Dear Alex,It's a long time since you and I mulled over life. So long now, our lives belong to another time.

We met as young men in London. I was an economic migrant from Ireland and you a political refugee from Hungary. London was as wonderful then - a teeming city of many nationalities. It was just what the doctor ordered, if any doctor had bothered to know our heads were agitated by tribal angst and depression.

Although we came from different countries, we shared a displacement which needed to be exorcised in a metropolis where you sink or swim by your own energies. We swam and sank - and swam again.

The cure is not in the family text books Sufficient to say, we did to excess what young men do and survived to become old enough to tut tut at the excesses of the young today. Really, all they seem to think about is drink and sex and having a good time....

Walking down the main thoroughfare of your native Budapest, I thought of you. I had emerged from the House of Horrors and needed to deflect my mind in the fresh air from the most telling account of your country in your lifetime.

In this building on Andrassy, the Nazis compiled lists of native Hungarians who needed to be recruited or exterminated. It all seems so mundane as you enter, like a collection of school books preserved.

The ledgers contain hundreds of thousands of names, addresses, from which came arrest and 'deportation'. Read 'mass murder', in rows of lists and names and families.

Shelves of box files, which became the clerical horror of the 20th century. Without them the Holocaust could not have happened.

These lists of husbands and wives, nurses and teachers, train drivers and civil servants, were compiled with systemic thoroughness so beloved of the Nazi mind.

As you know, the Russians did the same in Hungary, when 'liberating' you from the Germans. They used the same technique, the same ledgers to repeat and intensify the Nazi 'order' in Hungary.

Those boxes of names were used by the Russians to decide who went below to basement rooms for torture and hanging. It is , I can truly say, a chilling experience to be in that house, not just because it gets colder as you descend to the basement. Which brings me to your life.

When I was in the House, I kept thinking of my friend Alex, all those years ago in London.

I remember your broken English as you told, without emotion, of the killing of your family and of fleeing Budapest after the failed anti-Russian revolution of 1956.

I'm not sure I understood you then, being young and cynical. Believe me - I understand you now.

In the House I recognised straight away the bits of bicycles run over by tanks, the Molotov cocktails made from lemonade bottles that you told me about and the leather jackets, of the students, with the bullet holes.

As I say, I needed a lot of fresh air afterwards, which is why I got walking around your native city, a magnificent European capital of wide streets and baroque buildings.

I was there to inspect an apartment which I bought off plans. It's a small apartment, it is beautifully finished., in one of those old streets that I must have pictured in in my mind, from long ago.

Who know, maybe from the time you and I were friends. For reasons I cannot explain, I'm very proud to own it.

It's occupied by a civil servant whose family pay the rent. He tells me that most native Hungarians cannot afford to buy such an apartment, even though, by our prices, it is quite cheap.

I invested in Budapest for strictly commercial reasons. There is value in the 'new build' on derelict sites, with Modernist design which will become classical in no time.

The Hungarians are an honourable people to deal with. I feel European there, in a way I do not feel in Dublin or London.

I had not expected - out of the blue - to be dealt a double whammy from a visit to a 'museum'.

I had not expected , suddenly, to be reminded of your history, Alex , and of my own.

We were young men in a new and exciting city. We will never be so again....