At McDonald's, the queues long at every till.  The customer in the queue before me reaches the till, places his order; the order is rung up.  £7.17.  He hands the clerk £7.  "£7.17," she says.  He begins to question, of all things, the electronic addition.  I am hungry.  The queue is lengthening behind me ( Read more... )

...on the way back up to Cleveland I stopped in Solon, circling down the cloverleaf from 422 westbound, slowing to let the flock of Canada geese and teenage goslings -- half-fledged, gawky; endearing in the way that the human adolescent is not -- cross before me; then left under the highway, and a half-mile along and left again, and two blocks and ( Read more... )

With a gesture at his left breast, and a glare -- the minicab driver from Nigeria, six years in London, summing up his twenty-nine years in Budapest as first an apprentice, then an auto mechanic, brought to Hungary through a socialist gesture of friendship toward developing countries from the government before the Pan-European Picnic began.  Stones ( Read more... )

...so lovely, whether huddling at the bus-stop or sitting at my desk listening to the soft pelting from the garden against the peach-tree leaves ( Read more... )

That's "French toast" magyarul.  "Furry toast".  Just lettin' youns know.

And off to Vienna tomorrow.

Cut off his fag schoolmate's dyed hair.

If he'd kicked the kid's face in, we could have skipped all the Republican-primary nonsense.  You couldn't offer those voters a better credential.

Well, not "stupids".  Determination.  Pluck.  Ambition.  And a relentless lack of co-ordination.

Sonny The Cat can't walk the fencetop.  So he swims it.

**facepaw**


( Read more... )

A book of two halves.  Emotion recollected in tranquillity; caesura; raw lumpy ungrammatical misery ( Read more... )

Chèvre rather than mozzarella, tomatoes grandly glowing red but a disappointment in flavour...  nonetheless!

As far as the tomatoes are concerned, az előrelátható volt.  (That was predictable.)  From some Dutch greenhouse.  Oh, well.  The bottle of red wine made up for any deficiencies in the lunch.

GOD.  What a good question ( Read more... )