Walking around the perimeter feels like being a guard on sentry duty, protecting the city from long gone attacks. That’s what the fisherman that lived beneath the walls used to do. They’d climb up to defend the city, and that’s how it got its name. Although I can’t see what use a fisherman would be in a situation like that. Its almost the polar opposite of a soldier or a warrior.While I walk along the terrace my mind drifts to what it would have been like during times of conflict. I imagine burning arrows being fired up from huge boats on the Danube river down below, and then me raising my shield in defence. ‘Gonna have try harder than that!’ I shout (in my head). Then my compadre next to me see’s an arrow that’s flames have gone out coming straight for me, he pushes me out the way and it goes through his eye instead. Then a tourist nudges into me and I’m brought back to the here and now and wishing there weren’t so many bloody tourists. You’d think January would be a quiet month for excursions. One of their children is even walking along the wall unsupervised by his parents and I can’t help but feel a small level of anxiety. It’s almost a sheer drop on the other side.Strolling around and watching everybody taking pictures I wonder whether half of these people will ever even look at their photographs again. Most likely they’ll be forgotten about in a couple of months, destined to be left in the past in an old phone’s memory in a drawer full of junk. I file all my pictures in folders for that month of that year. I used to write a diary to go alongside the pictures but it was just to time consuming so I stopped. The plan is to watch it all in the future as one big slide show of my entire life (ideally when I’m so old and immobile that I can’t do much else), but I might also make separate files where it’s just pictures of certain friends or social groups and then have a slide show night with them too. Arrange it like a movie night with popcorn and snacks.

The waves of tourists have died down now and there’s more room to explore and use my imagination without being knocked into. Coming here on a summer’s day would almost certainly be better I think, because then you could just sit on the wall and eat ice-cream, whereas I’m starting to get cold again because I haven’t climbed a hill or stairs, or even walked much, since I got here, and so the last thing I would want is ice-cream. I’d happily eat some chocolate though. A cadbury’s cream egg would be perfect right now.