Once upon a time in the west

On Sunday, for reasons too complicated to explain, I travelled out to Szombathely on the western border of Hungary to cycle 70 miles north to get to a McDonald's in Neusiedl in Austria.

After weeks of beautiful autumnal weather with clear blue skies and lingering warmth, I chose the first day of winter for my ride. As I left Szombathely a cold northerly wind blew out of a thick grey sky, not encouraging as I struggled northwards along roads running in straight lines through fields of dead cornstalks or that were freshly ploughed. Many trees were now very yellow thinning out in preparation for the coming Hungarian winter.

Fo ter, the centre of Szombathely

The cathedral

After about 30 miles the rain started: cold, drifting drizzle that nipped at my face. I cheered myself by thinking that by lunchtime I would be in Sopron, apparently a pretty, touristy town stuck on a little peninsula of Hungary that jutted into Austria. Coffee and cakes would raise my spirits. Sadly, Sopron had decided that the tourist season had ended and that there was no reason for any type of cafe to be open on a Sunday, so I cycled wearily round the town centre until I found the road north.

Battlefields are popular places with people interested in history. They provide a specific place on the map where something significant happened, and I often find that by standing quietly I can imagine the excitement, noise and terror of what came to pass many years previously.

Picnic sites are generally not known in the same way. However, the site of the 1989 Pan-European Picnic a few miles north of Sopron, is different. By the summer of that year people all around the Eastern bloc countries realised that things were changing and that their governments were no longer completely in control of events. An invitation went out to East Germans to come to Hungary and celebrate freedom in this little corner of Hungary. Thousands turned up in the hope that it might be an opportunity to escape to the West. And so it turned out. When people started cutting holes in the fence the Hungarian border guards just let them and about 2000 crossed into Austria.

The news about the Picnic spread around the world, and it became obvious to everyone that the regime would not last much longer. The collapse of Communism is often associated with photographs of people sitting on top of the Berlin Wall, but it may be the case that the Pan-European Picnic was actually a more significant historical event. 

Freedom and a reminder of its absence

The site is now marked by a rather beautiful, peaceful open space. A white marble statue representing people struggling for freedom stands in the middle of the field, and in the distance on the hillside stands a solitary watchtower. 

BTW, if anyone is interested, Victor Sebestyen's "Revolution 1989: The fall of the Soviet Empire" is a great read on this period.

21 years too late for the Picnic, Bryan on his bike

It felt very moving to be at such a place that had witnessed such a significant moment in modern history.

What was the Iron Curtain

20 years on there were no border guards, and I simply climbed back onto my bicycle and pedalled on into Austria. 

The first houses appeared a few miles later, a row of identical, precisely aligned buildings showing me that I was in a different country.

Austrian precision and conformity - a surprise to my eyes

This corner of Austria is marked by the Neusiedler See, a large but very shallow lake, apparently averaging about 1 m in depth. An excellent cycle path has been built around its perimeter, wide, smooth and, most importantly after 60 miles, flat.

Starlings, starlings, starlings

Although the cold rain continued to drive into my face I was excited by seeing one of nature's great sights, starlings swarming: at one moment a dense black cloud and the next spreading out and becoming almost invisible in the sky. Then, as if being ordered to do so, all settling on a power cable running along the edge of a field.

That kept me going and as my cycle computer hit 71 miles I arrived at my destination, the Neusiedl branch of McDonald's, where, 20 minutes later, Helen also arrived, en route from Sheffield to Budapest.

Every little helps - a foreign Tesco experience

Our friend Eleanor is visiting us from Sheffield at the moment, and she brought with her a copy of yesterday's Guardian, a treasured arrival. In it I was reading about how Sainsbury's are claiming to have overtaken Tesco in the supermarket war, and it reminded me about our experience with buying a microwave from the huge Tesco superstore at the Arena Mall in Budapest.

An advantage of shopping in Tesco's is that we can understand what we are buying, and we extended that logic to buying a new microwave, choosing one of the Tesco's own brand models.

When we got it home and out of the box we were slightly dismayed but not surprised to find that the instructions were only provided in a range of Eastern and Central European languages. However, in this wired age I expected that an English version of the manual would be available on the Tesco website. Not so.

So I rang the technical support number to explain the problem, and spoke to a young gentleman who said that they could not possibly help as they did not have English versions of the instruction manual and that I could only sort this out by talking to the store manager. He also said that they were only there to discuss technical problems, but could not provide a definition of 'technical problems' that excluded instruction manuals. I gently tried to explain that the chances of the Tesco store manager in Budapest having an English language version of the instruction manual for a microwave were significantly less than zero, and after getting somewhat angry with the nincompoop I put the phone down.

We discussed whether or not to try and return the microwave, and I said that I would try calling again. The second time I spoke to a different young man who said, "Yes of course I can help you with that. What's your e-mail address?" Minutes later an English-language version of the instruction manual popped into my inbox.

So now I knew how to operate the microwave. However one slight problem remained.

The microwave had been shipped with a UK three pin plug. Now, I know that Britain is an island and that we often have little awareness of differences that might exist in other parts of the world. But I would have expected Tesco's international merchandising experts to have discovered that almost every country in Europe uses a two pin plug.

Had Tesco's at Arena Mall also sold or included in the box the appropriate adapters it would have been a little more sensible, but they do not.

So I just wonder about how many innocent Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks and the rest have bought Tesco own brand microwaves and have wondered at how cretinous the merchandising of the product has been. And how to get the bloody thing to work.

A plea to non-British readers. Please remember that some of us are aware that the rest of the world is different.

Remembering the 1956 Hungarian uprising

I’ve just finished reading “Revolution 1956”, a book by the excellent writer Victor Sebestyen on the failed Hungarian revolution of that year. Written like a thriller, working through the events day by day, it describes how the Hungarian people emerged from a period of intense Stalin-like repression in the early 1950s and, encouraged by a CIA-funded radio station beaming ‘revolutionary’ messages to eastern Europe, started to demand more freedoms. A student demonstration in October 1956 escalated over the course of a few days into a national uprising, and the fuse was well and truly lit when shots were fired into a crowd in the Parliament Square on the 25^th October, killing perhaps a hundred or so people.

Bullet holes from that day are discretely marked to this day, and there is a memorial to the people who died. 

A Hungarian flag with a hole cut out of the middle flaps over it, a reminder that the excision of the hammer and sickle from the national flag of that time was used as the symbol of the uprising.

Over the course of the next 12 days several thousand people died, some killed as representatives of the regime, but most by the Soviet invasion in early November which destroyed large parts of Budapest, just a few years after they had been rebuilt in the aftermath of the 1945 siege. Some 200,000 people were allowed to leave Hungary in the months that followed, with the new regime keen to allow potential troublemakers out of the country.

Historians often say that had Britain and France not invaded Egypt to regain control of the Suez Canal at exactly the same time that the outcome would have been different, but given that both the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons at that time it is arguable as to whether America would have been prepared to stand up for Hungarian rights at the risk of a nuclear war.

So once again the spirit of the Hungarian people was crushed by overwhelming external powers, contributing to the commonly-held perception of eternal victimhood.

Reflections on inequality

Anyone who travels will know that major city centre railway stations are often not the best places to spend time in. Travellers arriving, perhaps disoriented by a foreign language, make easy targets for petty crooks, so these places tend to attract the more dubious parts of a city’s population.

I was reflecting on this early the other morning  as I waited in a queue at the BKV (the city’s public transport system) ticket office in the subway at Nyugati station. Standing near the head of the queue was an old woman, clearly with some mental health issues, who was trying halfheartedly to ask people in the queue for money. One homeless person lay on the floor sprawled at full length on his front, perhaps dead drunk. Small groups of homeless drinkers slunk around while well-dressed people poured out of the metro exits. An old man played the violin exquisitely. Above in the streets the usual mix of taxis, Trabants and Porsche Cayennes would have been grinding through the rush hour traffic.

I reflected on the book I was reading, “The Spirit Level" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. Their argument is that many of modern society’s socio-economic indicators, such as teenage pregnancies, levels of imprisonment, perceptions of trust, etc., are strongly related to income inequalities, and they present a lot of graphs showing how equal societies (such as the Scandianavian countries) almost always perform much better in terms of social indicators than the unequal ones (the USA and the good old UK). 

Wilkinson and Pickett’s data did not include any of the former Eastern Bloc countries, but I’m sure that they all represent societies where inequalities are widening hugely. When these countries embraced capitalism and embarked on the orgies of privatization, well-placed individuals (often former ‘Communist’ apparatchiks, natch) took full advantage and made themselves very rich indeed, ratcheting up the inequality spiral. As indeed the leaders of the UK’s nationlised businesses did, thank you very much, in the 1980s and 1990s.  

Wherever you find troughs of money, you find pigs with their noses in them, while the great majority suffer.