Once upon a time, in a blogiverse far far away...

There was a person who regularly posted. That was about a year ago.

Then the ebhil curse of the drinking classes (or even glasses, I assume) got in the way.

Then she got her library shipped from home and trapped herself in her front room with some over-ambitious Ikea self-assemblage. After devouring three packets of rye crackers with only mustard ease things down, suddenly MDF looked rather tasty, and she managed to nibble herself free through a week spot in the backboard...

Only to decide that a holiday was the solution to all ills. So off she went (by train, metro, foot and ferry) to a remote mountain hamlet in Crete where she fulfilled a life's ambition and learned to milk a goat. There are pictures. She wasn't very good at it. It was cool. There was no electricity. Unfortunately, she had to come back by plane and is now scarred for life by the "complimentary" meal served to console her for missing her connection in Athens. To say nothing of the hotel room and its lovely view of one of the city's finest roundabouts.

Noswaith dda

So here I am on the official edge of nowhere, very far in the remotest bit of North Wales, behind a mountain and two miles from the nearest village, Ll--y-aedw-ch--dd-w-w-ll-dd or something like that. And yet, inexplicably I have better and faster wireless internet than I did in the centre of freaking London all week.

Gotta love the wonders of the modern age...

Alas, I still have no time for anything in depth, but getting here I realised that the Welsh and the Czech languages both share an extreme antipathy for anything that looks like a vowel. And the "ch" noise too.

Beehive behind the bonnet

Before the year is out, I will be a biological evil Auntie, rather than the "ties-of-friendship-rather-than-blude" evil Auntie I have been so far. The parents of the future be-evilled niece or nephew have been practising their parenting skills on the dog, so I am generally optimistic about the whole business of keeping the infant off the sofa and training him/her not to climb up the stairs, chew the bottom step to matchsticks or make messes on the living room carpet.

The dog has also been generous enough to allow me to practise my own evil aunting skills, which in her view generally involves letting her sprawl with pr0n-star abandon all over the older bro's fatboy (posh beanbag) revealing all sorts of Overly Frank Truths (it's a girl! it's a boy! later this year - it's a filled nappy!) to the world and shedding a good quarter of her body hair. Meanwhile I watch DVDs.

But while in the car on the way to the mouth of Wey this weekend with tricky, we were chatting about this and decided that in honour of the occasion I should probably up the evil quotient somewhat. We idly debated the possibilities of motorbikes, red leather, tattoos and a mysteriously untraceable smell, but in the end came round to the idea that the crowning glory could only be provided by my er... crowning glory.

Maybe it was the giddiness brought on by the pending weekend at the Great British Seaside. Maybe it was the prospect of greasy, paper-wrapped heaven in the form of the best fish and chips on the south coast. Maybe it was the Annual Trawler Race. Maybe it was the monotony and dull back pain induced by the Great British Bank Holiday Series of Traffic Jams. Maybe it was the ipod-wielding genius of tricky himself, and his selection of finest tunes. A combination of nostalgia and pop is a deadly thing.

But five and a half hours later, we poured ourselves onto the grey and windy beach utterly convinced that the ultimate badge of evil auntieness, the towering edifice that is the iron badge of the truly Great Aunt is the rock-solid, weatherproof, waterproof, wellie-proof beehive.

I'm off to find the lacquer and half a country cob.

Everything's bigger in Budapest...

The country...

The radishes...
The piles of smoked lard...

...and the rain.

...but at least it gave me a good excuse to play with the newly-discovered black & white function on my camera. I fear for the future - it's probably in sepia.

Gone to Budapest...

...in a train and everything. Back soon.

I think I need intensive hydrotherapy of a Hungarian kind. The almost uncontrollable urge to write something that while definitely not a book review,* might contain an actual opinion about something related to the contents of said book is just about killing me.

In the meantime, sitting on my hands while my mind does the boggling thing and my mouse does the link-surfing thing seems the safest option, since I have no time. Dammit.

*As opposed to yet another nail in the cherub-bedecked coffin of civilized discourse and a crushing blow with an unflatteringly large, spiked mace to the spiritual welfare of the world as we know it. Probably it also eats grubs, wears a smelly dressing-gown all day long and neglects its monthly waxing appointment.

…tastes just like cherry coh-lah...

(stripped of branding to make it acceptable for public blogcast)

But first, a quick, polenta-fuelled, trip up a mountain to see the natural sculptures in the Valle di Sella in the snow. Up where the air is thin and the snow doth fall in late March, artists are ferried in during the summer (less snow then) to make sculptures out of natural material which are left to weather the effects of the elements.

Top of the list is the work-in-progress tree cathedral. In theory, after 25 years, the trees inside the wooden framework will have grown into the desired shape, and the framework itself will have rotted away, leaving a living, leafy building.

Among the other bits and pieces (including an amphiteatre made of woven twigs) that are scattered through the forest is this one, which as far as I recall is called "Pieces of Stripped Pine" or something.

Then off we went to Trento to dry off our trouser legs and practice looking more glamorous while wandering through streets where the walls looked like this… …and the sky looked like this… But, whither Lola? Luckily, Trento isn't all about miniscule gelati and elegant little cups of espresso. All that fresh mountain air means they take their food seriously south of the Dolomites, and on the day we visited, a cheese fair had plonked its ripe and oozing self in a square right by the main underground parking lot. Imagine my delight! Italian cheese piled high in stinky piles of beautiful ripeness! Oh unspeakable joy! Oh unbounded rapture! Oh momentary anxiety over the transport of dairy products by plane! Giddy with various edible fungus fumes, I bought:

1. A wedge from a wheel that smelled of old socks and looked as if it had been buried in a burlap bag and left to rot for several months.
2. A slab of gorgonzola so gloopy, blue and melty that it was sliding off the display board and slowly dripping its way to freedom.
3. A small roundel (I think I just made up that use of the word, but it fits) of very stinky goat cheese infused with the juice of a head of garlic, in its own special straw nest.

I did not buy:

1. A chunk of bright yellow Sicilian cheese studded with peppercorns and made with saffron flour, mainly because the stallholder was quite annoyingly insistent on flirting with us and sang very bad Italian pop songs.
2. Some strange stringy stuff with a faint plastic aftertaste.
3. Something with an unpronounceable name, rolled in dead leaves and ashes, because the guy wouldn't let us taste it first.

And then there was the highlight of the Trento Regional Cheese Fair (probably not its real name). That fine spring day, we had the honour of being graced by the presence of none other than Lola, the prize-winning cow. According to her nicely hand-lettered sign this fine speciman of bovinehood had presented her proud owners with 14 calves (ooof) and vast quantities of milk, as a consequence of which said owners were forever grateful and prepared to say it in painting on a wooden board decorated with flowers.

Not only that, but Lola's supreme conformation and top quality milk production had endeared her so much to some judges not a million miles away from the secret alpine headquarters of the Federazione Provinciale Allevatori di Trento, that she was designated "Queen of the Mountains" and given a very large shiny bell to prove it. Lucky, lucky Lola.

Tra-la-la-la-splish

It may have been raining in Bolzano...

...but there was sunshine in my heart.

Ahhhh...

Personally, I blame an overdose of the free samples at the Trento regional cheese fair for that brief moment of insanity.

Since the mutual friend lives in the wilds of northern Italy, one of the many edumacational opportunities offered by a fleeting visit in her direction is a quick trip to Bolzano, which by virtue of the multiple "o"s is very satisfying to say. The Alto Adige region is but a hop, skip and jump to Austria which means that not only is it a nice place to eat pasta and look at mountains, but also sausage means more than mere salami and can come curry flavoured with mustard, almost everyone speaks German of a kind and most events can be rounded off with a nice piece of strudel/struedel/struedl/strooooodol (mmmm...).

On the downside, the weather was springlike only in the sense that torrential rain, sleet, fog and snow also can happen in March too. But that's quite a handy excuse for eating enormous helpings of polenta swimming in melted cheese, fried mushrooms, meringue-y things, heaps of risotto, yet more strudel, Sachertorte and chocolate Easter bunnies. Have a food picture.

I usually go for the ears first.

Tomorrow: Lola the prize-winning cow and her very big bell.

Mysterious Dimensionless Points

Polyps update: mysterious brooding.

Mysterious cause of camera refusal to download photos to laptop: assumed mysterious battery.

Imagine some pictures of snow here - I was in the mountains when I wasn't stuck in the portakabin or the smallest hotel room in the world (very clean, but mysteriously kettle-, drawer- night-table- and electric-socket-less).

The most mysterious thing, however, about the recent jaunts abroad is what has happened to my default foreign leungwidge. The DFL is the massacred version of an otherwise innocent and inoffensive foreign-to-the-speaker language that pops out in the absence of any decent command of whatever local language might be. It often bears absolutely no resemblence to the actual language you should be speaking, unless by doing so it can cause insult to the local person with whom you are attempting to converse (badly).

The DFL may be accentuated by the atrocious and yet irresistable urge to mime if doing so will cause acute humiliation. These days, however, it is only rarely the speaker's own native language spoken Clearly. And. Distinctly. In. A. Loud. Voice. With. Odd. Em.Pha.Sis. Or. A. Funny. Accent. Normally, it's whatever language you studied least and worst or most recently quite badly. It should not be confused with those foreign languages which a person speaks with any degree of fluency. Oh no. Far be it that you should be confused with a reasonably articulate speaker of anything apart from helpless grunting noises that never quite sound the same no matter how hard you try.

Nor, however should the DFL should be confused with those bits of language you pick up while abroad ("Do not flush/use the toilet while the train is standing in the station", "Do not feed the monkeys children - they bite"), watching films in smoky arts cinemas, or reading those books where the mysterious, foreign, tycoon hero peppers his speech with exotic endearments, curses and the odd (ungrammatical/mispelled/or both) sentence in his mother tongue. ("Efharisto!", "Querida!", "Avec les roberts comme ça, ta rhumba est exceptionnelle" and, "Non credevo che 'impotente' volesse dire 'non può divertirsi'", my darling.)

Anyhow, over the last few months, my default foreign longwidge has now become Czech. Heaven and Mrs. Jana both know I can barely manage a word or two in Czechland, but it seems that distance has an effect rather like that of half-a-bottle of Becherovka. My Czech actually gets more fluent the further away I am from the country where my mangled efforts would be most useful.

Those poor Italians hardly knew what hit them, what with my volley of "Prosím"s and "Promiňte"s as I hurdled through the Milan metro and fervently embraced the whole of the south-Tyrolean train network with a deathless passion.

Of course, now that I'm back in Czechland, 3 whole days of being indoctrinated into the vagaries of Italian (can't speak it, can follow some, thanks to french, music and a whiff of distant latin) by Our Mutual Friend and boyfriend, means that I'm now apologising and thanking people in dreadful Italian. Probably just long enough to annoy the bilingual flatmate of Sicilian extraction.

Bring out your... bread?

The polyps did try to stage a rearguard action from the lower right quadrant beneath the kneecap, but so far haven't succeeded. Czech hydrogen peroxide is clearly good stuff.

So I'm not incapacitated, just in Italy. And these aren't necessarily the same thing. For one thing, the coffee's better, even on the trains. The little I can see of the place from the window of our glamorous 70s portakabin is quite attractive, albeit rainy.

Brief little Wednesday something-like-a-thirteen for the purposes of comparison with Cancun.
1. Blogger speaks Italian.
2. Pasta is a starter.
3. Mmmmm... coffee.
4. Less weirdness, generally.
5. Peas? Why peas?
6. Hooray for new no-smoking legislation. At last I can wear dry-clean-only trousers to restaurants.
7. One of these restaurants may have been run by a man who gave me an autographed volume of his own poetry.
8. The power of the blonde is magnified here.
9. This is a bit weird.
10. Gotta go get trained.
11. No toga.
12. No toga.
13. No toga.

On a clear day

I'm jet-lagged, sleep-deprived and mourning the loss of my flip-flop led freedom from the constraints of shoes and woolly clothes. It's also cold and sleeting back in Praha. Sniff.

Have some pictures.
Jump where?

Oh. Here:

Add a bit of colour.

I can't take credit for this bit of underwater photography - my efforts always come out as funny blurred blobs. Anyhow, I was so busy looking at the reef to try to figure out what everyone else was frantically pointing at, that I nearly sat down on this guy, and had my own Steve Irwin moment. The dog in a mansuit in a wetsuit thought it was hilarious.


Waaaaaahhhh!!!!

Duuuuuudde...

The very early Monday Thirteen from Cancun.

1. It is VERY WEIRD here.
2. I'm beginning to gain an appreciation of the subtle imagery of some of the RnB that doesn't make it onto Radio2.
3. Dooff. Dooff. Dooff. Dooff. Dooff.
4. How many words can possibly rhyme with arse? Sorry. Ass.
5. Grass. Mass. Blast. Fast. Chast?
6. See 1.
7. Diving is muy bien.
8. There are very tiny ants crawling all over my laptop. Yep.
9. Blogger speaks Spanish now.
10. Fishizzle. I think.
11. Toga.
12. Toga.
13. Toga.