Lockdown Nostalgia - A Spring Walk

How odd - exactly this time last year, we were all blythe and innocent of our freedom and I went off on a long walk to buy a mop. When I got home, I started to make a blog post about it, but decided it was too humdrum and boring to inflict on anybody. 

Finding the draft of the first part of that blogpost now, it strikes me as the height of excitement, in a world where carefree walks - unmasked, without a rush to the soap and water and hours of hand washing on one's return home - are no longer a possibility. Which is why I've decided to include it on this blog after all, in sad memory of ordinariness and its many joys. I hope that by this time next year we will all be able to stroll about in search of mops again, without any anxiety about being infected with a germ that, without any particular rhyme or reason, decides to really go hell for leather in a battle of life and death with random of its victims. Mind you, I suppose the conversation I overheard a year ago could be said to be rather more apposite now, very sadly

From last year:  "The other day when I needed to buy a mop I decided I would walk to the big hardware store where such things can be found. I normally take the tram from outside what my neighbour calls the Great Market, but the weather was so good, and I'd seen from the tram window some faces on the sides of buildings that I thought I might like to photograph.

So off I went, past one of my favourite balconies:

admiring the bursting into leave of various trees in the district:

People were out and about, chatting. As I passed, this man was saying, "Well, they've all died now; yes, they're all dead", which is a not untypical conversational gambit in my neighbourhood:

Somewhere else on this blog, I once wrote about my fondness for a good balcony, and I stopped to admire these ones:

Then I spotted some faces:

Further down the same street, I came across this building, which I think could only be Hungarian, with its nod to a rural dwelling in its top floor timbering:

The one next door has a dinky mini-balcony, up there under the triangular eaves, not a useful space but nice to step out for a breather and possibly manage to grow a pot of mint or parsley upon:

More faces popped up:

I also came upon a rather sweet train that runs to Csepel, where there is, I believe a rather atmospheric abandoned industrial complex. Perhaps one day I'll go there, but for now, I'll just dream of the train ride: