In the summer of 2009, I ended up in Budapest with a man whose surname was Farmer. We’d been in Amsterdam, Berlin and Prague, drinking absinthe and sleeping on trains, and we found nourishment in Hungary by way of €5 goulash and €1 beers. Before Farmer dashed off to Madrid and I booked a cheap flight home, I went to the now-famous Szimpla Kert, one of Budapest’s original “ruin bars” hidden in abandoned ex-Soviet buildings. There were rooms with comfy sofas and shisha pipes, a lively crowd, bashed up cars below disco balls. A jazz band played in front of squeaky food carts.