamiliar to me. As ever it went on until the hours were no longer so wee (I'm still taken aback about how long parties go on here), and there were even people present who spoke less Hungarian than me. There was a football match the following day between the class boys and the husbands of the class girls. I didn't play, because (a) we had to get back to Paula, (b) I didn't know about it, and so had no suitable shoes, and (c) I'd only got to bed after 5 and had consumed a fair amount of booze and I am no longer capable of indulging in that kind of madness (and to be honest I'm not sure how any of the others were - I mean the nature of the event means that there isn't that great an age range between potential participants).

Farewell for another year, Búcsú

Well, it was hot for the pilgrimage. Very very hot. And since the culmination of the event involves climbing up a fairly steep slope in order to take part in the mass in the saddle of a hill, it was quite brutal. Pilgrims are not necessarily athletes, and there were some people who really looked like they were suffering (a couple of very overweight blokes I saw looked like they were about to keel over even before the climb started). At the top, the bloke who was speaking over the PA system pre-mass kept telling people to respect the sanctity of the event and to please not take all their clothes off. But not that many people were paying attention, or at least, they felt the statue of the virgin would understand their need to cool off a tad.

The mass was a bit of a laugh because the priest giving the sermon was such a grumpy old sod. Here he has 400,000 people all there ready for him to fill them with passionate love of the catholic faith and joy at being in the presence of such a huge communcal gathering. But no. Instead he goes off on one about how people (ie his audience) were coming for the wrong reasons and young people were just there to do drugs and party wildly for the weekend and that all those listening were in fact a bunch of miserable sinners who all ought to be seriously penitent and then some.

I guess I really just don't get this strand of guilt and abuse in the Roman Catholic church (and in many others it has to be said). What does it say about human nature that so many people in the world are Catholics? Are we really all just a bunch of masochistic vagrants who are desperate to be taken in hand by a strict father figure who'll give us a metepahorical seeing to with his belt? I suspect I'll never understand humans.

To some extent he wasn't wrong though (though he might need a sense of humour transplant) - this supposedly sacred experience does have all sorts of other extraneous bits attached. Many of these pilgrims, it is true, did not actually come for the opportunity to be especially holy in any way. Yes, there are a bunch of young people who show up and camp out on the hill and have a weekend party (though I suspect most of them who do are fairly religious and partying is done in a low key and catholic way), and yes there are many for whom the weekend is less about religion and more about Hungarian identity and nationalism (witness the presence at this year's event of László Tőkés, who is pretty much the accetable public face of Hungarian nationalism in Romania, but who is a bishop in the Reformed Church - why was he at an RC mass?).

If the priest had been that fussed about people not according the pilgrimage its proper respect, he should have made a point about how it wasn't supposed to be used for nationalistic purposes. But he didn't. Funny that. Not that the church (any church/mosque/temple/synagogue) is ever guilty of siding with nationalists, obviously, no sirree.

The town is still full of cars registered in Hungary - I think today (Monday) is a holiday in Hungary, so people are taking their time going home. Overheard in a cafe yesterday:
Group of young Szekely blokes: Welcome! Where are you from?
Older couple: Debrecen, in Hungary.
Szekely blokes: And you speak Hungarian? Wonderful. You speak it so well.

(This references the possibly apocryphal but often told story about Hungarians from here going to Hungary and having people surprised that they speak Hungarian "so well". The conversation above was all light hearted, though, and ended up with the groups joing for a beer together)

Frozen Saints

It was cold yesterday, much colder than it has been for ages. I went out for a bike ride in the afternoon, and actually needed to work harder just to stave off the chill. Then Erika mentioned that she thought that it was one of the frozen saints' fault.

The frozen saints "Fagyos szentek" are Pongrác, Szervác, and Bonifác (and possibly Orban). I'm still trying to work out what those names translate as in English, without much success, but since they're Saints, they must have equivalents - Bonifác is, I believe, "Boniface" and Orban "Urban" but I have never heard of anyone actually called these names, so probably Pongrác and Szervác are even more obscure.

Their relevance to the weather is that in May there are 3 or 4 days which are (according to folk wisdom) always cold - and in fact it is advised that you don't put your crops/plants that could be damaged by frost out until after the last of them has been and gone. These days are the saints days of Pongrác, Szervác, Bonifác, and Orban. But having done a bit of checking it seems like the first three are actually May 12th, 13th and 14th (ie not yesterday but this weekend). More details (in Hungarian). Orban is on the 25th.

So now you know. If tomorrow is cold it's the fault of that bloody St. Pongrác. Who, having done a bit more googling, seems like he might actually be St. Pancras. One of those saints (perhaps the only one) who is more commonly known as the name of a railway station. In fact, until that moment I hadn't stopped to consider that there was someone around once who was called Pancras. Amazing what appears when you start aimlessly looking stuff up.

Blog of a Death Foretold

So, yesterday we went to Gyergyószárhegy, which is a village about an hour north of here to witness the funeral of the Farsang. [Szárhegy, as it is known, is one of those villages that really need you to be careful with your accents - write it as Szarhegy and it becomes "Shit Mountain"]. As you will be aware if you have been reading for a while, Farsang is the Jan 6th - Lent period in which much merriment is to be had (normally because it is too cold to do much but get drunk and have lots of sex as far as I can surmise). While some countries celebrate carnaval by having a four day bacchanalia, others have a single day of general mayhem, and still others (the UK) celebrate in a typically reserved way by making pancakes, here in the villages of Transylvania the period goes on for 6 weeks or more (depending on when Easter is).

But all good things must come to an end, and so it is that farsang (or actually some kind of athropomorphised farsang dummy) is laid to rest in a funeral ceremony on the weekend before Lent kicks off (ie this one). Villagers from all over the county convene on one spot - which changes annually- to perform their mock funeral ceremony, drink palinka (I assume - it certainly seemed like a well lubricated event) and consume large quantities of töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage). It was all very enjoyable and I thought I would share with you some pictures (all of which can be blown up to a more viewable size by simply clicking on them).
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Dancing round the funeral pyre - in the background you can see the castle for which Szárhegy is famous.


The Szentdomokos funeral procession



On-stage funeral. The big bale of straw you can see is actually a bloke dressed as a bale of straw. It was dancing and stuff.


The body of the Farsang is brought to face it's final rites. Sadly you can't see from this picture the fact that it had a carrot and two onions attached to it in a particularly suggestive place.


This is a bull apparently. To me it looked more like a beehive with a pot on its head, but I was assured that it was a bull.


A man is beaten to death for wearing a sheep's skull on top of his head. And rightly so.


The farsang is dead. Until next year, when he will rise, phoenix-like from the ashes.

Farsangi bál

So, how was the party, is the question I'm sure you're all asking.

It was good, but like no party I'd been to before. Or rather, it had elements of many other different parties but in a combination previously unknown.

Firstly we had to bring along our own food and drink - it was actually possible to order a fixed menu prior to the event, but since the fixed menu was cold meats and cheese as a starter, with a main course of töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage - stuffed with pork), we didn't bother going down that route. Most people it seems brought their own food - and plates, glasses, knives, forks, corkscrews, etc. Having dropped off our baskets of food and utensils we all trooped down to the lecture theatre (the party took place in the canteen of the Sapientia University) to watch a play performed by the teachers at the school, which was on a traditional farsang theme, that of marriage. This extended pre-lenten period appears to have been traditionally the time when people from villages were married off - possibly lent was a time in which it wasn't wise to get married as you couldn't have much of a party, or maybe (who knows) some serious catholic villages even swore off sex during the 40 days. That would, of course, be inconvenient because lent aways falls in Spring, when people in those far off days before widespread pre-marital rumpy-pumpy were desperate to, ahem, "get married". So anyway, farsang was a period in which one partied, dressed in costume (no idea why, but this seems somewhat universal) and got hitched.

The play was performed with gusto and (I suspect) a touch of inebriation. I didn't know what the words were, but could get the gist It wasn't Beckett, is what I'm saying here. At the conclusion we all trooped back upstairs to the canteen and joined our tables. Each table was devoted to a different class at the school, so you were sitting with the parents of your child's classmates. In many ways the whole affair from that point onwards was like a very peculiar wedding reception. There was the usual wedding-type band, playing cover versions of classics from the 60s 70s and 80s. (At least I'm assured they were classics, being as how they were all Hungarian, I'll have to take people's word for that). There was the universal wedding behaviour of sitting round the tables, talking, eating, getting plastered, and occasionally getting up and dancing. What set it apart from the average wedding was two things - firstly the fact that all the guests were between 30 and 45; and secondly the fact that the people that you had in common, who had brought you and your tablemates together (the role filled by the bride and groom at a wedding) were not actually present and were all at home tucked up in bed being taken care of by babysitters. Then, rather than the best man's speech, we had an interminable raffle - parents had been asked to wrap things they didn't want and submit them as raffle prizes, and the table was very full of such gifts. The process of repeatedly drawing out a winning ticket, announcing the number, waiting for the winner to show up and choose their present, accompanied by boozy cheering from their table, took ages. At one point I was concerned that they'd actually have more prizes than tickets sold and would have to put all the winners back in the same hat and start drawing them again.

Our table, being a table of parents of kids in the first grade, was a little bit subdued, as it was our first opportunity to get rat-arsed together and we had to size everyone up. As you looked around the room, you could see the higher up the school was the class, the rowdier was the table. Some people, of course, had to flit to more than one table having more than one child in the school. In such cases they tended towards their oldest child's group, and left us newbies to fend for ourselves. Just as we were leaving, I came across a couple who had suddenly appeared at our table from some third grade table somewhere. They seemed quite put out that we were going so early (it was 2.30), and the husband insisted that I have a glass of wine with him - quite possibly because he was Romanian and wanted to chat to someone else at the party who'd no idea of what this bloody music was.

I have no idea what time it finished, but we certainly seemed to be the first ones to go. People do like to party until dawn here. The very concept that we were going before 5am seemed to be quite offensive, but having had the Szilveszter experience of having the 8am alarm-clock baby on a couple of minutes sleep, we weren't about to do it again. We've probably been marked down as party-poopers though, and will be treated with appropriate disdainfulness at the school gates on Monday.

Farsang 07

Last year I mentioned Farsang, the Hungarian (possibly Transylvanian only, who knows) pre-Lent feasting period, and I presciently mentioned that we might have to go to a school farsang party this year because Bogi would be at real school. Well, I was right, and that party is tonight. I'm not quite sure what to expect, but it seems like costumes are not really part of the deal (which is alternately a relief and a disappointment). It's also unusual to have a (non-family) party to which one is obliged to go, and to not go would somehow be breaking the unwritten but fiercely guarded rules.

Things are somewhat busy and manic these days, which will explain the lack of blog posts. In a two month period from mid Feb to mid April I will (I think) be spending significant time in 7 seperate countries, which sounds exhausting, but kind of intriguing all at the same time. Further details of my itinerary to follow.

It is still not cold! I never imagined I could see pictures on the news of snow on the ground in Spain and England, while Csikszereda remained snow-free. We're due to have winter start this weekend, I'm told.

Crumbs

On Monday, I learned of another new cultural practice previously unknown to me. That is the practice of Crumbs. To explain I'll have to go back a day further to New Year's Eve...

On New Year's Eve, we went to a party at the house of some friends in a village not far from here. Booze had been bought and lots of food prepared (to say that a pig had died for the gathering would be stretching it, but one did die immediately prior to it and provided the guests with large amounts of food - not so much me, obviously)

Anyway it was an excellent party - the children danced and played all night long, the adults got excessively drunk, and Paula and I got the chance to welcome everyone to the EU (as the only EU citizens at the beginning of the gathering). I don't really remember much afterabout 2.30am until I was woken up at 4.30 to go home - I had crashed around 3 it transpires, next to Paula who zonked out sometime in 2006. I won't bore you with how much and what varieties of alcohol I consumed, but it's safe to say that it was somewhat more than was absolutely necessary.

So anyway, we went home, and re-crashed out. And then of course Paula woke up at about 8. Now when you look at baby-related websites and the like there are these little milestones they have you look out for - baby's first word, baby's first steps, baby's first adorable solid turd, that kind of thing. They never have you look out for "the first time your baby wakes you up on New Year's Day when you've had about 3 hours sleep and you have a stonking hangover". But, new and prospective parents, let me tell you now, it's a milestone you will face.

Being (occasionally) a good husband (and being as how I had had an extra hours sleep at the party itself), I got up to spend the morning with her. Fortunately she was fairly tired herself and so I could mostly get by with holding her in my arms and watching a bit of TV. But much as I love spending every minute I can with Paula, I'm not that keen on spending time alive in any sense when I feel that bad. (It's actually another argument for having children earlier in life - in my early 20s I might have coped. In my early 40s - it was hellish beyond reason).

So, I slogged through the morning, and eventually was joined by the rest of my family, who looked much more lively than I felt, and was informed that today we were going for Morzsa - the aforementioned "crumbs".

Crumbs is this: The next day after a party, in the afternoon, you all go back to the house of the party to have lunch, and basically reminisce about the night before. Lunch, of course, being all the leftovers from the party. That's basically it. In the state I was in it was something like a massively extreme hair-of-the-dog* - not only was I going to be drinking the same stuff that had so damaged my capacity to exist happily, but I was going to have the same food, in the same place with the same company. If nothing else it would either tip me over the edge of vomiting (where I felt I was), or cheer me up no end.

It did the latter, I'm happy to reveal. Or at least, it didn't exactly make me feel full of the joys of 2007, but I did feel significantly better (though no less tired). But that first beer was very slow going.

We didn't leave until 7pm either - and we were the first to go. I think the thing broke up properly around 10. They like their parties here.

(*I have learned that "the hair of the dog that bit you" is exactly the same phrase in Hungarian. Which surprised me quite a lot. It sounds like one of those one-language-specific idioms)