WAKING UP IN AN OLD WORLD CITY

When I lived in London, I'd been there so long I ceased to notice my surroundings anymore, and walking round the city was one long tuning out session. A day here in Budapest is different, a feast of impressions. I'm suddenly more awake to details and textures.

The first thing you notice is the decorated buildings in the centre. Carved on the facades of many of them are historical and mythological figures - the guide-book probably knows their identities; lions' heads and art nouveau motifs. The poster-covered pillars on the wide pavements and streetlamps suspended awkwardly between shabby buildings are distinctively European, and make it easy to imagine another era.

Taking the Metro is more fun too: it's a kind of looking-glass world where the different space and layouts of stations and all the indecipherable ads crowd out any sense of the familiar. (Plus it's cheap, clean and regular, so my frame of mind is altogether different.)

On a trip to Tesco's for marmite, I passed some Communist-era blocks of flats, the peeling walls of which, lit up by the Saturday morning sun, looked as bright and bleak as the surface of the moon.