Absolutely Anything Else

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

.....Surely Szábo László if you want to get it right

I bet the Fluffyettes must have a right struggle which name order to use. Even for my missus, a Hungarian married to an Englishman, it can be a right struggle sometimes to get cards etc with the right name order, she has about nine choices what with the "ne" wife suffix etc. which she doesn't use but if she is not careful they will add it on and then the name on your card differs from the name you actually use, etc.

I was just being lazy.  If I was doing it properly I'd have done it the right way around but there's an assumption here.  Mr Szabo might not actually have been Hungarian.

The rules explained to me by locals are that foreigners do not have their name order changed. 

Kids don't have any problem with the name order.  If they know the nationality of the person they adapt on auto-pilot to that person - e.g. speak English to non-Hungarians, Hungarian to Hungarians.  They just do it automatically now.  It's all a bit obvious to them and there's never really any discussion about it.

Sure, I only meant how it goes down on official forms etc. You are right of course that non-Hungarian names are kept in Western Name Order, but when you are of mixed descent it can become a struggle on forms. My mother, safely dead so I can name her, was Doreen Joyce and they seemed to struggle with "Doreen", Joyce was her middle name but was hermother's surname, so that I have this continual struggle with anyanév (mother's maiden name) which for some reason they always want, and it got stuck on a form as "Doren" instead of "Doreen" and so forever in Hungary she will be "Doren" as it is just too much trouble to change it. Her grandfather's name was Bachmann but they anglicised it.

Even my own surname seems to give them trouble, Trew, it is not as if it is that hard and is straight on the top left of your keyboard, but they will go for Trev usually and I have to stop them (W being not part of modern Hungarian alphabet/vocabulary) or I would end up being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_and_Simon]Trev Simon if I wasn't careful,

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

.......In England I have never known anyone except a Hungarian who has ever even heard of Lake Balaton, for example. It's the largest lake in Europe, isn't it? Depending on whether you count the Black Sea as a lake, or in Europe, and a couple of Russian lakes but again one can always change the definiton to suit oneself, the fact is it is not promoted at all
.....

I dunno, some people have heard of it.   Many other people in Europe know of it but they call it Plattensee.  Ok, not English, but an older Dutch guy I knew a while back told me that as a kid he travelled by road to Balaton each year for their family holidays.  And of course  the East and West Germans could meet their relatives there on "neutral ground". 

I had relatives in Littlehampton, UK and there was the surprisingly named Balaton Restaurant (see it on streetview here, but alas now renamed). 

Black Sea isn't a lake as it's got flow through the Bosphorous straits to the Med.  Now Caspian or Aral, then we're talking lake (or more technically precisely, oil based dumping group and radioactive salt pan).    Then there's the Neusiedler See next to Austria which is only about 1m deep.

Lake Balaton (German: Plattensee Slovak: Blatenské jazero, Latin: Lacus Pelso, Croatian: Blatno jezero)

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Remember Carol Vorderman off the telly.  She's Dutch...

No, she is a good Cambridge chapess, who now is on a daytime advert for something or other, I think Sun Life Assurance, if it is not that it will be Wiltshire Farm Foods or one of the others that get advertised to retired people during the day,

John Betjeman, the English Poet Laureate, was Dutch or rather his grandparents.....

Believe me Carol Vorderman is Dutch or at least half-Dutch. I met her brother Anton but his Dutch language skills were a bit weak as I think the parents were estranged for many years.  Lots of Dutch people in East Anglia. Hardly surprising. 

Interestingly enough there are some other secret Dutch people including Audrey Hepburn, Jane Seymour and that idiot politician Nicholas Clegg.   I won't mention Rutger Hauer as he's a bit obviously Dutch.

Mrs Fluffy has a saying which has caught on amongst the rest of us.  She channels that kid in the "Sixth Sense" when she sees people from The Netherlands and says "I can see Dutch people".  We've all been doing it for years now.

SimCityAT wrote:

Black Sea isn't a lake as it's got flow through the Bosphorous straits to the Med.

Yes, but it is freshwater. It is a good job it has, or the Danube would start getting rather full up with water. So it really depends on what your definition of "sea" is doesn't it. That is what I was getting at. I am sure that there is some technical definition of what a "sea" is but you can pick  and choose, I would say it is some body of water that is saline, yet again the Dead Sea in israel that is so salty you can float on it, is I think technically a lake. There is this difference between common use and the hydrogeographical expert correct 0one, it is the Black Sea, obviously,  because that is what we (not being hydrogeographers) call it.

That is weird that in Littlehampton they would have a restaurant named Balaton.  By any chance did they close very early of an evening

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Remember Carol Vorderman off the telly.  She's Dutch...

No, she is a good Cambridge chapess, who now is on a daytime advert for something or other, I think Sun Life Assurance, if it is not that it will be Wiltshire Farm Foods or one of the others that get advertised to retired people during the day,

John Betjeman, the English Poet Laureate, was Dutch or rather his grandparents.....

Believe me Carol Vorderman is Dutch or at least half-Dutch. I met her brother Anton but his Dutch language skills were a bit weak as I think the parents were estranged for many years.  Lots of Dutch people in East Anglia. Hardly surprising. 

Interestingly enough there are some other secret Dutch people including Audrey Hepburn, Jane Seymour and that idiot politician Nicholas Clegg.   I won't mention Rutger Hauer as he's a bit obviously Dutch.

Mrs Fluffy has a saying which has caught on amongst the rest of us.  She channels that kid in the "Sixth Sense" when she sees people from The Netherlands and says "I can see Dutch people".  We've all been doing it for years now.

Vorderman was born in Bedford, Bedfordshire, the youngest of three children[2] of Dutch father Anton 'Tony' Vorderman (1920–2007) and Welsh mother Edwina Jean (née Davies, 1928–2017).[3] Her parents separated three weeks after her birth, and her mother took the family back to her home town of Prestatyn, North Wales,[3] where Vorderman and her siblings, Anton and Trixie,[4] grew up in a one-parent household. Vorderman did not see her father again until she was 42. In 1970, her mother married Italian immigrant Armido Rizzi.[5] The couple separated ten years later.[2] Vorderman's father remarried; his wife died in the early 1990s.

fluffy2560 wrote:

[Lots of Dutch people in East Anglia. Hardly surprising.

Not that many, and I lived in East Anglia for many years, I imagine who you are referring to is Cornelius Vermuyden, who was asked by the Duke of Bedford to drain the Fens after having done it in Holland (not The Netherlands at that time), and seemed to have made a fairly good job of it.

Where I used to live, South Cambridgeshire District Council has as its motto "Niet zonder arbyt", Dutch "Nothing without work", and that is Vermuyden's family motto. Sounds a bit Nazi eh, but isn't

Vorderman did not trace the Dutch side of her family until 2007 (as part of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?) It was only then that she discovered that her father had been an active member of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation. He died while the programme was being filmed.[3] Her great-grandfather Adolphe Vorderman played a key role in the discovery of vitamins.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

[Lots of Dutch people in East Anglia. Hardly surprising.

Not that many, and I lived in East Anglia for many years, I imagine who you are referring to is Cornelius Vermuyden, who was asked by the Duke of Bedford to drain the Fens after having done it in Holland (not The Netherlands at that time), and seemed to have made a fairly good job of it.

Where I used to live, South Cambridgeshire District Council has as its motto "Niet zonder arbyt", Dutch "Nothing without work", and that is Vermuyden's family motto. Sounds a bit Nazi eh, but isn't

An interesting read - https://www.visitnorfolk.co.uk/inspire/ … rwich.aspx

SimCityAT wrote:

An interesting read - https://www.visitnorfolk.co.uk/inspire/ … rwich.aspx

That link doesn't work for me... oh it just has but is very slow. Yep, pretty much drained the lot. There is a beautifl pumping station at Prickwillow which I think is in Suffolk, (nope, it is in East Cambridgeshire) https://www.prickwillowmuseum.com/ I have had a day out there. it is run and maintained by volunteers as the watercourse has changed and been diverted, but they have a huge pumping engine now on diesel  but was originally steam to pump and drain the water out or rather pump it from a lowel level to a higher level, not needed now as Anglian Water have replaced it with some modern stuff but It is a sight to behold, it is beautiful. If you go down I thikn that is on Bedford Twenty Foot is it, on the Twenty Foot Drain? Anyway that, Beford Twenty Foot or Bedford Ten Foot, that refers to the distance it would raise the water and, same thing, the depth of water it could hold,  It has nothing to do with how long it is. Ultimately it will go into the River Great Ouse at Ely or further east and I imagine end up in the Orwell and thence the North Sea. It could come out at Great Yarmouth or pretty much anywhere, the whole point is that it is a balancing act and we haven't the technology to track individual molecules of H2O

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

An interesting read - https://www.visitnorfolk.co.uk/inspire/ … rwich.aspx

That link doesn't work for me... oh it just has but is very slow.

Last time I went to Norwich it was very slow as well.  Took ages to get there but a fairly pleasant drive.  On the other hand I went there for my Uncle's funeral.  Still it was nice to see everyone there.  Bit of a back water.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

[Lots of Dutch people in East Anglia. Hardly surprising.

Not that many, and I lived in East Anglia for many years, I imagine who you are referring to is Cornelius Vermuyden, who was asked by the Duke of Bedford to drain the Fens after having done it in Holland (not The Netherlands at that time), and seemed to have made a fairly good job of it.

Where I used to live, South Cambridgeshire District Council has as its motto "Niet zonder arbyt", Dutch "Nothing without work", and that is Vermuyden's family motto. Sounds a bit Nazi eh, but isn't

Well, no I wasn't referring to the drainage expert and the amusingly called Forty Foot Drain out that way.  I know that area relatively well.

One of my close relatives live out that way had a GF whose mother was Dutch and she (the GF) even had a Dutch first name.  There are quite a lot of Dutch(wo)men hiding out thereabouts.   So that proves my theory immediately. Case closed. Rubber stamp. File under "Proven".

"Niet zonder arbyt" sounds mostly older Dutch but I've got deja-vu here.  "Arbeit" is German for work whereas nowadays, Dutch for work is actually "werk".   Not sure where the word "arbeit" originates from without giving more of a toss to look it up but I know it's nearly the same in Swedish ("arbete").

fluffy2560 wrote:

Last time I went to Norwich it was very slow as well.

Well... that... is... norfolk.. people.. for... you. They... are.. nor... folking.. good...

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Last time I went to Norwich it was very slow as well.

Well... that... is... norfolk.. people.. for... you. They... are.. nor... folking.. good...

I've been motorboating on the Broads too.  Quite good I seem to remember but I was only about 12 at the time.  My Mum and Dad used to have a boat they used there.  Really noisy motor on it.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Last time I went to Norwich it was very slow as well.

Well... that... is... norfolk.. people.. for... you. They... are.. nor... folking.. good...

I've been motorboating on the Broads too.  Quite good I seem to remember but I was only about 12 at the time.  My Mum and Dad used to have a boat they used there.  Really noisy motor on it.

Again, the Broads are essentially just cut out but not to drain the water. They were cut out for the peat to use as fuel. They filled up with water when Vermuyden drained the Fens.

Me mum and dad and the three of us did that, from Potter Heigham down to wherever on a noisy motor boat,My mum was not very happy with my dad, "I get one week off a year, one week holiday, and I have to cook. On this --- cooker. I get one week holiday and I still have to cook for all five of us on this bloody boat".  Happy holidays

fluffy2560 wrote:

There are quite a lot of Dutch(wo)men hiding out thereabouts.   So that proves my theory immediately. Case closed. Rubber stamp. File under "Proven"

They must be very good at hiding, then, since it is as flat as a billiard table and you can see for miles and miles, and Dutch are quite tall... perhaps they are all dykes then I never met a Dutch or Nederlandser in East Anglia as a native I mean I have met lots of people on holiday etc.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

Well... that... is... norfolk.. people.. for... you. They... are.. nor... folking.. good...

I've been motorboating on the Broads too.  Quite good I seem to remember but I was only about 12 at the time.  My Mum and Dad used to have a boat they used there.  Really noisy motor on it.

Again, the Broads are essentially just cut out but not to drain the water. They were cut out for the peat to use as fuel. They filled up with water when Vermuyden drained the Fens.

Me mum and dad and the three of us did that, from Potter Heigham down to wherever on a noisy motor boat,My mum was not very happy with my dad, "I get one week off a year, one week holiday, and I have to cook. On this --- cooker. I get one week holiday and I still have to cook for all five of us on this bloody boat".  Happy holidays

Ah, not Vermuyden, I was thinking of Pete Boggs, the famous Norfolk landscaper.

I think your Mum and my Mum would have got on famously with plenty of subjects for mutual whinging. My Mum had the same kind of comments about the aforementioned Boaty McBoatFace. 

Mr Fluffy Senior as an ex-military man had (and still does) have a tendency to think of holiday things in terms of "Army" camping of the 1940s circa D-Day.  But he did his best and there we more than 5 of us. 

He thought the American outboards - Evinrude etc - weren't tough enough so insisted on using a Seagull engine which was very simple but had no sound proofing. 

My Dad's rationale was that in the aftermath of D-Day, they had cleaned up Seagull engines eventually found stuck in the beach sand and they ran perfectly with a little attention.  But Evinrude would be a dead duck if treated or spoken to brusquely or worse case, sworn at. 

I think his post-war thinking was that American tank engines were very poorly designed and hard to fix and therefore the same logic could be applied to outboards of the 1970s.  I think he discounted the potential for hearing loss on a small boat with such a noisy motor in close proximity.   Moreover the superb smoothness and responsiveness of a proper outboard was unnecessary.

Maybe he didn't take into account that the USA could afford to just leave  the tanks blown up or broken down whereas the British were short on resources and they simply had to be rescued and repaired.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

Well... that... is... norfolk.. people.. for... you. They... are.. nor... folking.. good...

I've been motorboating on the Broads too.  Quite good I seem to remember but I was only about 12 at the time.  My Mum and Dad used to have a boat they used there.  Really noisy motor on it.

Again, the Broads are essentially just cut out but not to drain the water. They were cut out for the peat to use as fuel. They filled up with water when Vermuyden drained the Fens.

In the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the peatlands as a turbary business, selling fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. Norwich Cathedral took 320,000 tonnes of peat a year. Then the sea levels began to rise, and the pits began to flood. Despite the construction of windpumps and dykes, the flooding continued and resulted in the typical Broads landscape of today, with its reedbeds, grazing marshes and wet woodland.

fluffy2560 wrote:

Mr Fluffy Senior as an ex-military man had (and still does) have a tendency to think of holiday things in terms of "Army" camping of the 1940s circa D-Day.  But he did his best and there we more than 5 of us.

Well he must have been a bit confused, the flotilla left all from the south coast to arrive in Normandy, did nobody tell him? Long way round from East Angular, but then maybe he was part of the deception....

I salute Fluffy Senior. It is men like him that gave us the freedom to waffle or wafel or gaufre. Without him, we would have no freedom to be right or wrong or have opinions. Sincerely, I salute him.

SimCityAT wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

I've been motorboating on the Broads too.  Quite good I seem to remember but I was only about 12 at the time.  My Mum and Dad used to have a boat they used there.  Really noisy motor on it.

Again, the Broads are essentially just cut out but not to drain the water. They were cut out for the peat to use as fuel. They filled up with water when Vermuyden drained the Fens.

In the Middle Ages the local monasteries began to excavate the peatlands as a turbary business, selling fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth. Norwich Cathedral took 320,000 tonnes of peat a year. Then the sea levels began to rise, and the pits began to flood. Despite the construction of windpumps and dykes, the flooding continued and resulted in the typical Broads landscape of today, with its reedbeds, grazing marshes and wet woodland.

I didn't realise we had become a Wikipedia mirror site. That comes from, that exact text, a blog on growsonyou.com, and the blogger's account has been deleted but the text is on a Google search word for word. It was a matter of milliseconds for me to find that. so why not quote your sources. that is not a reliable source according to Wikipedia, blogs are not reliable sources. So by Wikipedia's somewhat low standards, that would not be accepted as a reliable source.

So it comes down to being my word against yours. And my sources are far more reliable than yours.

I am just correcting your mistakes.

SimonTrew wrote:

SimCityAT wrote:

I am just correcting your mistakes.

Sure, but I am not quoting huge blocks of text; brevity is the soul of wit. I am not intending my comments to be taken as absolute fact, I am an unreliable source. I give links, I assume everyone else is capable of looking up Wikipedia if they want to. If you want, for the record, the missus and I translated from Hungarian to English all of the articles on the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 including the biographies, back stories etc etc. from Hungarian into English. I have done many many railway articles, translated many French articles into English, Wikipedia is not a reliable source so pasting in "[1] [2] [3]" why not just direct people to the Wikipedia article and let them make their own minds up.

That particular block of text you copy-pasted comes from a a blog at growsonyou.com which is not a Reliable Source by even Wikipedia's low standards. So you are up a peaty broad without a paddle.

expat.com is not an encylopaedia and I do not see why it should become so, quoting blocks of text. Anyone can do that, everyone has a search engine. All you have shown is that you know how to search for something. I had assumed we all kneq that.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Mr Fluffy Senior as an ex-military man had (and still does) have a tendency to think of holiday things in terms of "Army" camping of the 1940s circa D-Day.  But he did his best and there we more than 5 of us.

Well he must have been a bit confused, the flotilla left all from the south coast to arrive in Normandy, did nobody tell him? Long way round from East Angular, but then maybe he was part of the deception....

I salute Fluffy Senior. It is men like him that gave us the freedom to waffle or wafel or gaufre. Without him, we would have no freedom to be right or wrong or have opinions. Sincerely, I salute him.

No, our boating adventures were in the 1970s but the legacy was and is still in his head.  He was a young man then at the invasion, only just 20 by 6th June 1944 (D-Day).

In WW2, he went from the South Coast a couple of days after the main invasion and saw first hand what went on from that point forward.  He said he was most impressed by the absolutely fantastically well organised it was and on a gigantic scale. 

When he arrived at the beach head (via the temporary Mulberry harbour they put in), much had been cleaned up.  They didn't hang about though, they moved off from there directly to a few miles behind the front where they set up their temporary bases.   

In his own small way, he was part of that fight for freedom.  However, I think he never intended to "volunteer". Being in the Army was a job and when he joined in 1938 at age 14, he was a "boy soldier" (as he called it).  I don't think he anticipated that by 1942 (when he was 18), he'd be very directly in a war.

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Mr Fluffy Senior as an ex-military man had (and still does) have a tendency to think of holiday things in terms of "Army" camping of the 1940s circa D-Day.  But he did his best and there we more than 5 of us.

Well he must have been a bit confused, the flotilla left all from the south coast to arrive in Normandy, did nobody tell him? Long way round from East Angular, but then maybe he was part of the deception....

I salute Fluffy Senior. It is men like him that gave us the freedom to waffle or wafel or gaufre. Without him, we would have no freedom to be right or wrong or have opinions. Sincerely, I salute him.

No, our boating adventures were in the 1970s but the legacy was and is still in his head.  He was a young man then at the invasion, only just 20 by 6th June 1944 (D-Day).

In WW2, he went from the South Coast a couple of days after the main invasion and saw first hand what went on from that point forward.  He said he was most impressed by the absolutely fantastically well organised it was and on a gigantic scale. 

When he arrived at the beach head (via the temporary Mulberry harbour they put in), much had been cleaned up.  They didn't hang about though, they moved off from there directly to a few miles behind the front where they set up their temporary bases.   

In his own small way, he was part of that fight for freedom.  However, I think he never intended to "volunteer". Being in the Army was a job and when he joined in 1938 at age 14, he was a "boy soldier" (as he called it).  I don't think he anticipated that by 1942 (when he was 18), he'd be very directly in a war.

Well anyone could see war was coming... but we had a piece of paper, Mr Chamberlain said so, signed by Mr Hitler, that says there will be no war in Europe. I think it is Edmund Burke who says "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". This is why it is important to vote, to complain, to express your views. God hope that we never have to experience that horror ever again, that is why in the UK we have a war memorial in every village, every town, with the names of those who died so we can live. In  Hungary they have them too, I can think of many, some from the 56 invasion but many from WW1 and WW2. They are the unknown soldier, you never knew them, but I never want to see that massacre again. I am not afraid to fight and die for what I believe in, I am a bit old to be conscripted but I know how to mark and fire a surface to air missile or two and operate a radar, no problem but I will serve, no problem. I have nothing but the deepest respect for people who serve. They protect us. That is why it is called "defence". It is not entirely a euphemism, although usually it ends up being the UK that sorts out conflicts elsewhere,

My grandparents were in reserved occupations, not by choice but because as a plumber on my dad!s side and a welder on my mum's side it was more important for them to be, not in Dad's Army but to use their skills on the Home Front. They did not get any medals, but they also served. My aunt was in the WAAF and loved every minute of it. It was she who taught me to touch-type as after the war she worked as a teletypist and give me a bit of five-punch tape I can still read it on my fingers, although I cannot read Braille, I should learn.  I can do some basic British Sign Language, Hungarian Sign Language is very different apart from the most basic signs.

God hope we never have to experience that horror ever again, it is possible, the European Union has shown it is possible, to grumble and disagree without having to shoot each other.

SimonTrew wrote:

.....In  Hungary they have them too, I can think of many, some from the 56 invasion but many from WW1 and WW2. They are the unknown soldier, you never knew them, but I never want to see that massacre again. I am not afraid to fight and die for what I believe in, I am a bit old to be conscripted but I know how to mark and fire a surface to air missile or two and operate a radar, no problem but I will serve, no problem. ....

Plenty of memorials here from both sides.  Commonwealth War Graves at Solymar  (mostly NZ aircrew) and a large German one in Budaors (never been in it, nor seen anyone there).  It's possible to see bullet holes from 1956 in Budapest - they deliberately don't fill in the holes.

I can tell you that you would be afraid and there's nothing wrong with that. 

I was afraid of the chaos even on an exercise and I wasn't even in a war. Really, if exercises were anything like the real thing, it's just utter madness - bangs, shouting, flashes, trying to hear the orders over the radio while someone is firing a machine gun next to you all in the rain and dark and cold. Really gets you disorientated.

If someone didn't shoot you, you could crash a vehicle, get blown up, die in a fire, fall off something. It's a dangerous profession.

I also had a crisis of conscience at one point when I realised I was being desensitised to firing my weapon at what could have been another human being.  Part of that process was being exposed to pictures of victims of Northern Ireland terrorist attacks - both bombings and shootings. One could argue it was simply real life.  I did know obviously it was kill or be killed and a throughly brutal affair. If push comes to shove - after being desensitised - I'd simply have to pull the trigger because if I didn't then it would be the end of me.  I can easily see how in tense situations, people would shoot first and ask questions later.  Moreover there's the issue and dilemma of potentially sending people to a fight where decisions you made could cause people to die.  Really hard life and death stuff.

SimonTrew wrote:

God hope we never have to experience that horror ever again, it is possible, the European Union has shown it is possible, to grumble and disagree without having to shoot each other.

Amen to that.

fluffy2560 wrote:

Plenty of memorials here from both sides.

Yes,  I did not make it clear I meant from both sides. I know you know this fluffy,  but the Hungarian ones tend to have red white and green rosettes and maybe a few, I don't know technically what they are, but red white and green ribbons tied round them. You are absolutely right that they keep the bullet holes in Budapest from I think the Russians firing off of St Gellert hegy (hill) in the Siege of Budapest of Dec 1994 to Feb 1945. At (have I got the wrong hill?) there is a memorial, too and a little museum,

I am not sure I would be physically afraid to fight, but that is the normal human reaction. I have three rules in my life, don't hit, don't lie, don't cheat, but I will hit if anyone dare put a finger on my missus or on me. Being taller than the average hungarian I have usually a height advantage, and wearing as I usually do EU size 42 (UK size 11) steel toecapped boots, I just kick their boots from under them at the back of ther ankles to floor them then there is usually no argument. I have had to do it although I am a fairly placid man. Nemo me impune lacessit as it says on the sides of Scottish pound coins, Wha dar meddle wi' me?

Apparently expat.com does not allow me to add "Latin" as a language. I never learned it at school, I was not that posh, but just taught myself over the years. It is kinda weird because I also have only ever read Voltaire in French, not just "Candide" but for example his journeys in England, but only ever in French. So I have no idea of any bons mots of Voltaire in English. For many years I was under the impression that the standard unit of electrical potential difference, was named the volt after Voltaire and I have no idea why I would ever think that except that in England he wrote in his diaries lots of essays about magnets (aimants in his French). It is of course not, but since electromagnetism was not unified until Faraday did it, I don't know why I would have that kind of falsehood but we all have these kind of "facts" that are false.

We all sing songs to the radio with the wrong words, for example. NO IT IS NOT "BEELZEBUB HAS A DEVIL FOR A SIDEBOARD. SHARING HIS LIFE WITH A LARGE CUP OF TEA", that is a Bohemian travesty, Or "DOWN IN THE DUNGEONS WITH PETERS AND LEE". We all, all of us have these sturdy indefensibles that against all evidence and proof we continue to believe in, or rather not believe in but somewhere in our memory we fetch something we damned well know is wrong but part of our brain convinces us is right, different parts of our brains racing to get there first.

It is one of the explanations of déja vu, I am no neuroscientist, but that your short term memory remembers and recalls what you are actually experiencing right now, so you feel that you remember this happenng before when actually it is just your short term memory doing a short-circuit so to speak and giving youa kinda false memory. I tend to get it not just that I have seen this before, but that at that time I was saying, I am sure I have seen this before. I have no idea if that explanation is correct, neuroscience is not really hard fact it is very early days really, but it seems plausible to me.

fluffy2560 wrote:

Moreover there's the issue and dilemma of potentially sending people to a fight where decisions you made could cause people to die.  Really hard life and death stuff.

It's not hard. All you have to do is make sure you are well out of the line of fire and get someone else to do the dirty work.

I am no pacificst, but (it is OK to say this because it is not there any more) at Western and Eastern Magazine at the BAe Defence site in Stevenage they probably had enough explosives to  blow up the whole of Stevenage. As part of my apprenticeship once I had to count the stores and worked out that with that amount of gunpowder, plastic explosive and various other bits and pieces, if you set the lot off you could destroy Stevenage and cause about fifty billion poundsworth of improvements.

If you are in England and  you drive from Hertfordshire to Bedfordshire (I used to do this a lot because I lived on the border, to get from my village to the next one I would nip into bedfordshire and back into hertfordshire on the same road, with no turnings or whatever, but hertfordshire owned both ends of it and bedfordshire owned a bit in the middle, hulye) ....anyway the signs say "Welcome to Bedfordshire. A Progressive County".

What does that mean? In what way are you progressive? And why are you "a" progressive county rather than "the" progressive county, what other progressive counties are there? It is one of those stupid slogans that is entirely meaningless.

SimonTrew wrote:

fluffy2560 wrote:

Plenty of memorials here from both sides.

Yes,  I did not make it clear I meant from both sides. I know you know this fluffy,  but the Hungarian ones tend to have red white and green rosettes and maybe a few, I don't know technically what they are, but red white and green ribbons tied round them. You are absolutely right that they keep the bullet holes in Budapest from I think the Russians firing off of St Gellert hegy (hill) in the Siege of Budapest of Dec 1994 to Feb 1945. At (have I got the wrong hill?) there is a memorial, too and a little museum,

...EU size 42 (UK size 11) steel toecapped boots, I just kick their boots from under them at the back of ther ankles to floor them then there is usually no argument.....

EU 45 = UK size 11

There's a hill called Nemethegy or Nemethhegy or German Hill on the Buda side. I believe a bunch of Germans held that hill for a long time during the fighting. I am still not sure which hill it is but I think it's on Szepvolgyi.   I don't think there's any memorial there though.  Don't know about Gellerthegy in WW2.  That's just near Szabadsaghid and its name comes from Saint Gellert rolling off it in a barrel.  The Castle tunnel was where the Germans had their HQ. There are some doors there but where they go, I don't know.  Apparently there are extensive tunnels all under there, carved out over years and ideal for avoiding bombing.

You don't want to be taller than other people in a firefight.

The rosettes are just modelled after the flag of Hungary as far as I know.  It's not anything more symbolic I suppose.

This is where search engines are of no use to you. Someone once said "When I hear the word 'revolver' I reach for my culture".  I am well aware that is a turnaround on the original expression, and a funny one. But because search engines assume I have got it the wrong way round, I can't find who said it.

"It is good for young men to read books of quotations", Winston Churchill said.

fluffy2560 wrote:

EU 45 = UK size 11

I believe you. I have absolutely no idea what my shoe size is in EU sizes and looked up a conversion site. perhaps it thought I was US size 11 or something. I have absolutely no idea about that, I am used to collar sizes and chest sizes etc being in Imperial.

My next mission is to find a decent bit of blanco, to whiten belts and stuff, like the army uses. Never found anything that can do that in Hungary, good bit of blanco. Even brasso and duraglit (which is now brasso) I have to get smuggled in from the UK Where can I find something like blanco?

fluffy2560 wrote:

EU 45 = UK size 11

I believe you. I have absolutely no idea what my shoe size is in EU sizes and looked up a conversion site. perhaps it thought I was US size 11 or something. I have absolutely no idea about that, I am used to collar sizes and chest sizes etc being in Imperial.

I don't even have to hurt them, it is just simple. Left foot out, back of their ankles, take their feet off. I will even catch them as they fall, I do not want to hurt them, do not want to hurt anyone, but look in the face, left foot behind and whack down you go. Now you are on the pavement horizontal and I am standing up.... Now you can start arguing. You would do the same or something like it if anyone came near you, Mrs Fluffy or the Fluffyettes.

My next mission is to find a decent bit of blanco, like British Army uses to whiten belts and stuff. Never found anything that can do that in Hungary, good bit of blanco. Even brasso and duraglit (which is now brasso) I have to get smuggled in from the UK Where can I find something like blanco? I need it cos the er runners or whatever, the belts on the mechanism that runs up to the blind rollers on the windows are, flithy is too kind a word, but a bit of blanco will get them nice and clean.

SimonTrew wrote:

.....Where can I find something like blanco?

Don't know what Blanco is but there's a thread for "where can I find?".

fluffy2560 wrote:

SimonTrew wrote:

.....Where can I find something like blanco?

Don't know what Blanco is but there's a thread for "where can I find?".

Blanco is a character in the British sitcom 'Porridge' played by David Jason, as any fule kno, Blanco Webb. Now I might be on to something because I think those straps that hold the blinds, that I couldn't think of the word for, are called webbing.. it is not as if Ronnie Barker would resist a pun.

Oh what joys, another hot day. 40°C+ !

I can take the heat, but when there is no breeze it gets a bit unpleasant.

SimCityAT wrote:

Oh what joys, another hot day. 40°C+ !

I can take the heat, but when there is no breeze it gets a bit unpleasant.

Yeah, we do have a bit of breeze here in my újpalota but for the last few days it has been stifling, as you say not the heat, but just no breeze to get the sweat off you etc which is what sweat is designed to do by evaporation. It's why I tend to work more at night times when it is cooler.

"Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the mid-day sun", Noel Coward

fluffy2560 wrote:

.....
Ah, not Vermuyden, I was thinking of Pete Boggs, the famous Norfolk landscaper. ...

I probably need to correct myself.   Pete Boggs might have been Irish.  I might have got the name wrong too - could have been Sebastian Sphagnum, Michael Moss or Carol Compost. 

It's 33 C here but there's a bit of a breeze. I was outside and the sun is brutal.  My outside thermometer in the shade is reading 30 C which is ridiculous.  It's more like 40+ C.   

We're avoiding going out during the day and have become nocturnal.  We emerge around 18h as the sun starts to go down. 

I was washing the car at 20h last night and earlier on in Praktiker and OBI (which incidentally has started receiving wood for woodburners and has no pool filters - they missed that extended summer opportunity).

BTW, the latest news from Balaton is that they've finally discovered the Loch Balaton monster:

One of my slight amusements is that "paszternák" is the Hungarian for "Parsnip" and is a loanword from Russian. Somehow, "Boris Pasternak", the Russian author of Dr Zhivago etc, would not have the same gravura were he known as "Boris Parsnip".

Now. "mozi" is a lovely word, for cinema. it is a much better word than "cinema" which should be "kinema" anyway from the Greek 'to move' as in kinematics, but "mozi" the Hungarian, that is just a lovely word, perfect word.

Krumpli as the slang for potato is also an extremly good word, that scores about 100 on my potatometer, it is just an extremely good word. "spud" is not bad, but "krumpli" is even better. "borgonya" on the other hand is an awful word,  I go to the market the missus says get ten borgonyas and I come back with a bunch of begonias, it is just awful. Krumpli is perfect though.