Danskcolin: Saturday March 15th 2025 "Everybody loves a parade, don't they, especially if they're members of a Hampshire Chinese Tong gang (!)"

Friends, do YOU love a parade? Most of us do, don't we, especially a colourful one, and that certainly applies to me and my medium-to-long-suffering wife Lois, "in spades" (!).

The problem is that, living here in sleepy, semi-rural Liphook, Hampshire, if we want to watch a parade we have to go and immerse ourselves in the Chinese "quarters" of Betty Mundy's Bottom, which is a few miles away (25 miles, or so ??).

And that's certainly further than we would want to travel, without some extra "incentives" anyway (!).

We've never seen the parade - in fact we've never even seen Betty Mundy's Bottom (!), but we did read about the parade once, in the local Onion News - as a parade it's certainly colourful, and is considerably enlivened, to put it mildly, by all the traditional rivalries and bitter feuds of the local 'Tong' gangs, but all with a distinctively "East Hampshire twist", which is nice!

Nothing much is going on in Betty Mundy's Bottom today, anyway, according to our sources, but after our morning walk and a little lunch, Lois and I have an extra-long afternoon in bed. And our experience this afternoon is much enlivened by intermittent news, on my Facebook feed, of another parade, this one over a thousand miles away, in Budapest, Hungary.

after our morning walk over Lowsley Farm in chilly Liphook, Hampshire (brrr!!!)

we spend the afternoon in bed getting intermittent "feeds" about parades in Hungary

"Why are you two noggins getting updates about a parade in Hungary this afternoon, Colin?", I hear you cry! [Not me - I'm watching the rugby! - Ed]

Well, seeing as how you're obviously "gagging" to know (!), Hungary is a country that Lois and I visited several times in the 1990's and the "noughties" too. And today, March 15th, is Hungary's National Day, commemorating their Revolution of 1848 against Austria's Habsburg Monarchy.

I took this picture on this picture below on March 15th 1994, on my first ever trip to Hungary, when my English friend "Magyar" Mike and I mingled with the crowds assembling in the centre of the southern city of Pécs, near the Croatian border. Exciting times, because Hungary was just beginning to emerge from the shadow of communism, under the leadership of the then young, thrusting democrat, Viktor Orbán.

the photo I took on March 15th 1994, on my first ever visit to Hungary,

when my British friend, Cotswold Warden "Magyar" Mike and I

mingled with the crowds in the one of the central squares in the

southern city of Pécs on the country's National Day

Mike and I were staying with a Hungarian college lecturer, István and his wife Mária and their kids. István was a fervent supporter of the young democrat Viktor Orbán, and he's still a supporter of Viktor's today - hence István's posts about the National Day that I can see this afternoon on my Facebook feed.

(left) flashback to 1994: me (centre) on my first trip to Hungary, standing

with my Hungarian friend István and his teenage son Marty, and (right)

István's Facebook profile picture, taken in 2011, still "King of the Halászlé"

(Hungary's national dish) - fish soup with all the, like, billions of little bones left in it.

Yikes !!!!

It's a pity that, for me, Viktor Orbán today doesn't have quite the same "vibe" today as he had in 1994, to put it mildly, now that he's "Putin's 'mole' in Europe" etc etc. Oh dear!

Still, István is still my friend, and a friend is a friend is a friend, isn't that true? And you don't care about their politics, unless you're crazy, that is, haha!

For people who don't particularly like Viktor now, however, there's some good news on this week's Hungarian news websites. His party, Fidesz, is trailing in the polls behind the Opposition party Tisza. Also, a majority of Hungarians don't seem to back Viktor's fierce campaign against gays, the Gay Pride movement etc, and all that stuff, which is heart-warming.

Live and let live, that's my motto!

Lois and I are feeling quite lazy today, hence the long stay in bed, but eventually we decide to get up and have some teacakes and Earl Grey tea, as the sun sinks slowly below the horizon....

And I think today of our long commitment to each other: 52.5 years of marriage, and 3 years of being kind of an "item" before that.

Awwwww!!!!!

I can't say that American singer Glen Campbell brought us together exactly (sorry Glen!!!), but we were both big Glen Campbell fans at the time, and I remember that, on our first "kind-of" date in 1969, when I took Lois out to a country pub just outside Oxford, I paid a shilling or whatever for the juke box to play Glen's "Galveston" and "Wichita Lineman" for us, and those songs, whenever I hear them, as we do today on YouTube, they still take me back to those days.

(left) flashback to 1970, and the first known picture of Lois and me together,

in a holiday cottage in Shropshire, and (right) Glen Campbell's "Wichita Lineman",

which I paid for on a pub jukebox on our first kind-of date, in rural Oxfordshire

Awwwww!!!!!

[That's enough nostalgia! - Ed]

21:00 We go to bed on the first programme in Ardal O'Hanlon's new "celebrity travelogue" series on Ireland's islands.

In this first programme in the series, Ardan (Father Dougal off the Father Ted sitcom) is visiting 3 islands off the coast of Northern Ireland and Donegal: Rathlin, Tory and Arranmore.

Lois and I didn't know about an archaeological discovery made on Rathlin in 2006 - the skeleton of a Bronze Age man in a stone kist, a man who lived over 4000 years ago and whose DNA was very similar to that of most Irish people today, so not "Celtic" at all, despite the rumours (!).

The population of the island is only around 150, but in 2006 the owner of the island's only bar was using diggers to dig out a car park for his customers. As a precaution, a team of experts and students from Queen's University, Belfast was invited to the island from the mainland to do a quick archaeological survey, as this local history buff explains to Ardal.