Want to Make God Laugh?

Yes, tell him your plans.

The view on the left is not of some Great Caparthian Mountain, but of what I can see from my sick bed just a few hundred metres north of Hungary’s border with Serbia, hunkered down for a few days as I finally fight off the back end of a month’s cold and chest I thought had been despatched before we left England.

Boring, since I’d hoped not only to have delivered a fluent Hungarian presentation to Szeged university by now on covering the cold war (a different kind of cold…) but having driven our bikes 1800 km across Europe to have been well on our way by tandem towards Bucharest.

Hey ho, as they say. But at least (and scroll on down for some fun photos from the journey so far) I now know how to translate that headline about God’s laughter into Hungarian.

Indulge me for a moment in sharing the sentence’s grammatical thrill.

Ha Istent meg akarod nevettetni, mesélj neki a terveidről.

For non-Hungarians reading this, be careful not to say akarsz rather than akarod, as the former would imply there is only God in general but not the actual object.

“Nevettetni” has, in effect, “makelaugh” all in one word – the “tet” bit in the middle is “make”.

“Terveidről” is just beautiful in its complexity, like some ancient filigree.

“Terv” as the word sets out on its journey is the “plan” bit, then “ei” indicates the plural of something belonging to someone/something.

“D” makes it about “you”, and “ről” (be careful to make the umlaut forward-sloping and not vertical, as you’ll be in big trouble with your teacher if you do) tells the reader/listener that this is “about” something.

Not sure the analogy is going to work, but if the very simple grammar of Mandarin (it’s the characters, and the reading and writing that take for ever to learn) is a stroll in the park, German might be a brisk hilly walk in the easier foothills of the Alps.

Russian might be the Alps themselves, but Hungarian is like climbing the sheer face of El Capitan in Yosemite solo without ropes.

You can see why I’m keen to learn it, perhaps – though that wasn’t the intent of this post. (Rather like writing a From Our Own Correspondent or FOOC for the Beeb, I would often find that the piece I ended up with was very different from what I’d intended on setting out…)

What I wanted to write here was how the cold I’d thought to have beaten off before leaving the UK last week decided it wanted the last say after all.

We’re hoping now to head off tomorrow Thursday, by car to start with (allowing space for full healing of the lungs) rather than bike, heading via Belgrade east to Bucharest, and then back through Transylvania.

What’s unexpectedly fun is that the route traces my own most expensive BBC taxi ride ever – $1800 in cash to get me from Belgrade airport to revolutionary Bucharest on December 23 1989.

And, even more fun – old friend Bill Mitchell get this one!- we’re going to call in on the way on awful Nicolae Ceausescu’s birth place in Scornicesti, the visiting of which with Bill in 1982 first brought out the local Securitate in force (in cars with blackened windows all round including forwards), and then got me declared persona non grata for poking a bit of fun at the then dictator in, yes, a FOOC on Radio 4.

We expect a warmer welcome this time.

So, with thanks as I conclude this short musing to my Hungarian teacher David for the warmest of welcomes, and his patience as our plans keep changing, herewith some additional and hopefully enjoyable photos to illustrate our – OK, not yet cycling – journey so far.