Wednesday December 9th 2020

07:00 My first job today is to make sure Lois is in time for her 9 am appointment with James, her hairdresser. I bring 2 cups of tea up to bed at 7 am, and get the shower ready. She gets away from the house on time at 8:55 am, with her face-mask and plastic gloves. James will be wearing the full PPE set including some sort of visor, like a riot-policeman - my god! What madness!!!!

on the left, the Billy Shears hairdressing salon, where Lois goes

10:15 We go for a walk over the local football field and cross into the new housing estate, which workmen are beginning to finish off. A few Christmas decorations have started to appear: we see some wreaths on front doors, and a Santa climbing a chimney, which is cute.

the local football field

approach to the new housing estate

a tiny Santa climbing up a chimney - cute !

11:00 We come home and warm up with a hot chocolate. I look at my smartphone, and see an interesting article on The Independent website, written by Hungarian foreign policy specialist  Zsuzsanna Szelenyi about Hungary's leader Viktor Orbán, and what Zsuzaanna calls a warning message for the US. 

So far American judges and election officials seem to be holding firm against Donald Trump's assaults on the democratic process, so my personal view is that a warning message from Hungary won't be needed, although Trump will perhaps still be in a powerful position to do damage even when he's out of office, because of his support base. I don't know - I'm no expert, to put it mildly! So the jury's still out on that one.

Nevertheless I find it interesting to read about exactly how Orbán has acted - I never knew the details of how he consolidated his position.

"Eighteen years ago ... Orban’s response to his own narrow defeat in the election was to ask his supporters to collect electoral irregularities and report them to the hastily established “Democracy Line”. He declaimed: “We can’t be in opposition, as the nation cannot be in opposition!” And, based on hundreds of allegations of fraud, his party, Fidesz, set out to challenge the results of the country’s parliamentary elections.

"Orban eventually conceded and left office without meeting his successor. However, he rallied his followers and telegraphed his nationalistic, hegemonic aspirations, suggesting that his political rivals were under foreign influence, and only he represented true Hungarians.

"So-called “civic circles” were formed all over the country linking hundreds of patriotic, church-bound, cultural, and local level political groups and many small scale businesses, which, whether out of self-interest, ideological sympathy or both, aligned with Orban....

"...Orban was defeated again in 2006. Six months after the elections, a closed-door speech of the newly elected Socialist prime minister Ferenc Gyurcsany was leaked, in which he admitted to his party activists that they withheld the real state of the economy from the voters during the election campaign, saying that “we were lying morning, night and evening”.

"Orban snatched this opportunity to reveal “election fraud” and question the legitimacy of the elections. Orban moved his stage from parliament to the streets. For several months, Fidesz obstructed the work of the parliament wherever they could – including removing a protective cordon to allow demonstrators closer to the building. The protracted disorder corroded the legitimacy of the Socialist-led government and, when the financial crisis hit in 2008, the ruling coalition was pushed to the brink. All Fidesz had to do was wait – and, in 2010, with a supermajority, the party was swept back into office....

"Over the last 10 years, Orban and his one party government have changed the constitution, and electoral law. This month, a new law was proposed to make it harder for opposition parties to collaborate on an anti-Orban platform. Government media advertising has been used to reward outlets loyal to the government. Orban has packed the democratic institutions with his friends, and built up a sophisticated system of corruption, with allegations that his circle are offered favourable terms during the awarding of public tenders.

"... Fidesz have shifted position in the past decade or so. They are establishing support not through optimism, but through rage, greed, and grievances. Rationality and compromise are now more and more difficult to find...

"Orban – like Trump – requires opponents to demonise. Whether it’s the international philanthropist George Soros, the country’s Roma population, or the EU, there is always a scapegoat for the prime minister’s failings. This was evidenced just this week when Orban levelled charges of "corruption” at EU leaders and Soros, and threatened to veto the EU’s Recovery Fund in protest at that notion that EU subsidies would be linked to how far member states were willing to uphold the rule of law.  

"Whether Hungarians can now dispatch Fidesz from power, peacefully, is questionable. To have reached this point, within a decade, shows how easy it is to sleepwalk into autocracy."

How different from the heady days of the early 1990's, when the youthful Fidesz Party and Orbán, its youthful leader, seemed like a breath of fresh air after nearly 50 years of Communism. 

You have disappointed me, Victor!!!!

On my first visit to Hungary in 1994, I was initially surprised to see "advertisements" on the walls of buildings, until I realised that it was the same 2 advertisements almost every  time: (1) an advertisement for Blikk magazine, and (2) a political advertisement for Viktor Orbán's "Fidesz" party , when it was a forward-looking party of young idealists paving the way for democracy and capitalism, and not the group of bigoted nationalists and autocrats that it has now become - oh dear !!!

Flashback to 1994 and my first visit to Hungary: me standing in front of hoardings -

and what were Hungary's two most ubiquitous advertisements in 1994 - an advertisement 

for Blikk magazine (right), and an advertisement for Viktor Orbán's Fidesz party (left):

"if you are bored with the banana, why not try the orange [the Fidesz symbol] ?"

12:30 Lois and I have lunch and afterwards we speak on the phone to our daughter Alison, who lives in Haslemere, Surrey, together with Ed and their three children, Josie (14), Rosalind (12) and Isaac (10). Josie and Rosalind are at school, but Alison has kept Isaac at home today, because he has a cold, and Alison says he's become over-tired.

(left to right) Ed, Josie, Rosalind, Isaac and Alison: a recent picture

Isaac has been elected "head boy" of his primary school, by the votes of his fellow pupils. Lois and I speculate that he mustn't spend too much off school, in case he gets impeached, or whatever the scholastic equivalent of that is, haha!

We chat to Alison and conclude that we can't yet make plans for her and her family to visit us sometime over Christmas - there are too many uncertainties at the moment: the state of the pandemic in their area or our area, and also the weather, to name but three!

What a crazy world we live in !!!!!!

20:00 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom. I settle down on the sofa.

I settle down on the sofa

I decide to watch most of the first part of an interesting series on the PBS America channel, "When Whales Walked".

I always find it enormously comforting, especially in stressful times, to hear scientists talk about hundreds of millions of years of evolution, which makes me and my nearly 75 years of existence feel totally insignificant, to put it mildly.

We start in Madagascar, where the only crocodile nowadays is the standard Nile Crocodile. There was another one till one to two thousand years ago, the "horned crocodile of Madagascar", but scientists think it just got "crowded out" by the Nile Crocodiles.

There aren't many different types of crocodile today on the planet, but if you go back 230 million years, to the Triassic period, when there was just the one continent, Pangaea, crocodiles were very diverse, and a lot of them looked like dinosaurs. It all goes to show that appearances can be deceptive when it comes to differentiating species. Today's crocs are rather "lumbering" when they move. But this extinct crocodile from the Triassic, the sphenosuchian (see picture below), was definitely built for speed, for instance, with long, powerful arms and legs, and looks much more like a dinosaur until you take it apart and analyse all its body parts:

reconstruction of an early crocodile species from the Triassic period

Pangaea had the ideal environment for crocodiles, hence the diversity of types, I guess. But about 200 million years ago Pangaea started to split up into today's continents, and this triggered climatic changes and an "extinction event", one of the apparently 5 such events that scientists have identified from the Earth's history. This killed off almost all of the variant species of crocodiles, but they recovered in the Jurassic/Cretacean and diversified again, until another extinction event 66 million years ago - more climate change followed by the asteroid/meteor collision which followed also wiped out the principal dinosaur species.

Only a very few crocodile species made it through this extinction event, the successful ones being the freshwater kinds living half in the water, half on the land, with a low, tank-like body plan that enabled them to hide in shallow water and surprise their prey with swift attacks.

DNA studies illuminate the history of crocodiles. All crocodiles and alligators originate from a common ancestor that lived 80 million years ago. These two major types split off from each other between 60 and 80 million years ago. The Nile Crocodile arose in the last 4-6 million years, with a very resilient lineage stretching back millions of years before that. Most surviving species today are similar to the Nile species.

The programme then proceeds to talk about the extremely diverse bird family (over 10,000 different species today), and their evolution from dinosaurs. The reconstruction of this evolution began in the 1860's with the discovery of the archaeopteryx, which 150 million years ago had feathers and wings, and could fly, although it also had claws and a toothed beak. To fly you need to have a wishbone, and scientists spent decades looking for a dinosaur with a wishbone, without success.

In the 1960's, however, the fossilised remains of a dinosaur with a wishbone was finally found (deinonychus). This species couldn't fly but it had all the "equipment": feathers (developed for warmth, not originally for flight), and clawed wings (developed for attacking prey, again not for flight).

However, the story of the evolution of birds wasn't really solved till the 1990's, when a massive trove of fossilised "early birds" (haha) from 130 million years ago was found in China, buried in layers of volcanic ash. The haul produced masses of different species, including many transitional forms. Many different combinations of wings, feathers and flight potential were found - the evolution of flight was not linear, and there were plenty of "dead ends", and some features evolving multiple times. Most of these species died out in the asteroid/meteor extinction event, but a few survived and became the ancestors of today's birds. But there is much about the evolution of birds that science does not fully understand, and it's a work in progress, apparently.

The programme leaves me wondering about diversity and lack of diversity - why are birds so diverse, when other species are relatively uniform, with one dominant species tending to compete with, and wipe out or squeeze out, any competitors? There aren't many types of crocodile today, or elephant, and only one type of human being haha! But there are over 10,000 types of birds. 

Does diversity tend to be inversely proportional to size, for instance? I think we should be told, and quickly!

What madness!!!!

"no early birds" - a typical sign featuring this warning, that always disappoints Lois and me - oh dear!

21:00 Lois emerges from her Bible Class - she tells me about some of the things in last week's "The Week", which gives a digest of news from home and abroad. 

I didn't realise that some people think that the 68-year-old Putin may be on the way out. He doesn't get out much and has been reported to be suffering from Parkinson's and cancer, and also getting side-effects from the drugs he's on. And Russia seems "unusually weak and indecisive abroad", according to the article, no longer interfering vigorously in neighbouring republics like Belarus or Moldova.

The article, based on material from Frankfurter Rundschau, Meduza (Riga), Echo (Moscow) and the Financial Times (London), makes clear, however, that this may all be wishful thinking. Putin was recently given permission to hold office for another 12 years after his term expires in 2024. Like Donald Trump, Putin is very anxious to avoid prosecution after he leaves office: so there are only two options for him - either to retire with immunity from prosecution, or life-long rule.

Yes, things aren't so easy for ageing dictators and autocrats, that's for sure!  

Poor Vladimir !!!!!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzz!!!!