Hi everyone at the Frog Pond. When life is stressful, it helps to have some calming music. This track by Aphex Twin has worked for me since the early 1990s (wow, that’s been a while then):

The YouTuber who created this video must have been recording in and around Budapest. I visited some of the locations depicted in the video when I visited Budapest in 2014. You see some Soviet-era apartment buildings on the Pest side of Budapest, as well as some scenes around the park that houses some museums, Heroes Square, and a monument to those who fought the 1956 Revolution that would be, tragically, quashed by the USSR. That monument gets featured at the end and is given a fun abstract treatment.

I like this video because it seems so hopeful. Then again, there was still some hope when this video was first uploaded. I actually sensed a hopeful mood among the people I met with while I was in Budapest in 2014. Reality hadn’t quite yet sunk in that the Orban regime was devolving its democracy. These days, Hungary seems more an ally of a different Kremlin dictatorship than the one that dominated it in the Soviet era. I wonder what a visit there would feel like now. This is a video that belongs to an era that is now increasingly in the rearview mirror.

I hope this post finds you all well and I hope some of you will take a moment to give me a shout. I know there are still plenty of lurkers who visit.

Cheers!