Thurs 29/5/08 view all the photos Castle Hill, museums and more… Successfully negotiate public transport back from Statue Park, poking my head into Hotel Gellért in passing. There’s some lovely 30s stained glass decorating the main staircase, a series of illustrations of a folk-tale involving a magic deer. At this point the camera battery […]
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Thurs 29/5/08 view all the photos The Statue Park Slept like a dead animal, despite (or perhaps, because of) a bed only slightly softer than a park-bench. Suitably refreshed, and feeling somewhat intrepid, I decide to visit the statue park, full of soviet era monumental sculpture. I’ll start with this, I decided, on the basis […]
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Wed 28th May view all the photos It’s a new (and not immediately pleasant) experience being cast up alone somewhere with a language so impenetrable to me. The fact that the (Hungarian) check-in clerk at Luton airport commended my pronunciation of ‘Budapest’ salves the pride a little, but only a little. French, Italian, Spanish…even German, […]
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Went to Budapest for a few days holiday last week… Weds 28th May view all the photos Let’s see….red, already have the beginnings of blisters on feet, sticky with the heat, legs aching a bit…but, there’s a cool bottle of beer within easy reach, and I’m actually in Budapest. Good start, then. On the taxi-ride […]
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In an effort to try and get a bit more exercise, I went out and purchased a bicycle on Saturday…and rode it earlier today. You can’t see me (thankfully) but I’m sitting very still, and moving only when absolutely necessary, and then in a curiously slow and jerky manner – rather like a bad stop-motion […]
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It’s good to be busy I suppose..but there’s always some other cost. As, for example, the early morning extreme brainlessness that led me to lock myself out of my flat at 8 am last Wednesday…having got up especially early in order to drive to Welwyn Garden City for a day’s work in schools and library. […]
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A couple of weekends ago I spent a brisk and energetic afternoon down at Willen Lake (local-ish beauty spot. Sort of. Buddhist monks & an awful lot of geese notwithstanding) trying to retrieve a very big kite from the top of an annoyingly un-climbable tree. It having been a bit windier than I thought, the […]
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What on earth possessed me to buy what, it is becoming increasingly clear, amounts to a top-story cave ? (If one can have such a thing) As a person of reasonable height (but no sense at all, obviously) you would have thought such practical considerations might have entered into things. God knows why, but they […]
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I’m half awake, dreaming of boats and voyages – strange so far from the sea. This place is all about crossing places, though, many layered, one on another as you walk up through the city towards the Alhambra, through the Alcazar. Peeling away the layers or sliding between them, something infinitesimal traversing an onion. A […]
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From the air, wherever there is bare land, or not green at any rate, there are strange patterns impressed in the land. Valleys and hills, one assumes, but they look more like cloud shadows, or tree shapes, ferns and foliage. It’s as though the land has been branded some time ago and the burnt patches […]
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