Everybody Wants to Read

Down at the crossroads between Kurt & vodka

A Sunday morning, I think it was, a morning after the night that was. I happened to be living in eastern Hungary at the time, a country awash with new freedoms, liver cirrhosis and the highest lung cancer rates known to mankind.

I’m not claiming the two men whose photo I snapped, two paragons of their previous night’s trip to Valhalla on the back of a bottle of plum brandy were particularly unread. I am not claiming they were priestly in their newfound innocence as they sobered up. And I’m fairly confident they were not opening pages to catch up on their stock perfromances. However, they were awake that early morning, and before stepping into the bar for a breakfast of rejected cigarette smoke and Attila the Hun vodka, they had stopped off for a moment. To read.

And millions of heaven-bound braincells in the duo of befuddled brains was not going to stop them. Nor was eyesight long-gone behind coke bottle bottom bifocals or a night’s sleep on a contraption loosely-termed bed for the time it took for the sun to rise past the lamp post they had clung onto, on their way to their abodes. They’d woken up in the morning, and went to read.

Years of learning how to read and what to read in various courses in various education institutes in various locations on…