My father pulled a chair into the centre of the hotel room, stood on it and peered inside the chandelier. 'Just checking for microphones,' he said. He tapped the light fitting, then mimed a listening spy wearing headphones and pulling them away from his ears in shock. I laughed.

It was 1964, and Hungary was very much under communist influence. The Duna Hotel in Budapest was plush, as I remember, though I was only nine years old. I was, however, already a James Bond fan, so I was intrigued by my father's microphone search. He was partly serious, I think, since although he was Hungarian, he had married my mother who was English, and so had close association with the west. He was also what could be described as a 'wide boy,' and was undoubtedly viewed as suspicious by the authorities.

Fast forward twenty years and I was again in Budapest. Not much seemed to have changed. The border crossing was heavily guarded and patrolled, our campervan was searched, and our documents were examined minutely. We were once pulled over by two armed militia on a lonely country road and all our papers examined again.

Fast forward another thirty-three years and the difference is dramatic. No border checks (Hungary is in the EU), communism is dead, the red star on the tower on Budapest's highest hill has disappeared, and from that vantage point you can clearly see Hungary's intelligence service building, which everyone seems to know about. If there are any microphones they're probably aimed at the American Embassy, to hear whether D. Trump Esq. has any plans to build a wall around Hungary, or deport all gypsy violinists.

We've been here for only two days but I am in sensory overload, for a number of reasons. The main is that I have reunited with my half-brother and his two kids having not seen them since 1984. Of course the 'kids' aren't kids any more.

Another is that the eldest of the children, Csaba (pronounced 'chobba') speaks excellent English, and his sister Edit is not far behind, though he teases her about her grammar. That's older brothers for you. But the big difference is that, apart from when I was nine years old visiting here with my dad, this is the first time I have been able to communicate properly.

Hungarian is not an easy language for English native speakers. It has a close grammatical structure to Finnish (I know; bizarre right?), and is not as intuitive as, say, Spanish or Italian. Latin and Greek roots aren't obvious, so there aren't a many clues to even help you guess what words mot mean. Plus, Hungarian makes full use of all those accents over letters, double dots, and other symbols - plus letters from the tail-end of the alphabet - that the rest of us rarely employ.

That said, it's not as much of a problem as it was over thirty years ago, when I was shouted at by a post office employee as I tried to buy a stamp, mangling the Hungarian language in the process and probably reinforcing the argument for socialism and keeping the Iron Curtain firmly drawn.

No, today English is everywhere, at least in Budapest - on signage, menus, in bars, spoken by fast-food employees and, usefully, on the trams' PA system where a terribly-well educated English woman announces what the next stop is and which metro station it connects with. In the mid-eighties, Hungary's second language was German, no doubt due to its proximity to Austria, but Csaba says English has now become the back-up tongue, and is taught in schools. His own son, who is six, will be learning it from next year.

Thanks to Csaba's excellent command of English and his deep interest and knowledge of Hungarian history and especially its conflicts, we have been treated to a seriously in-depth tour, covering everything from Roman occupation to appalling stories of Hungary's own holocaust, where 600,000 Hungarian Jews were, as Csaba puts it, destroyed. 'Not killed,' he emphasised. 'They were destroyed.'

We learned that the present government has rid Budapest of corruption, and now confines it to the upper levels of the Hungarian parliament (said slightly tongue-in-cheek, but often enough for Csaba to mean it), and that Hungarians today are in conflict with themselves over the Second World War: were they victims, or perpetrators? Or both? It was a complicated war for Hungary, but Csaba is firmly of the belief that they were perpetrators, while at the same time acknowledging undisputed heroism by some Hungarian soldiers.

So I am exhausted. There is so much we have learned and seen in such a short time. So much to have caught up on in over thirty years' absence, and so much more to experience that one blog like this certainly won't suffice.

Maybe I should record a podcast instead. I wonder if there's a microphone anywhere in the apartment...