Hungary 1

It is sunny and warm in Budapest. Our flight was delayed for about half an hour in Luton and then the taxi at this end was late arriving, chiefly because it was St Stephen's Day, when almost all the bridges across the Danube are closed in order that the great firework display may take place.

The day has been a holiday for a long time, St Stephen being the first Christian king of Hungary to begin with, then because it is when the settlement and occupation of the country is celebrated (everyone, but everyone is a colonialist if you scratch deep enough), as well as the first state constitution. After the war it was deemed to be the day to clebrate the communist constitution.

Lesson: try not to arrive on 20 August. (Having booked flights late we had not much choice).

This is the familiar house of our closest and dearest friends, L and G. They occupy one of the three flats in it and own the vacant one opposite theirs, downstairs across the hall. That is where we stay. Arriving here is always moving, a joyful occasion because of our long friendship, almost twenty-five years now, and because we only see each other once a year, if that. I suspect that if I have a residual Hungarian 'self' it is closely tied up with them, their being, their sense of being Hungarian. As for the flat, it is familiar by now, though it changes a little every time.

I have written about the house before. It is a typical smaller villa on the Buda side of the river. Built in the early 20th century for a poet-journalist and his actress wife, it's near the city terminal of the cogwheel railway. A large painted portrait of the wife faces me as I write. She is an attractive dark haired woman, her hair in a twenties bob. A portrait sketch of her husband hangs in the hall.

Over the next few days I'll say more about the house and the people who lived in it. Their stories are the sum of the country in little.

I'm here to work as well as relax. C emerges from the shower wrapped in a towel. It is always astonishing to me how slender and young she looks. I am not sure how I earned this. Well, I haven't. And now there is the sun too.

Lightning

That was London last night.

We had night thunder in Norfolk too. Lightning striking fairly close, some two or three seconds away, the double neon flash, then that croaky barrelling sound, much like heavy gunfire. A few moments and the whole process repeated now further, now closer.

In 1989 the Hungarian Writers Union treated C and me to a week at Szígliget, one of their retreats consisting of an adapted ex-Esterházy residence complete with grounds by Lake Balaton. It was the first week of March. The state was slipping if not yet crumbling, but a major flashpoint was coming up the following week: 15 March, the anniversary of the outbreak of the 1848 revolution. One writer we met had advised us to store up enough food for a couple of weeks. He expected violence. The mood everywhere was anxiety and occasional exhilaration. Seeing a state shift was like watching heavy furniture gradually moving itself across the floor.

Szígliget is beautiful. A ruined castle sits on top of a high hill, the retreat being further down the steep slope, about half-way between the castle and the lake shore. We had the finest room - the guest room - with an ornate balcony and an enormous white faience stove complete with putti. Outside in the plain corridor moved Hungarian writers who were working in smaller plainer rooms, none of whom we knew but got to know a little over endless games of table tennis that were to strain my back for the next six weeks. The next president of Hungary introduced himself as we sat on a bench. We had no idea he would be the first president of the new republic less than a year later, nor did he I suppose. He wore a blue tracksuit. He wrote short stories and translated fiction from English into Hungarian. He turned out to be a very good thing.

We could see some of the lake from the balcony. There are occasionally spectacular storms over it. One night we woke and thought we were in the middle of a cannonade. I think the lake must amplify the sound. We looked out to check that it was in fact thunder. So it was.

There was a brief storm this afternoon too but its approach promised more, was nicely grandiose and operatic. We could see the cumulus swimming towards us, a mountain of relatively amiable grey growing darker and denser as it rose. Then the grumbles began but no rain. The lightning was always elsewhere, the barrelling never too close, yet the sky continued to darken and, finally, eventually, spat out a few drops of rain, hammering the yard for a minute or two, offering brief violence before moving on. Bright again now.

Later this month we shall be back in Szígliget for a writers' meeting where I do an interview.

I have finished the proof-reading and am back to translating, thinking I should be writing. I will be writing.