Socialising

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I seem to spend most of my free time with socialists. We just don't talk about politics much.

What's the Hungarian word for amphetamine? There is one, and being Hungarian it's nothing like the English word and I can neither pronounce nor spell it. But that doesn't matter because no one uses it - they say "speed".

How would you translate an idiom like "heavy water" into Hungarian? Actually, you'd do it literally. The people who measure beverages in decilitres and sometimes play songs in a musical mode not used anywhere else in the world...use an anglicism when talking about deuterium rich hydroxillic acid.

How do you say "goodbye" in Hungarian? You wave and say "Halo!", which I think is pretty great.

Yes, my friend Paul T - flamenco skatepunk guitarist, long time teffler, and the man who signed me up to the SWP - is visiting England with his Hungarian girlfriend, also a teacher.

We sat on the beach, ate pizza, drank styrofoam tea, and talked about the British love of heroic failure, battleship design, and how the Spanish call some red wine "black wine" but the Portuguese call some white wine "green wine" - even though what we call white is actually yellow.

Not a word about the 1956 revolution, G20 summit, or the deepening crisis of world capitalism.

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Comrades and computers don't seem to get along. There's a number of fellow local lefties who regularly call me up with technical troubles.

Sometimes it's "I can't log onto my email", sometimes it's "The printer's beeping at me", occasionally it's "can you fix it so it'll understand my voice", and quite often it's "The flashing thing won't switch on anymore".

Don't get me wrong - I like to feel needed and appreciated, I enjoy solving problems, and they generally cook nice things for me. Today it was spicy spaghetti followed by baked banana and ice cream, yesterday it was roast chicken and potatoes.

But I have to ask: Is everyone so technically inept, or only those who describe technology as "means of production"?

Defragging, cache clearing, firewall, virus scan, not clicking on spam offers of free porn? Basic care of equipment, but no, they can't quite see the point - and still can't see the connection when the flashing thing won't switch on anymore.

My beloved Socialist Workers Party has finally started discussing, fifteen years after everyone else, that the internet might be a good means of reaching people.

But anyway, that's the other reason why I spend my free time with socialists, not discussing politics.

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