March 1994. I’m in a basement bar in Szolnok, an industrial town in central Hungary.

There are only four customers in. One is travelling around Eastern Europe with me. One is a friend who moved out to central Hungary to teach English. One is very drunk, with a ponytail and a good line in lewd sign language.

Behind the bar is the owner, a man who loves horses. You can tell he loves horses, because pictures of them decorate every wall of his tiny underground bar. Photographs of stallions, racehorses, feeding mares, all shapes and sizes and kinds, each with a handwritten caption, detailing the who and what, where and when.

He beckons me over, pours us both a hefty shot of the local hooch and explains, using a combination of broken english, doodles on ripped beermats and childlike Hungarian, that several years before, there’d been an exhibition in the town, about horses.

There’d been photographs of horses from all over Hungary, and the world, and a souvenir programme which visitors could take home with them at the end of the day.

He, Vilmos, the man behind the bar, had provided the English translation for the programme introduction. He pointed at himself proudly, and beamed.

“I am good English! Yes? Yes!”

When we left, at the end of a long night, he pressed into my hand a photocopy of the introduction he’d so painstakingly translated.

Today, it fell out of a book I was putting onto a shelf, emptying the last of the moving crates. The book was one I’d carried around Europe with me back in 1994, unread since then, but well-loved all the same.

I’d almost forgotten about the grey industrial town in the middle of Hungary where we went to a basketball game (local chemical plant versus visiting nuclear power station); the windowless basement bar in which we sat and drank a night away; the pictures plastered on the walls; the man who loved horses.