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But getting it wrong can be balanced with moments of getting it right. How right that in my same stay in Paris 1965, I should have found myself talking in a bar to a few young English guys, playing pinball with them, and finding out only after half an hour that they were the Kinks due to play Olympia that night. A sweetly emblematic sixties memory…pinball!

And there is pleasure in getting it wrong. It is refreshing, bracing to be culturally disorientated, to be in a world which has at least a tinge of oddness in it: (encountering a pair of racoons gloomily sorting through the rubbish in my brother's inner-city Toronto front yard on my first morning; looking out of the window into the dazzling street on my first morning in Cairo and watching a couple of moustached soldiers walking hand in hand. Indeed finding myself walking with a functionary of the Egyptian Ministry of Education, (a small, bald, fat man in a sweaty nylon leisure suit) like a pair of lovers hand in hand through the streets of Cairo; (but then I needed him as a work contact.)

Some times (and one doesn't have to go far), one lands in somewhere distinctly weird. My first day in Budapest was eerie; one tends to look for language support: some words must be the same. But no; Hungarian is famous for its obscurity. It was like being in one of those curious Balkan-ish countries in a Tintin book in which every sign is utterly unutterable, bristling with exotic diacritics. (For one brief moment I thought I had found some familiar ground. On a building across the road from my flat was a neon hoarding showing a spider's web, and the writing ARANY POK. At last, I thought, I have found a cognate: Arany is like araignee in French or Arana in Spanish, meaning spider. No. I found instead that arany meant golden and that Golden Web was a make of tights. Hungarian, in a particularly perverse and Hungarian way, had outwitted me again.

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