'Brothers' in arms, Nyugati Underground Passageway

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All-Ireland final day. Sunshine and Amhrán na bhFiann in Croke Park, Dublin. Brilliant light down the streets of a smashing Budapest afternoon. I should be out taking photos but it's Mayo versus Donegal in an Irish pub packed with vetinary students from all over Ireland, from Norway, from the Spessart region of Germany. They even brought a stray dog with them that they had somehow, recently, collectively rescued.

All the time I know I'm losing that lovely light but it's Mayo and I'd love them to win after the semi-final performance I saw live a few weeks ago..... To hell with photography for the moment at least....

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Sometimes, however, when you are least expecting it, a photograph presents itself. Sits suddenly right up from where it has been hiding, taking cover, like passengers forced out on to uncovered platforms by a departing train,
like heartening bursts of sunshine after rain.

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At full time the whistle blows....the girls beside me are whooping madly...one of them grabs her girlfriend's pink phone to ring home....

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....Where the two young men were bound for or where they had been I cannot say. They were just suddenly there, outside Eiffel's Antikvárium bookshop in the underground passageway at Nyugati. I had left Beckett's pub and was setting up a rather lacklustre shot of second-hand paperbacks, ancient maps of Hungary, magazines with titles such as 'Proletár Kezet' or Lenin's baldy head served up on the front page. A half-hearted attempt to ease my guilty conscience...on the point of going home...

Running towards me, the two lads were keen to know what kind of photograph I was taking, could they help, what was it supposed to be? Eventually, one broken sentence after another lead to smiles , the chap on the left grabbed his mate out from behind a row of books and there we had it...the pair of them, both Hungarian, brothers in arms, stronger and a good deal more silent, proudly so, than they had been moments before...


Best moment of the day...especially considering that Mayo lost.