Red Wine Express

I’ve just spent a few days in Holland. If John Denver was still around he’d hate the place. Searching for a Rocky Mountain High (the Rocky Mountain bit, not the high bit – that’s everywhere) here would be like looking for a massage with a happy ending at a Puritan League meeting. The only hills here are inverted – when you go down into a tunnel and come up and out the other side.

I got here on Finnair, which I’ve never used before. After decades of travel it’s unusual for me to experience a new (to me) airline despite the fact that new airlines are springing up all over the place all of the time. Perhaps that’s because you’d avoid most of the new budget outfits like the plague.

But Finnair was great. One disappointment, if you could call it that, was that the cabin crew in the part of the plane I was in were all Asian (bogus racism alert!!!!!!). We did leave from Singapore so maybe it was the local crew but I expected at least one or two cool blondes. But I’m not complaining. Pick an Asian airline, any one – Cathay Pacific, Singapore, Malaysian, Korean Air etc – and all of their people are guaranteed to know the difference between offering a service and being your servant. That can’t be said about certain Australian, US and British airlines, some of whose fussbudgets would prefer to throw that drink in your lap as serve it to you with a smile (which should always be reciprocated – free piece of advice there). But in this case it could certainly be said about Finnair.

We landed in Helsinki on the way to Amsterdam and I saw snow for the first time in years. I also wore a coat and a scarf when I got off the plane there and later in Amsterdam also for the first time in years. The first day in Holland was bitterly cold. The sort or cold where you could snap off an ear and not feel a thing. I was reminded of the last time the CB and I were in Europe in winter on vacation and vowed and declared never to do it again. This was business though so I guess it didn’t count. And it was November so not officially winter unless the EU has redefined the seasons in accordance with some transgender, marriage equality, climate change directive from the UN to spite the Brits because of Brexit. Or something.

Like another flat place we visited recently – Denmark – there seem to be more bicycles than cars, especially in and around the town centres. I was in Haarlem and there were bike lanes everywhere. For the uninitiated this is a real hazard and the bells don’t help because they can be ringing all around you or not at all as the case may be. When my colleagues and I ventured outside we were constantly hauling each other out of the way of whispering, wurring, scarf trailing missiles. It was like a practice run for the future world of electric cars. They’ll have to be fitted with diesel engines so we can hear them coming.

On my way home it was Finnair again to Helsinki then on to Hong Kong then Brisbane. I had been fortunate in that my contracted employer has stumped up for biz class so I settled into my cubicle, contemplating the glass of Perrier (champagne, not water) on my little side table and hoped the bunch of Australian women who were screeching and cackling on the other side of the cabin didn’t do something really embarrassing that reflected badly on me. My inner snob is emerging; I’m a very intolerant traveller. By all means get pissed, I do it all the time, but leave the bogan on the cruise you just got off or wherever it is you’ve been.

Shit, I didn’t think I had that level of nastiness in me. Must be because I am currently immersed in Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens’ memoir. The old adage “the word is mightier than the sword” was written for him although he would have considered it trite and a cliché despite the fact that his word-sword and especially his spoken words were uncompromisingly and ruthlessly rapier sharp. He quotes William Safire as saying “clichés should be avoided like the plague”. Quite so. I use present tense in the previous sentence because it’s in his book and past tense in the sentence before that because tragically, he is no longer with us. But he is preserved forever in print and in the formaldehyde of YouTube.

You can’t complain about lie flat seats these days….but I’m going to. As I said previously, Finnair is great but, and this is really pushing it, you really need to lie on your right side because the space where your feet go sort of curves to the right. So if you lie on your left side you’re feet are against the curve and it’s like having your shoes on the wrong feet because the end bit is rather narrow. But this is Venezuelan President-for-life, Nicholas Maduro complaining that his steak is medium when it should be well-done so I shall shut up.

If anything of interest was going to happen between Helsinki and Brisbane, I would have let you know.

It didn’t.

 

I’m not a complete tech dinosaur – I know enough to get by. But I do remember when the first electronic calculator appeared – still don’t know how that liquid crystal display works. And when I first worked in an open plan office at a mine, there was one phone for everybody. My first job in the commercial world was eased by the use of telex then faxes and if you were extremely lucky you had a computer terminal on your desk linked to a main frame computer in another building. And it spoke a language called Fortran or something. Some of us even remember that there were floppies before there were flashes. Fast forward to now and the smart phone era and it’s time to upgrade.

It was inevitable I guess. My iPhone was built during the Triassic period (see reference to dinosaurs above) and powered by cow dung and hamsters and needed gunpowder to take photos. On Wednesday the CB’s iPhone decided it was a two year old toddler so threw itself on the ground and refused to function under any circumstances. It did the equivalent of locking itself in the bathroom and flushing the key. So it was time to upgrade our communications capability from the 21st century equivalent of smoke signals to something akin to the pony express.

Off we went to the internet to try to find a plan less complex than the theory of relativity and locate phones that……make phone calls, gasp!! We decided on 21st century iPhone 6S’s. I know, I know. This is like buying a Zephyr 6 to replace a Model T Ford. Admirable in 1960 but hardly cutting edge in 20… (what year is it again?). Then it was off to the shopping mall to confront a bouncing, toothy 20 something in the Tech shop who knew everything about stuff and proceeded to explain all about zzzzzzz.

We eventually left after very patient, very polite Katie explained a whole lot of something or other to us which I suspect had nothing to do with making phone calls.

So to home. Much more important things were beckoning – the sun was over the yardarm and it was Friday afternoon. Then Prodigal Son spent an hour transferring my contacts and emails from my aforementioned steam driven device to the new one, because these things are so user friendly if you are Steve Jobs.

I can now do things that defy description. It can tell me my location which will be very useful when I don’t know where I am. It will tell me that I am, in fact, here. I can do a university course, learn a musical instrument – I stumbled on a piano keyboard but have no idea how to relocate it. It makes noises that a movie studio would be proud of although it doesn’t seem keen to let me use my old ring tone – Rocks Off by the Rolling Stones. I can watch movies because a 5 inch panorama is as good as it gets (if you’re an ant).

Whatever. Our phone numbers and email address are unchanged.

There’s a lady in this world who has repeatedly saved my life. I’m not talking about my wife, my mother, my daughter or my granddaughter who are all a very large part of my world or various girlfriends (numbers 1, 2 and 3 in particular – christened thusly by the child bride in fact, and girlfriends of the purely platonic type I might add). I’m not talking about a religious icon or a sporting legend or a racehorse, none of whom/which have risen to sufficient heights of achievement to even raise my heart rate. To be fair though, if Monica Bellucci could play rugby, she’d be up there.

No, I’m talking about my dermatologist. I visited her again yesterday and left with a bloodied right leg, a bloodied left hand and a slightly bloody left arm. But first we have to backtrack a little. Actually, I wish it was a little but it’s actually a lot. I was born in the UK some decades back and it was immediately obvious that there is Viking in my ancestry – my red hair and fair complexion are dead (if you’ll pardon the expression) giveaways. Many years later this particular heritage also manifested itself via Dupuytren’s Contracture which is sometimes called Viking’s Disease amongst other things. Another lady specialist who fixed this up for me only saved my left hand from becoming a permanent heavy metal horns symbol and thereby preserving my (marginal) ability to play the guitar. But Mr Dupuytren’s another story. Back to my skin.

Leaving the UK to live in Australia when I was eight was a blessing in disguise (which my mother still hasn’t seen through) from every angle except for, in my case, the sun. Don’t get me wrong – I love the sun, not least for the fact that it keeps us alive and will continue to do so for another 4 billion years give or take unless the most recent 12 year time frame for irreversible climatic catastrophe and atmospheric mayhem predicted by the IPCC and supported by those doyens of atmospheric physics, left wing journalists and humanities students, comes to pass. All of the others haven’t so their odds of getting it right are increasing even if temperatures and sea levels aren’t moving other than by utterly normal fluctuations. The sun is only my enemy when I expose my extremely combustible skin to it which makes me sound rather vampirish. Thankfully that particular quirk of my genome hasn’t kicked in yet because I prefer sleeping at night rather than swooping on unsuspecting bare necked tottie.

As kids we weren’t aware of the long term effects of extended sun exposure so we grimaced through the sunburn, peeled off the dead skin, took our shirts off and did it all again. It’s not my fault if in neighbourhood football games I was always picked on the “skins” team and never the “shirts”. I still remember lying face down on a bed in my mother’s aunt’s ramshackle house in the then sleepy village of Byron Bay, with blisters all over my back and a plague of insects swarming through the house. The next day we had to tie my mother to a tree to stop her hitchhiking to Brisbane Airport to escape from this Stephen King nightmare and back to the civilisation of Timperley, Cheshire, England.

I survived however but just as the Soviets supposedly planted sleeper cells in the US during the cold war, I had my own sleeper cells which decades later have been waking up. And this is where my life-saver lady comes in. She wasn’t the first to stick a scalpel into me but certainly the most frequent over recent years. After my GP at the time tired of squirting liquid nitrogen at various blemishes on my person, he referred me to a specialist dermatologist who soon after went off to do research and gave me to an associate, the aforementioned lady. I have been to see her many times over many years and I never escape from her surgery unscathed. She is always scraping, digging or cutting, hence the reference to bloodied appendages, above. I’m a bleeder, what can I say.

Occasionally, if the cutting part is a bit tricky, she’ll send me to a plastic surgeon. Here was me thinking plastic surgeons were only there to straighten actress’s noses or make their tits bigger. But no. One did a job on me that required a degree in ear lobe origami. Another did a much more basic job on my back that left a 50mm scar. This and other rather smaller scars randomly scattered over my torso and appendages proved quite an attraction for one of the theatre nurses. The conversation went something like this:

Nurse – Another scar eh?

Me – Yeah, looks like it. Still it won’t be lonely.

Nurse – No but there’s nothing wrong with a few scars.

Me – Come again?

Nurse – Yeah, scars are sexy. Girls like a few scars on a bloke.

Me – Doctor, can we get moving here.

The point is, had those sleeper cells been allowed to wake up, scratch their balls, have a few beers and generally hung out, they would have eventually morphed into something infinitely uglier and much more dangerous. So the trick is to eliminate the cancerous bastards before they even know their short life’s objective which it to make my life shorter. And my guardian angel has been doing just that for years now. Had I adopted the same attitude as a number of people I’ve known or known about who couldn’t really have cared less until it was too late, I’d be a footnote in history.

The good news is that after reaching peak extraction a few years ago, we’re now down to the residuals. Anything that looks ever so slightly suspicious is ruthlessly dispatched to the pathology lab minus its previous mode of transport i.e. me. Three monthly checkups inevitably resulted in surgical follow-up. But eventually three months became six and yesterday I was told we are almost at the twelve month stage. She’s a lovely young lady to whom I literally owe my life and while I would like to think there will come a time when I don’t have to see her again, there won’t.

Annual vet day for the cats is a hoot – we have to cram one in each of those cat boxes in the picture below.

Getting them in there is something to behold. First you have to get them used to it so we take the roof off and start putting their food into the bottom half of the box weeks before, then after a while put the top half on so they are used to going inside to eat.

This morning, vet day, they are in for a surprise. The food goes in followed initially by half a cat. We sneak up behind them I grab Eddy and the CB grabs Kaos and we try to shove the other half in. All biting, scratching, spitting hell breaks loose. Not helping is Charlie the small white dog (our incredible barking sheep) leaping about like a demented pogo stick. Two shredded arms later Eddy’s in. Kaos goes marginally more quietly.

Before being loaded into the car both of them try to tunnel their way out. Eddy succeeds in forcing the door open but Eddy is not very smart. Instead of getting under the bed or on top of one of our very high cupboards, I find him sitting near the box contemplating what he just escaped from (death row I expect he thinks). So I grab him and shove him back in. Once again it’s like trying to jam razor blade laced toothpaste back into the tube while riding a roller coaster.

They are now safely on their way in the secure custody of the child bride. Kaos will come back shaved for summer, looking like the Lion King in ugg boots, and not speak to us for weeks – nothing holds a grudge like a disgruntled cat. Instead of cat crap on our rug every three or four days, we can expect a daily dose for a while. Eddy, with the memory of a goldfish will be back to normal after his first feed. Meanwhile Charlie, who minutes ago was running the length and breadth of the house at mach 2 for no apparent reason is asleep on the floor next to me. Peace reigns.

The child bride and I and assorted friends and relatives went to a local courthouse yesterday to watch one of my brothers get married…..again. Now I always thought the marriage ceremony ended with “I now pronounce you husband and wife”. I guess it was because we were in a courthouse that the celebrant turned to my brother and said “I hereby sentence you to life in marriage”. And it’s the only sentence in the civil or criminal code from which you can earn early release for bad behaviour.

His first marriage lasted 30 years and his second 98 days. Based on that trajectory his third would have lasted about 12 minutes. Fortunately a genie granted him three wishes and he got the third one right.

Not everyone deserves “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” in the immortal words of the American Declaration of Independence – I’m looking at you Billy Ray Cyrus for inflicting “Achy Breaky Heart” on an unwitting populace. But my brother does having survived imprisonment for longer than your average murderer with sanity relatively intact.

Marriage is a wonderful institution it has to be said and everyone deserves a piece of it. But at the end of the day, it is still an institution and some people are quite reasonably reluctant to enter its enticing portals. I’ve been married for centuries and love it and I’m going to leave it there because the child bride reads this blog occasionally. Any sort of innocent commentary on a social compact that comes with reams of fine print is bound to attract conflicting views and generate a range of emotions so all I’ll say to everyone is “happy families”.

I can’t resist finishing on a note which links the name of this blog and the subject at hand. A woman and a man are sitting together sipping drinks when the wife says “I love you.” The husband says “Is that you or the wine talking?” She says “It’s me talking….to the wine.”

My Facebook page was hacked yesterday. I have no idea why anyone would want to do such a thing although they did manage to imply that I recommended a certain type of face moisturiser. It wasn’t even my favourite brand sweetie. Anyway, since I was on FB and had a few minutes to spare, I went looking for something from the past to put here, having just reminisced about our blockbusting, stadium filling (if Coldplay can do it, anyone can) musical combo. I found this Christmas story from a few years back and here it is for your reading pleasure.

So that’s the Christmas Eve job list done and dusted.
– Two dead trees near the dam chain-sawed and disposed of. Ahead of the Season of Goodwill, all latent aggression dispersed.
– New plants and herbs watered – a stinking hot day today so they need it. Who’d be a lettuce in Queensland in summer.
– Vine infesting one of our hedges chopped and poisoned. Not funny climbing into a hedge of grevilleas. Arms look like I’ve been sparring with the cats.
– BBQ moved from the shed to the deck in preparation for tomorrow. Managed to prevent it escaping down the driveway and finishing up in the next post code.
– Full gas bottle attached to same.
– Additional tables moved from shed to deck (after checking for red-back spiders, hiding snakes etc).
– Fridges stocked to the gunwales – experience tells us that when this family has a “do” the gunwales aren’t high enough.
– Tinselly stuff hung round the deck. Tinselly stuff picked up and re-hung after breeze proved too strong for blue-tack. Tinselly stuff picked up again, screwed up and shoved back in box to be re-hung when the breeze dies down a bit.
And the final chore:
Step 1 – remove beer from fridge
Step 2 – take beer to pool and put next to edge of pool
Step 3 – dive into pool, swim to other end then return
Step 4 – drink beer
Step 5 – repeat steps 3 and 4 ad nauseum
Note – Step 3 not compulsory.

A few hours later……..

Well, what an eventful Christmas Eve. Completed the beer ritual mentioned above then escorted the child bride round the estate while partaking of a glass of bubbles (origin New Zealand, but not to worry). Koalas successfully located and all well with the world. Graduated from bubbles to red (and in the CB’s case white) wine and settled down to watch the Royal Variety Performance. Recognized Dame Edna, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jimmy Carr. The rest were plastic people presumably from some talent show. Then it was time for bed – we didn’t want Santa to turn up and here’s us still awake. So hit the shower at 11.00pm.

We have a small foot rest in our shower which, as the name suggests, you rest your foot on when washing it. So I put my foot on it as I have done most days of the 7 years we’ve been here. It takes a little weight but obviously you don’t transfer the whole ponderous bulk to this one small foot rest or you are inviting trouble. Anyway, it collapsed and I hit the floor of the shower. As I lay there mentally reviewing the potential damage from top to bottom, I realised that the absence of bones protruding through skin was due to the fact I was quite relaxed. So I gingerly stood up and realised I’d been lying on a bed of ceramic shrapnel.

All was okay though except for my red left arm. It hadn’t been red that I’d noticed when I got in the shower but there it was leaking vital bodily fluids onto the floor of the shower. Bummer. Anyway, the CB did a wonderful job patching up my arm (too pissed to drive to hospital and not serious enough to bother the ambulance) which has a number of rather nasty gashes in it. Nothing she can do for the shoulder which feels like it hit the ground first but even though it’s on the right side, won’t prevent the important events of the day. So first port of call this morning is the emergency room at Prince Charles Hospital to get stitched up then back here prior to the commencement of festivities which I might add, will not be affected by this unfortunate occurrence.

12 stitches from a babe of a doctor who looks like she is on her way home from a Christmas Eve party and a tetanus shot later and normal programming is resumed. Liquid painkillers beckon.

I just read an article about how bands like the Beatles and Pink Floyd and pretend bands like Coldplay got their names. It was interesting up to a point. The point being that they left out one of the world’s premier, if somewhat understated and underground, bands. I speak (write, actually) of none other than Not Garfunkel. The stories of how others got their names pale into insignificance when compared with the saga around our name. Did I mention that I was one of the founders of this iconic band and am currently the only member? Actually the others may still consider themselves to be members. It’s just that when I grab a guitar to play, I’m the only person in the room these days.

Back to the name. Son and girlfriend at the time came round to see the CB and me one night. The girlfriend was 24 and basically knew nothing about anything that had happened before her 18^th birthday and outside this state. So when we told them we had tickets to see Simon and Garfunkel she explained that not only had she never heard of them but that it was a stupid name for a band.

Later that evening I announced that Saturday afternoon some mates were coming over and we were going to set up our gear on the deck and play some music and drink some beer. I forget which was used as an excuse for the other. Son asked if we had a name for the band and before I could answer girlfriend blurted out “It’s not Garfunkel is it?” And a legend was born.

Another rollicking good time at the Hammo last night. It seems tribute bands are all the rage at the moment. It was Led Zeppellin a couple of months ago and we have Pearl Jam and Bon Jovi on the horizon. But last night it was the turn of Killer Queen, a tribute to Queen (obviously) dutifully attended by daughter, son-in-law, son-in-law’s mate and your humble correspondent.

Whereas the Led Zepp tribute sounded really good, not only did the Queen guys sound good, they even looked like Queen. So we had Freddy with the obligatory black short back and sides and the 70’s pornstar moustache, Brian May with the still black shaggy curls and John Deacon with the gravity defying front bouffant which looked like it was about to tumble down his face.

But make no mistake, these guys spent more time on music than appearance and nailed it. The night did, however get off to a rather confusing start. We were advised that the Freddy character was sick and the John Deacon character would do the singing. Now a lot of the Queen songs contain some pretty lengthy and unmistakable bass runs so I was a bit dubious as to how the poor bugger would be able to handle both roles. But as the intro to the first song was being played, out bounded Freddy like Trevor Gillmeister off his death bed in State of Origin III in 1995 to lead an unexpected triumph.

Of course there were those iconic moments to look out for and the crowd didn’t disappoint when it came to their (our) turn. Everyone remembers the head banging scene from Bohemian Rhapsody in Wayne’s World. This was faithfully reproduced by all of the women with long shaggy hair. Sorry, but it doesn’t work with a sensible haircut. And the spontaneous hand clap (well it was spontaneous at Live Aid in 1985) for Radio Ga Ga was there if a little disjointed. But we only had a few hundred people, not 72,000.

And when Freddy told the ladies that the next song was especially for them and the unmistakable intro to Fat Bottomed Girls started I scanned the fat bottoms for signs of rebellion but thankfully that potential tipping point passed without a descent into chaos or at least indignant detachment.

My review of the Led Zepp tribute also featured a crowd review because when we’re talking about bands with their origins in the distant past, all manner of enthusiasts emerge from the shadows. This time the attendees seemed a tad more middle of the road with more women than men by my estimation. I expected the gay community to be out in force and maybe they were, I just didn’t notice. Anyway, one thing’s for certain; when the band starts up all of the tall men and short women push their way to the front. Lucky the child bride wasn’t there or she would have been somewhat miffed.

At the end I commented to my daughter that most of the songs we heard were recorded before she was born, some of them a decade or more before she was born. I don’t know how to adequately explain this but it’s like time has condensed or concertinaed in recent decades. Had I been her age and we were listening to music from a similar time in my past, we’d be listening to Glen Miller and when I was 30 that was never going to happen.

After a month in Europe, long flights home and a decent night’s sleep, the CB and I are back in the land of the living. Here are a few final thoughts, in no particular order, to wrap things up.

In Nuremberg we had a look at the place where Hitler conducted his rallies and made those infamous fist waving speeches to the then adoring masses. It’s been preserved so we never forget what went on there. As a music lover I like the idea that it’s now used for rock concerts. I don’t know if Iron Maiden have performed there but seeing Bruce Dickinson in his redcoat tunic waving the Union Jack while singing The Trooper and leaping about in the spot where Hitler once stood appeals to my irony gene.

We saw numerous castles on our travels. I love castles. Inverlochy Castle in Scotland was used for protection back in the 13th century. This involves fighting. I am photographing the defensive capabilities of the castle – the moat, the battlements, the walls, the ingenious ways they had in those days to trap or kill attackers. The CB is photographing bluebells growing out of the walls.

I’ve previously reported in Widows and Walking Sticks and other previous posts that we have been travelling with a bunch who are about a generation removed from us – up, not down. And there are a lot of single ladies amongst them. So while Cuz1 and I have been focussed on getting the next round in, Cuz2 and the CB have been more concerned with who’s doing what to whom. A bit crude I know but when we are talking about an average age of about 80 it takes on a whole new dimension. They had the male and female tour guides sorted on day one despite a left-field intervention from another of my cousins in Vienna which I won’t outline here but some of the other “connections” were ……… I don’t know why I’m talking about this and will stop immediately.

We’ve encountered many, many famous people on our travels this past month ranging from Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome and philosopher extraordinaire to Ferenc Puskas, Hungary’s and one of the world’s most famous footballers who was given a cathedral burial. We saw Oscar Schindler and Ralph Wallenberg, Gothe and Richard the Lionheart. There was Zsa Zsa Gabor and Conrad Hilton and various Habsburg kings and queens. We caught up with Mozart, Beethoven, the various Strausses, Haydn and Schubert in Vienna and Richard Wagner in Germany. It seemed like every town, big or small, had a claim to fame usually involving a figure from the history books. And that’s a big reason why the CB and I love visiting Europe.

Of course getting from Aus to Europe can be a pain and readers of one of the earlier Rheinube episodes will be aware that British Airways fell rather dramatically in my estimation when they put the CB and I in the middle two seats of the four in a 2-4-2 configuration. They redeemed themselves by giving us an aisle seat and a middle seat with no one in the other middle seat coming back the other way. It was looking dodgy there for a while BA.

Then when we showed our boarding passes at the Qantas lounge in Singapore the nice Qantas gentleman said they had different boarding passes for us and went to consult with a colleague. They were different but not in the way I hoped and at this point expected. Rather than an upgrade, they were switched from paper to cardboard and the seat numbers didn’t change. Hoo-bloody-ray. Maybe Alan Joyce knows I think he’s a social justice warrior wanker who should confine himself to running an airline when wearing his Qantas hat. I’m a Qantas shareholder and he doesn’t speak for me when he says Qantas believes this or Qantas believes that (insert favourite lefty cause).

And finally we were very fortunate to have travelled with such fun loving, and booze loving companions in Cuz1 and Cuz2. When intentions (having a good time mainly) are perfectly aligned you can’t go wrong. Any hint of disunity prior to departure however will be magnified especially in the close confines of a boat or a coach as someone I know recently discovered. Not us. We had a blast and intend doing it again and if you hang around long enough and I don’t get sick of doing this you’ll read about it here first.

Well Budapest, what can I say? What a wonderful place. You are now my official favourite city. Take an insomnia pill New York. Wipe that sanctimonious smirk off your face Paris. Turn off that phone Hong Kong. There’s a new kid in town.

Vienna was inspiring with its beautiful palaces and it’s magical, musical past. But it’s flat and organised. A touch of dishevelment and hints of a more “colourful” past plus a few hills make for greater interest. Vienna certainly has interesting history being front and centre with Budapest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire followed not long after by it’s capitulation to nazism. And it’s suburbs are as graffitied as any other city. But Budapest is coming out of something no city, no country, no people should be made to suffer and the transition is incomplete but the potential is obvious. Maybe the same can be said for Bucharest and Sofia and any number of places which experienced the same cold, dead-hand of totalitarianism, but today we are focussing on Budapest.

Budapest has the Danube. Many places have the Danube as it’s Europe’s second longest river behind the Volga which is entirely in Russia so doesn’t really count. And the best place to showcase a city from, in my humble opinion, is a river and if that river happens to be the Danube then all the better. Many of Budapest’s most outstanding landmarks are visible in all of their glory from the river. And there are plenty of them which you can read about in any number of books and blogs, but not this one.

Our tour guide advised us that the happiest day in Budapest’s long history (they celebrated 1000 years in 1896) was the day in 1991 when the Soviet army left. Then the hard work began because what hadn’t been trashed had been neglected to a criminal extent. Restoration work is proceeding apace but unfortunately the economy hasn’t progressed since the communists were kicked out, to the extent that sufficient funds are available to restore everything. So you get this strange phenomenon of a street of beautifully restored palaces and five story town houses interspersed with potentially and previously beautiful buildings sporting crumbling masonry, exposed bricks and collapsing facades. And they are filthy.

Now, the majority of restoration work is done as a condition of sale of the particular building. So if a hotel chain or a bank or any other business buys a run-down building, they are required to do the restoration themselves, in some cases it would appear, simply to make them habitable. How’s that, you millennial, socialist weenies? Capitalism is cleaning up the mess your communist fellow-travellers left when they scuttled back to their mythical land of fairness and equality where everyone lives happily ever after.

Meanwhile back in the real world you can still see bullet holes from World War 2 and more recently from the uprising of 1956 when the plucky Magyars tried to toss out the Soviets only to be crushed. A small part of this was reenacted in the pool at the Melbourne Olympics when Hungary played the Soviet Union in water polo – the “Blood in the Water” match won by Hungary 4-0.

These are the reasons why Budapest is such a wonderful place. It has a magnificent smorgasbord of attractions, it has reminders of its tragic past and it is demonstrating its determination to eradicate, but not forget that past.