Five random things about me and Hungary

1. I was watching this amazing Stomp! DVD that I got from my sister for Christmas. We've all been getting into it in a big way, and plenty of household objects and paintwork now have dents in them because of our non-stop percussion around the place. We watch little sections here and there, and tonight, before bedtime, I noticed that part of the scenery was a battered old road sign that said: BUDAPEST.

2. The last time I was in Hungary was in the Summer of 1990. It was a University-holidays-Inter-railing four week thing. I guess Rachel Canning didn't really know what she was letting herself in for, but those were my dark, intense and melodramatic collegiate days and there were galleries to see and culture to be had. [Just for the record, my many years of watching the Gary Shandling Show had trained me in how to be a platonic friend and travelling partner, and besides, Rachel already had a boyfriend, so rest assured, there was no hanky-panky.] Anyway, our last stop, our furthest point east, was Lake Balaton. I think we rented a cottage in Balatonfured for two nights, and it was all rocking-seats-in-the-garden and reading EM Forster and Aldous Huxley (me) and Anita Brookner's Hotel Du Lac (Rachel) and the sun setting on the Lake and the thoughts of thousands of Ukrainian copper miners holidaying there for a week. And then we got the train back, from Balatonfured to Reading, and it took over a day to retrace our steps through Europe, and I slept the longest, deepest sleep I can remember (and still crave), the kind of sleep Frodo gets when he's recovering from his injuries in the golden rays of Rivendell or something.

3. World Cup 1982. I'm 11, and collecting the Panini stickers. And it strikes me that lots of their players are called Laszlo. Fast forward to visiting in 1990, and it still strikes me that there are a whole lot of Laszlos around.

4. 1990 again. And I think to myself "Budapest already has an IKEA with a blue ball pool for kids? Boy, perestroika's happening before my very (juvenile) eyes."

5. I managed to play in the Cambridge vs Oxford Varsity American Football Game in 1990. But don't get over-excited, it was just flag football, no helmets or concussions, and I only played the last two minutes. One of the team captains was Andre Czegledy-Nagy, and I remember naively asking for his address in Budapest in case I could stay there during the summer (I really was reading a lot of books and watching a lot of world cinema at the time, I thought of myself as a bit of a Huck Finn in a road movie). Actually, I asked lots of them for their addresses at the after-match meal at some Garfunkels place in Oxford, passing round my American Architects Association address book to these Ivy League post-grad wide receivers. Honestly, I used to get so star-struck with real life Americans, they must have been thinking why is this nineteen year old twerp asking for my home address? But weirdly enough, it's that out-on-a-limb, anything-is-possible, pick-up-a-train-timetable-and-go attitude that I miss, and therefore there's an element of trying to recapture a flicker of it this time around.

[Ok, actually 6 random things.]

6. There was this Chemistry teacher called Mr Imre Nagy at Loughborough Grammar School, and although he never taught me, he did run the astronomy club in the lunchtimes, and he leant me some videos of the Voyager missions and I used to show them to my sister and it used to blow our minds. Actually, he also asked some deep philosophical questions too, like do we change the things we're observing by observing them, and if the universe has an end then what's stopping it, which was pretty heavy for a lunch hour unwind with NASA).