Road trip

I feel rather proud of myself for having found and downloaded an app that lets me dictate on my telephone in gmail and I'm giving it a go. 

The danger is that it makes me prolix which reminds me that in my first job in the House of Lords in the dear bygone time I used to walk down the corridor by the side of the chamber where handwritten diplomatic dispatches taken from the library were displayed. A colleague pointed out that they were very short which was one of the advantages of not having word processors. 

By the way Lytton Strachey said the history of the 19th century will never be written because we know far too much about it. 

What would he have said about 2026? 

Does it really matter what he would have said? I suppose it doesn't.

So by chance I have come from Bucharest to Kosice in Slovakia hitching a lift with a friend who was on his way by car to Riga. For lunch we stopped in Sibiu at a very good Portuguese restaurant called Old Lisbon in Piață Mare, the main square, which I recommend. Then we went to Oradea  where we had a capital dinner at restaurant whose name I forget with a friend of ours. 

I've always had a great respect for him but it turns out that he is more interesting than I knew. Before and during university and in a year off after university he had had an idyllic life in Oradea riding horses and enjoying the 18th century countryside and 18th century way of life which I only glimpsed in 1990 from a car window. 

He was among other things secretary to Laszlo Tokes who started the Romanian revolution in December 1989 and is the Romanian Vaclav Havel.

My friend led a life that seems from the outside more like a novel than reality. When life really feels real it feels like a novel or a film which is a paradox 

Oradea is dominated by the famous Nicula brothers who own a lot of it. I remember Old Man Potter in It's a Wonderful Life would have owned Bedford Falls and called it Pottersville had George Bailey played by James Stewart never lived. I have no reason to think however that Oradea is worse for the brothers. Come to think of it Pottersville looked more fun than Bedford Falls.

Oradea was a Hungarian city, proudly rebuilt during Hungary's fifty brief years as a great power, but now the great majority of people there are Romanian. This is a phenomenon which is repeated around the world, including in Kosice where I type this (though Kosice had a Slovak majority in 1850) with my thumbs and in the great imperial cities of the British Isles, France and Spain. 

The difference is that the Romanians and Slovaks are indigenous and got there first.

Now brown skinned delivery boys rush down the streets of Kosice and Bucharest which until recently we're monochrome.

Some Hungarian historians accept what is undeniable that the Romanians were in Transylvania first but say they left and returned after the Hungarians and Szecklers settled the Crișana, the Banat and Transylvania. 

They adduce evidence from river names but my historian's instinct tells me that this theory is unsound.