Spent the weekend in Budapest with the writers' football team. We travelled to a big lake and lots of tubby, middle-aged men went swimming and professed it 'very nice'. However 'nice' it was, they got out pretty sharpish. We played a game against our Hungarian counterparts. We drew one each.

Afterwards we met an elderly gentleman who was commentating when Hungary beat England 6-3 in 1953. This seems to have been a definitive moment of Hungarian identity. It's all a bit lost on the English which is surprising as we do love to celebrate a good failure.

In the evening I sat on a stage and talked rubbish about Anglo-Hungarian relations before a bored audience of expats and language students. One of my Hungarian fellow panellists kept going on about the local suicide rate. Apparently it's very high. Together with the '6-3' this seems a curious source of pride. Then again, we English are proud of some funny old shit ourselves ... our rampant alcoholism, for example. Talking of which, we went out late into the night. At one point, I realised I hadn't come across a single English stag night and I felt briefly grateful not to be being bothered by some boorish London drunk. Then I looked more closely at the bloke I'd been talking to for the last 10 minutes and realised he hadn't been so fortunate.

In the morning we walked around the city. I ate bean soup. We climbed a hill. We waxed verbose. I solved hip hop's problems together with two other middle-aged, middle-class white dudes. It was very fulfilling. Unfortunately, I can't remember what those problems were now, let alone their solutions. On our way back down the hill, we came across the piece of graffiti above. Whoever wrote it is wrong about Budapest, it's a cool place. Perhaps they were writing it to scare away the stag nights, or perhaps they'd listened to too much hip hop. I reckon they were suicidal. Apparently it's common round these parts.