Edgar and I spent the next day being tourists. I rediscovered the places I’d run through, and this time I was able to appreciate them properly: the steep streets on Castle Hill, the soaring Matthias Church spire, the majestic Parliament Building, the stately Danube – not exactly blue – and the trendy shops and restaurants in the Erzsébetváros district.

I loved Budapest as much as Tokyo. Two cities that could not be more different. But both of them had a touch of innocent madness that resonated with Louis’s character.

I loved every nook of those cities as if they were pieces of my son.

*

Louis had perfectly summed up our evening activity in his notebook. We were to go in for a different type of competition. A ‘party marathon’, described as follows:

Have a drink in a dozen ruin bars and then stay out all night at the wild techno party in the Széchenyi Baths!!! (All without throwing up, please.)

I hoped that Louis had planned to wait until he reached the legal age before embarking on the alcohol-sodden adventures on which he was sending me, but I very much doubted it. When I was a teenager, I too would have a little drink, naively thinking I’d pulled the wool over my mother’s eyes, until she told me one day, without batting an eyelid, that my breath stank and that I couldn’t teach an old dog to drink beer.

The weather was freezing, but Edgar and I soon warmed up wandering from kert to kert. These ‘ruin bars’ are in abandoned courtyards in the old Jewish quarter. Disorientating places of decadent beauty, cleverly designed grunge decors, where Budapest’s cosmopolitan youth chills out at night. We ate in one of them, to soak up the alcohol that had even seeped into our frozen toes, then, with a mix of apprehension and excitement, we headed for the rave at the Széchenyi Baths.

The place was crazy. Széchenyi, the most famous of Budapest’s thermal baths, was a magnificent edifice that looked like a neo-baroque palace. We were outdoors, in sub-zero temperatures, and the spa waters were thirty-eight degrees Celsius. The ochre-coloured walls contrasted with the blue glow of the baths, and the dense steam rising from the swimming pools muted the whiteness of the snow-covered statues. In these funky surroundings, thousands of young people, completely sloshed, were dancing in swimsuits to hardcore techno, jumping up and down to the flashing lasers in a doomsday scenario.