Bratislava

Crossing the border, the countryside didn't change. Terrifying bleak forest, mistletoe clumps in the trees like nests of some big malignant bird, grey vegetation, frozen ditches. The landscape was the same, but the use of it altered: shacks and knackered livestock compounds. I'm not much for the sticks, it's in the username, but this was something worse. It was all broken down, and horribly thriving. On the outskirts of the city there was a Tesco.

Walking down the approach from the Hlavná station reminded me of arriving in a northern town on a Saturday lunchtime in the dead hour before the football special and the police escort. Remains of benches with the wooden slats missing, cow shed shelters, wheezing buses almost as old as me. Like Barnsley not long after the miners' strike.

Obchodná was like a street my subconscious had invented in a dream, nothing especially surreal about it, but the mix was all off. I can't explain how. Walking down it I got slight tingles, the buzzy-dizzy feeling that deja vu causes, but I'd never been there before.