Here I was thinking how kind these Hungarian ladies were offering me a space to sit out the searing midday sun today half way between Lake Balaton and the border with Slovenia, to charge my literal and metaphorical batteries, eat my picnic lunch and generally cool down as I now finally pedal westward and home.
“What kind of place is this”, I ask them in my extremely uncertain everyday Hungarian – aware now, (with thanks to my old BBC Hungarian service colleague and language teacher Vali Toth, who knows the difference) how inflated and – let’s face it – absurd my self-evaluation was in Budapest as having reached B2/C1 level of fluency.
“Ah,” the white-coated young ladies say. Or “Na” in the Hungarian way. “We look after old people here. We’re not a residential care home, just a kind of respite space for the local elderly.”
How nice, I think. How generous that they’re letting me use their common room and their power sockets for my own break from the searing heat outside, a snooze, and to charge my bicycle batteries. (Hilly hereabouts, so they don’t last long.)
Next thing, a friendly local gentleman, probably in his early 70s, comes in out of the sun, with open shirt and large exposed suntanned beer belly.
As he takes a seat at my long table, I think he’s probably one of the team, helping the ladies with the looking after.
At which point, a team member comes in with lunch on a tray. The gentleman is not staff, but himself a customer. An oldie, an idősebb férfi, a case for care.
And younger than me. Hmmmm.
Not sure my Hungarian yet stretches to expressions to the care team of embarrassment at being not quite the intrepid and youthful traveller whom I somehow still consider myself to be, but just another old gent in need of kindness and support.
Ah well, it helps put things in perspective, which my old friend Nick Thorpe, another visiting friend (longer story) and I did at length over the weekend at his and Andrea’s rustic and charming home/retreat just north of Lake Balaton, taking stock of the state of the world especially in the context of America’s bombing of Iran.
Nick in his younger days (he’s a stripling at 65) was a passionate peace advocate and campaigner for nuclear disarmament. As the BBC’s man in Hungary for what feels like generations (he now pretty much lives in the Balaton house rather than in Budapest), he’s had more than his share of covering war, notably in former Yugoslavia and more recently in Ukraine.
He’s is also one of the deepest thinkers I know (it shows in his writings), and what’s now happening in the Middle East and Iran was for him much more existentially unsettling than for me.
Maybe it’s my Aspergers, but rather than resonating with Nick’s deep emotion, what continues to hold for me as I settle in to this long pedal back across Europe, reinforced by Iran and Gaza, and maybe by Ukraine too, is a kind of weariness perhaps, a resignation about the state of the world and the planet.
As a civilisation and even as a species, we are in the final years of what our baby boomer generation took for granted: The ever-improving future, a rich and rewarding career (though Nick and I have certainly had that), a gentle retirement, happiness, security and wellbeing for our children and grandchildren.
Struggling more with my Hungarian than I had anticipated, and lacking still the language for ordinary everyday conversation as I pedal West and North, there’s so much I can’t yet say.
But this morning with my bed-and-breakfast host on Balaton’s southern shore, we established that he and his wife, now in their mid-60s (so young!), have put their lovingly-cared-for restaurant and hostelry on the market and are looking forward to not having to work any more.
At the same time, with two grandchildren like us, he was profoundly unsettled by the disappearance of insects (for which the Hungarian is curiously “rover”) and of winter.
“Már nincs hó.” There’s no snow, a story I have heard here from so many. And summers like today are very, very much hotter than they were.
This post has turned into something more philosophical than anticipated, but perhaps it might serve as a reflection, along with my usual sprinkling of photos below, of how valuable this trip continues to be.
While greatly looking forward now to getting home, eventually, to Jutta and the family, I continue to follow the invitation to cycle now while stocks last. Because age-wise and planet-wise, they won’t.
