Milling around

A long, long time ago... but I can still remember... how the sight of a small pack of giggling Japanese tourists mobbing the butcher's counter as they pointed at the rows of chops and piles of sausages made me smile. They took what seemed like hundreds of photos while I looked on, bemused. No idea why. Maybe Japanese meat counters are unbearably sophisticated affairs compared to the rustic plastic-tray-embellished-with-fake-grass affair of your average Sainsbury's. Or maybe the arrangement of bacon spelled out something rude in hiragana.

But at last, I can finally announce that I too have tittered at a supermarket refrigerator full of cold cuts and even taken photos, although my own efforts were far more surreptitious. Well okay, furtive. What can I say? I felt weird. Besides, I was in one of the two subterranean supermarkets near Můstek metro station. The thing with these two stores is that the combination of cement floors, steel warehouse doors painted off-white and nasty fluorescent tube lighting makes me hideously aware that I am surrounded by concrete on all sides, and UNDERGROUND. And I'm not even claustrophobic.

To the cabin fever simmering gently in my subconscious, add the winteriness of the evening, presence of "interesting" characters that like to hang around public transportation and best of all, the heavy metal music in tongues that they blast from the speakers during the late-night shopping hours. Taking photos probably would have blended, come to think of it. If only I had thought to put on my very cheap new woolly hat that makes my head look pointy.

So I'm feeling weird, and taking photos of processed pig products. But why? Ahh… young love. Rebel love. (bear with me here - this isn't really a non sequitur. Oh. And come to think of it, I wasn't feeling that weird.) Where was I? Oh yes, Rebel love. So wild. So free. So rebellious. James Dean, spiky hair, leather jackets and maybe even the poetically tragic, doomed romance between the young idealistic revolutionary and the offspring of the corrupt local governor. But what of soft furnishings, long flowing hair, nicely-pressed linens and low-cost paté?

Well it would seem that at least one of Czechland's manufacturers of meat paste has taken this question to heart. And thus, they have decided to exploit this newly-discovered niche and entice customers to take advantage of their 2-for-1 deal by throwing in a free copy of this DVD.

Yup. "Zdarma" means free. All well and good you might think. But I have yet to penetrate the motives of the genius that came up with the strategy to offer this DVD as an alternative for those who might be able to spurn the temptations of "RebeLove".
That's Czech for "The Princess from the Mill", a famous comedy from the last decade.

But look. Teeth. Who needs teeth like this to chew paté?

And just in case anyone found it hard to believe that I found these DVDs in the supermarket stuck to plastic packs of scary pink mush, here are both of them together in the display that first attracted my attention.

Chune

I'm still here. But for mysterious reasons, the theme tune to "Dambusters" has lodged itself in my head for the past two days and whenever I tune out just the tiniest bit, I start to whistle it under my breath. This is not good. Especially when there are Germans in the vicinity.

Happy Hanukkah

Of the hundreds of photos that I've managed to take in the last six months, I have precisely two that involve lights in the dark/candles and things of that sort appropriate for a Hanukkah post. It may be something deep and psychological, but it's more likely that it's down to my total lack of ability to take pictures in the dark that aren't wonky due to camera shake. (What is that you say... "Tripods?" Didn't they also invade earth from Outer Space in the Seventies?)

It's just gone dark here, so apologies for the paucity and here's a candle for anyone who's calling today 25th of Kislev, especially the lovely D'eath, son of D'eath, husband of D'eath and bump of D'eath.

The Horror! Oh The Horror!

Since the ghost of the Seventies was raised in yesterday's post, and invoked again today by rpc, I feel the only way to banish it is to wallow. Besides, that means I have a theme again. Ta-da.

Last weekend, I picked up for the princely sum of 70 KC (about £1.75/$3.50 US - yes, English language books are vvvv expensive here) a second-hand copy of a book published in 1971, and based on a TV show of that era, called "Dark Shadows." After all, how could I possibly turn down the chance to own "A Paperback Library Gothic - #28 in a series?" Especially as it rejoiced in the deliciously gloomy title, Barnabas, Quentin and the Grave Robbers, and the tag line, "Was there no escape from the evil Dr. Bentley - even from the land of the living dead?"

And I have to say that so far it is a Hammer-tastic overly melodramatic late Regency pastiched delight. (I can only really read one chapter at a time, because I slightly lose it after about 3 pages of this sort of thing.) The heroine is the most unbelievably stupid brunette to ever get locked up in a coffin by fiendish cock-er-ney 'enchmen. The hero does absolutely nothing apart from turn up at the last possible moment to rescue the dimwitted heroine. The villain revels in his unspeakable vileness and delivers lines like, "If you prefer not to be my wife then I shall have Hoskins prepare you as a cadaver for dissection at the Winslow Hospital Medical School." Why add tags to denote maniacal laughter when his dialogue fairly shouts it?

This is the extract blurbed on the back cover. I haven't yet reached this point in the book, but so far it does what it says on the tin. Best read aloud in the finest imitation of a TV announcer of Dooooommmwhaahahahahaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!HAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!HAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!

"You see, Paula, how well it will work out. Lily will drink the blood of the village maidens - and Barnabas will be blamed." [Insert evil laughter here. Think: Barnabas? Barney? The dino- No, wait. Don't think. Just read.]

Paula stared at the evil doctor in horror. [I think horror means goggle-eyed. To make sure this is clear to passing migrating wildebeest, shriek breathily, as if you've just trodden on a slug after inhaling a balloon-full of helium.] "Whatever happens to Barnabas, you'll still have Quentin to reckon with!" [Stretch out arm, then retract abruptly to forehead as if it were a highly desirable wet fish. Try not to concuss yourself with enthusiasm.]

Dr. Bentley sneered. [Flared nostrils work well here. With practice, you can probably do one at a time and waggle your eyebrows simultaneously. This is the epitome of evil if you don't actually own a pair of retractable horns.] "The werewolf? If Quentin tries to interfere with me," [rude gesture optional] "I'll find a way to deal with him." [More evil laughter, and rub hands gleefully. It's exhausting, this level of evil-tude. If you laugh evilly for 3 minutes, you burn off enough calories for 2 and a quarter chocolate digestives. But you gotta go with gusto.]

Lily added [Who's Lily? Oh yes, she of the drinking of the blood of the village maidens. Eeyuch.], "Better come over to our side, luv." [Ah... a cock-er-ney 'enchwoman. Flounce like you've never flounced before, me ducks.]

"I'd rather die," Paula said firmly, [yet gently]

"An interesting suggestion," Bentley remarked pleasantly. [I'm pretty sure "interesting" should be pronounced "eeeeenteresting". In fact, you could try doing all of Dr.B's dialogue with a really bad fake German accent.] "Dying could be your first step in joining my company of friends - zombies, if you will." [You see? Not "will", "vill". It makes people think eee-villl. How much more sinister could things get?] "Then you could be truly useful to me." [Oh look. Foreboding. Even more sinister. Get your bodes to the fore and dare I say laugh maniacally? Or even go for bust and try megalomaniacally. For variety, Paula could probably shriek a bit. Laugh! Shriek! Laugh! Shriek! Laugh! Shriek!]

Are the village maidens like the Village People? Where is the land of the living dead? Will Dr. Bentley get in touch with his inner zombie? How will Quentin interfere with Dr. Bentley? Why do all old second-hand books smell funny and have mysterious shopping lists scribbled in the front page? Can I have my biscuits now?

(all extracts quoted under fair use, she says, covering her arse, as she's been shooting off her mouth about plagiarism elsewhere)

Lydia oh Lydia.

No, wait. She was a lady with tattoos

According to the Guardian, beards are back in fashion - for men, anyhow.

Don't quite know how to react to this. I mean, it had to happen. The eternal wheel of fashion will do its going around thing. So sometimes it must inevitably roll downhill over the pointy toes of its followers. And beards are probably better than 'burns, muttonchops or even lambchops. Because that Victorian gentleplum look was a fashion to set the world alight, or at least make a terrible smell as a set of manly sidewhiskers smouldered darkly in close proximity to a newly-installed gas chandelier or two.

The newspaper claims it's related to two seemingly contradictory trends (neither of them economic, unlike theories about hemlines):

1) Spread of "metrosexual" fashion necessitating the adoption of other indicators of masculinity to counter-act the girlifying effects of pink ties and lavender lounge suits.

(Note to self: remember the Seventies? Or at least, remember the old poster from the Seventies that was glued to my dentist's ceiling to distract his hapless patients? There is something very disconcerting about enforced study of a set of perfect gnashers gleaming whitely from a dark, hairy nest of luxuriant facial shrubbery. Particularly when said manly hirsuteness is perched on a skinny body in powder blue drainpipes and a ruffled shirt. Maybe it was the injections, but I seem to recall him sitting in a golden, hazy field of wheat above flowing letters which declared soothingly, "Love is… having regular check-ups and flossing twice daily. Use fluoride."

2) Popularity of facial fuzz and rRraaWwk (I'm never quite sure how to spell that) music go hand-in-hand. Bands do it, so fans do it.

Quick visual poll of surroundings reveals

3 undetermined (It's blonde. It may be long stubble, it may be deliberate, it may the acorns that herald future growth. It's a bit scruffy. There is no way to tell without asking the owner. They wear band t-shirts to work, if that helps.)

1 definite chin-and-moustache affair, neatly trimmed (he's French, so does that still count?).

1 goatee (in transit).

1 very heavy five-o'clock shadow, which blends imperceptibly with shaved head.

2 really long sideburns with sharply razored ends. Think they're supposed to replace cheekbones.

No bearded ladies, but I live in hope.

Interestingly, the scruffy undetermineds are scruffy all over. Where the facial fuzz seems deliberate it also appears to have migrated from forehead to chin(s). Is there a maximum possible quota for overall hair on a man's head? At what point does he reach overkill? Is that when they make you pose for dental hygeine posters of dubious taste?

It's beginning to look a lot like…

...kringlor.

For those interested, there is still no snow. We're basking in highs of 7 or 8 (celsius) and the Praguers (Praguees?) I've spoken to are all saying things like, "It doesn't feel like Christmas at all. It's much too warm." This is despite the presence of Christmas-tree salesman by practically every metro station, lights on pretty much every building downtown, Christmas markets full of glittery tat, choirs singing carols and svařak everywhere. Some of them have been reduced to watching snow cams from the Tyrol and Krkonoše mountains to meet their visual quota of the white stuff.

But it is always odd what makes people feel Christmassy, or festival-y of any kind. For me, the feeling is built up out of many layers, some more fragile than others. The obnoxiously loud singing of Christmas carols (pref. with surprise soprano descant that scales the Flipper-summoning heights of the range) is a thick fudgy one, particularly when done outdoors on a cold night.

Then there's lots of smells. A whiff of pine, or any strong tree resin, coupled with a flash of red ribbon. That particular recipe for gingerbread with orange bits, and the smell of mulled wine in company. The faint feeling of panic when you think of post office queues. The endless lists and planning. Tinsel. The annual conversation about what to feed the herbivore which magically turns me into a provoking teenager and the other party into the supreme warlord and all-powerful dictator of festive foodstuffs:

"What do you want for Christmas dinner?"
"Roasties."
"No. You have to have something besides roast potatoes."
"Roast parsnips?"
"No. You have to have something besides roast vegetables."
"I don't like sprouts."
"Don't be an idiot. What do you want to eat?"
"I want to eat roasties. I mean, I really like roasties. I could eat my weight in them."
"You can't. There have to be some for everyone else. Now what do you want instead of turkey?"
"Why is a dead bird festive?"
"Stop trying to annoy me."
"But why?"
"Look. Just stop it."
"Ok. Nut loaf."
"Don't be stupid. We're NOT having some bloody twig-filled, sandal-wearing lump of muck at Christmas dinner."
"Nut loaf is nice."
"No."
"I'll make it."
"No."
"With tomato sauce it's nice. And festive-coloured."
"No."
"We could stick a holly leaf on top."
"No."
"Look," A pause while a brief grown-up moment shimmers on the horizon. "Really, I'm happy with the side dishes. Just cook the veg in olive oil and I'll be fine."
"No. You have to have something special." The moment is gone.
"Bread sauce."
"No. Bread sauce is disgusting. We're not having bread sauce."
"So are sprouts."
"Sprouts are traditional."
"Sprouts taste like farts."
"Stop trying to distract me. It won't work. What do you want for Christmas dinner?"
"Pizza."
"Pizza is not a Christmas food. You can't have pizza."
"There were mini pizza bites the year I had Christmas dinner at --'s"
"Exactly. It was crap. They completely ruined dinner."
"They didn't ruin my dinner."
"Yes they did."
"No. My dinner was ruined when the dog ate all the mince pies and was sick on the rug. And I stepped in it in my new socks on the way to the kitchen to get more roasties. Besides, how do you know? You weren't even there."
"Exactly. If I'd have been there, there wouldn't have been any bloody pizza. And the dog would have been better behaved."
"You hate dog sick."
"Right, that's it. There's no point asking you to be sensible about this. I'm making you stilton tarts with walnut and garlic sauce. It's in my cookbook."
"How is that Christmassy?"
"Stilton. Stilton is Christmassy."
"I had Stilton yesterday. I think it's more Advent-y. And sometimes it's also Easter-y. If you eat it at Easter, for example. Except what if you started then, but had a big wheel and didn't finish it until after Whitsun?"
"Stop being so BLOODY ANNOYING."
"Can we pray for the turkey?"

glazed and confused

Still under the weather (rain). Very tired. This means the world has taken on that peculiar glaze where everything seems just a little bit shiny and surreal. It wasn't helped this weekend by a couple of those moments of oddness.

For possibly the first time in my life, I spotted not just one, but TWO men whisking their (ahem) "dates" past reception and into a hotel lift. Maybe it's just because I don't spend an enormous amount of time hanging around in hotel lobbies. Anyhow, some might say this sight shouldn't be a huge surprise, because Prague is considered a "party" town and has a large number of business travellers. With FDI being a significant chunk of the country's GDP, I guess all those foreign business people want to see what they're spending their bank's money on.

More importantly, I've also discovered that there is apparently a universal human expression for, "Oh my God, did he just go into a lift with a woman of uh… a lady of the uh… a hoo… uh… you know? In the afternoon?"

But maybe I'm not naïve and easily shocked, but in fact too cynical. Maybe the grey-haired old fart in a suit draped in giggling, peroxide, leather-mini-skirted blonde was lending a helping umm… body part to a long-lost niece who had over-indulged in the mulled wine. Perhaps the sheepish guy in the red wool jumper who came out to introduce himself and shake hands with another bottle blonde wearing spike-heeled boots, denim shorts and a fur jacket waiting outside the hotel door, and then whisk her promptly to the lift was deeply anxious about the state of his cuticles and had sent out for an emergency manicure.

Then there was the airport bus. Some passengers might consider that it does not bode well to enter the warm mugginess of the number 119 to Dejvicka and be greeted by a blast of Alice Cooper from the driver's cab. On a wet, chilly night, "Poison" could be considered the sort of background music used in a scene for one of those possessed-escaped-convict-driving-a-bus-at-high-speeds-to-eternal-damnation films. There may be blood.

But y'know, I'm down with the er… middle-aged man with the receding hairline and ponytail. I have banged my head in many a sticky-floored, or even sticky, floured, beer-splattered excuse for a nightclub. I have danced the wonky dance of a thousand ciders, or a half-pint of home-brewed scrumpy. I have worn black clothes, DM boots, flannel shirts and ironically boogied my way through Guns N Roses albums with strangly tidy German punks. I have played ridiculously enthusiastic air guitar in ripped denim and tie-dye at wedding receptions to which I have not even been invited (to be fair, I was supposed to be working the bar, in the serving of alcoholic beverages and the occasional orange juice and lemonade kind of way).

But lest anyone thing that any of the above actually indicates either a) rrrrawk credibility or b) extreme sadness, I must protest that it is the latter. I'm a dabbler, not a dunker. I couldn't name a bass player if you covered him in molasses, stuck on a pair of bunny ears and threw him at me. The upshot being that I do sometimes like loud noisy music and can empathise with the need to have it when doing pretty dull, routine job.

Anyhow, given my vaguely chequered past and lamentable lack of cool in the face of an occasional need to jump around looking like an idiot, preferably doing mime to the lyrics of songs, I try not to make judgements based on musical taste. Just because a bus driver plays Alice Cooper very loudly on a rainy night, it does not mean he's going to screech off at 90 miles an hour through the sodden streets or take corners on two wheels. Despite those studies that link aggressive music with aggressive driving, I do not yearn for a quick change of mood to Toni Braxton's "Unbreak my Heart," or something vaguely Celtic with panpipes. In fact, to do so might actually be more unsettling.

It's cool. I don't mind. I'm relaxed. I understand that loud, noisy music does not a scary, freaky bus driver make.

Except… he played the song twice in a row.

An angel on my shoulder. And a devil. And a bishop.

Well, here's how the Czechs celebrate St.Nicholas' (sv. Mikulás) Day. (5th December)

Traditional:

1. Acquire costume.

Angel - white flowing clothing, tinsel halo and some wings. Blonde wig and face paint optional.
St.Nicholas - white beard, gold and red robes of a vaguely clerical kind, wood crook.
Devil - red horns, black wig, red and black clothes, black face paint. Sinister sack.

2. Wander around areas heavily populated by children.
3. Demand if child has been good (bishop is head inquisitor).
4. Child shrieks. Bellows poem or song.
5. Child receives sweets from angel.

6. Identify naughty child (parents usually grass).
7. Child receives coal from devil.

8. Identify very naughty child (see bad child).
9. Child kidnapped, popped in devil's sack (see costume) and carried off to Hell. This may be metaphorical if exit routes are blocked.

10. Laugh at shrieks of terrified children.
11. Sing songs.
12. Drink svařák*.

Non-traditional:

1. Wander around areas heavily populated by sellers of svařák*.
2. Buy svařák*.
3. Drink svařák*.
4. Drink more svařák*.
5. Notice a few people wearing plastic twinkling devil's horns.
6. Look around for seller of twinkling devil's horns.
7. Buy twinkling devil's horns.
8. Wear twinkling devil's horns. Backwards. More evil that way.
9. Drink more svařák*.
10. Let off firecrackers under tyres of passing cyclists.
11. Eat a sausage. (Veggies may observe eating of sausage and pass comment.)
12. Drink more svařák*.

*svařák* = hot mulled wine of the Czech kind. Left "*" on because it has a little zing.

This plastic beaker of svařak* is...

Half-empty...

I cannot find boxes of Christmas cards anywhere.

The god of plumbing is still angry.

I have incurred the wrath of the Three Furies of the Temple of Going Out In The Cold With Wet Hair and despite my woolly hat, now have a streaming cold.

Visitors will descend this weekend and already disaster looms in the form of cancellations, complicated requests and a rather terse exchange of texts.


Half-full…

I have found rather elegant Hanukkah cards (tasteful pen-and-inks of antique menorahs, that sort of thing). So some people are in luck. There's still time for a quick conversion if you know a friendly rabbi.

Trdelnik (sort of an unrolled cinammon/sugar bun wrapped around metal cylinders, baked over an open flame and served immediately) are widely available.

The big Christmas tree in Wenceslas square at night is the most over-the-top explosion of lilac-lighted, purple-tinselled campness in arboreal form I have ever seen. By day it's green. Weird.

The big manger in Old Town Square contains live animals, including two sheep and a donkey. They might escape and stampede - the fence is looking very rickety indeed.

*Czech hot mulled wine

Tonight there's gonna be a jail break...

...somewhere in this town.

But probably not here. Maybe at the jail.

Really really really really busy - the work thing is out of control. And it appears that my newly-purchased mop has been cursed by an angry god of plumbing.

Maybe I can appease it with offerings of a socket wrench, u-bend and very large mug of hot, sweet tea? Probably have to do it on bended knee to demonstrate appropriate degree of bottom cleavage though. Will hunt out lowest-waisted trousers.

Crimini - not just your average basidiocarp

Imagine mushrooms. Clusters of brown shingled mushrooms with pointy roofs a bit like, um, little wooden huts. Of the type that could be inhabited by elves in stories by the brothers Grimm if they were less organic and mossy and more, sort of, pre-fab. Well, actually, you could just picture clusters of little square wooden huts, but saying that makes me think of rustic, field-bound portaloos. So think mushrooms.

Besides, the mushroom comparison (for ever after known as the mycelium metaphor) allows me to cheat and pretend that some kind of thematic thing actually is happening here, since I have mentioned fungi at least once before. Twice creates a theme. If I bring them up a third time before the end of the year and cook them for hours in a heavy cream sauce on a gas ring with my hair in plaits while maundering on for several days about the twilight of the gods they probably become a leitmotiv. And I win a Xena apron.

Damn. Christmas must be soon, I just made a dodgy Wagner joke.

Anyhow, there are mushroomy clusters of huts all over town now. Brown, wood, small. You know the type. And they have popped up all over the place in preparation for December's Christmas market spectacular. They've pretty much colonised Old Town Square (also known by the hard Czech name, Staroměstské náměstí) and the north-east end of Wenceslas Square (also has a hard Czech name - Václavské námestí, and it's not even square). Both locations are perfectly situated to lure in the ravening hordes of tourists. There's also a row in Smíchov by the tram stop to catch the American students on their way to the Big Shiny Shopping Mall and one in Náměstí Míru so the expats don't have to hobnob with the short-breaking hoi polloi.

A brief informal poll around work revealed that most Czechs view them with disdain and won't be venturing anywhere near Prague central for the next month except maybe to buy their carp.

The Poles think the ones in Warsaw are better and cheaper because the Polish are the bestest merchants in the world evAH and don't you know that even before Solidariność they would trek miles barefoot through howling gales and driving rain to flog a bright-green plastic pencil sharpener with a missing blade to an Albanian who would thank them, dammit, for the favour. And how can anyone sell with Czech food in their belly anyhow? Except maybe svíčková. This food is quite okay and they make something very similar in southern Poland, but the flavouring is much more subtle - they use this special herb and anyhow…

The Hungarian doesn't like to shop, period, he just plays Warrior's Doom-Laden Trek wiv Gory Battles and Barbarian Gurls. The Bulgarians think that the markets are full of over-priced tat they could knit themselves and would rather just stay home where it's warm and eat something good like moussaka with a couple of bottles of red wine and a whisky chaser.

Being an expat who loves to play tourist and is expecting my own weekending visitors, I intend to embrace the Christmas market scene with an awe-inspiring fervour, fuelled by my unbridled lust for tinsel, mulled wine and special Christmas cookies. I also predict that many of my friends and relatives this year will be getting Official Product of the Czech Republic HandMade Bohemian Christmas Themed Gift Objects. Probably ones made of nice, light straw. A shopping extravaganza awaits. More later - particularly about the carp, which requires further elaboration.

Better living through chemists'

I've actually been working all weekend, and my mind is spinning, spinning, spinnning ahahahaha… However, I did manage to focus enough to head out to the chemists' (drug store) and pick up a few things. It was while queuing to pay that I spotted the latest products from Ambi-Pur, manufacturers of the finest room deoderizers and over-powering plug-in aroma generators to the discerning public.

I could tell they were new because they had "novinky" labelled on the box.

Ladeeez and Gentlemen, Ambi-Pur proudly presents:

His 'n' Hers car perfume.

Yep. One box for the manly men, distinguishable by its brown colour, and three photos of "manly" things: a black&white pic of a flexed bicep, grass and the open rooooaad. The woman's was pink (sigh) and featured pictures of lilies, lipsticks and a peach. Oh my. In a fiendish act of savvy marketing, the manufacturers have tapped into my long-repressed desire to dance gaily in a shower of lipgloss while clutching a huge bouquet of flowers to my chest and stomping on soft fruit.

Although the boxes were sealed to prevent reckless perfume abuse they also provided a handy-dandy scratch 'n' sniff patch at the top. After rummaging through the boxes to find stickers that were still intact, I can reveal that "His" smells of cheap aftershave with a hint of paper and "Hers" smells of cheap floral fabric softener. Somehow that doesn't make me feel any better. To say nothing of the complicated logistics problems created by having a gender-based car scents.

Fortunately, when I went to have a coffee to recover from the shock, I found the following personal advert at the back of the weekly English-language newspaper, The Prague Post which made me feel much better:

Rich, powerful, handsome yet modest businessman, 33, seeks much younger woman for relationship and good times. No time-wasters.

Edited to ad(d): Didn't have a copy of the advert with me when I wrote this, but thought I'd remembered enough. Except I went home, checked the paper and it's actually worse than I remembered. Here it is in full unabridged glory, but without the big box around it that caught my eye in the first place:

Rich, handsome, powerful yet modest urban professional seeks a woman to gaze into his eyes adoringly before and after. I am 33 y.o. from London looking for a younger Czech girl for a serioius relationship. No time-wasters

What can I say? If it's not a joke, then in this man's world, "irony" is a bit like "goldy" but made of iron.

Brave New Blurred

Hark! Observe the majesty, beauty and poetry of the banner which replaces the old header above. Or, as its creator put it, "I love how when you put a bit of sexy type over the top of even the most shaky and blurred dodgy photo, it instantly looks like high art."

The shaky, blurred and dodgy photo is mine, the sexy type is a Czech font (no stone left unturned to develop the shapes which best suit the use of diacritics) called Fedra, by Peter Bil'ak. The high art creator and font-hunter is rpc, who occasionally takes it upon himself to give me a gentle yet well-deserved kick in the style/graphic/design trouser region. For which much gratitude and kudos.

It's all cunningly woven together to fit a theme. Really. Not a smidgen of harried, "Dammit, why are all my photos so vertical? Aarrghh. Hang on...the metro ones - they're horizontal... maybe rpc can cut out the backs of people and wandering thumbs," about it. It's carefully planned. Observe the wall. A very wall-like wall in Prague. Malostranska metro station to be precise. It even has extra-special-added "woosh" blurriness from an oncoming train.

There may possibly be animals stuck to said wall - that could be where the dents came from. The "woosh" makes it hard to tell. Or perhaps a pair of cut-out, yellow ducks hovering beak-to-beak were attached to a section slightly above the bit showing in the cropped shot. Although they usually appear on the yellow line, and Malostranska, as any fule know, is on the green line.

The ducks are one of those random street art things that crop up here and there. Slightly quirky, child-related objects seem to be popular at the moment. Dolls and wooden toys are propped on buttresses, or ride decorative stonework in seemingly hard-to-reach locations. Take the wooden puppet lounging on lintel in a corner of the Spanish synagogue, or the little girl sitting on the high wall around the Klementinium complex (Jesuit-college-built-on-Dominican-monastery-turned-national-library). But then, what else can you expect in a place where Stalin's statue was replaced with a giant metronome?

Aaaaarrrgggghhhh

Aaaarrrgggghhhh. Beta Blogger...

...leads to...

...aaarrrggghhhhhh. Over-weening confidence in non-existent computer code skills...

...leads to...

...aaaarrrrgggghhhh. The realisation that I am computer-illiterate...

...and...

...aaaarrrggghhh. Deep-down, suspect I may never learn...

Maybe more tomorrow when I've taken a few deep breaths, heard some whalesong and figured this banner/graphic thing out. sigh. I can't go on like this.

PS. Maybe green?

Brief service announcement

Avast and away, for I have boarded the good ship beta blogger and twiddled with a few nobs. Nautical theme owing to over-indulgence in The Blue Planet this weekend. I now want to give it all up to become a marine biologist. Also the bathroom was flooded last night around midnight. Apologies to downstairs neighbour who may or may not be a little damp. In a rare feat of psychic ability I had only that same day bought a new mop with "power-squeeze roller attachment". Spooky, I tell thee...

Finally, for anyone considering dining chez Peril & co. in the near future, you will be relieved to know that thanks to bookwormom's suggestion of ammonia, I was able to go to the chemist's (drug store), ask for "amonika", mime scrubbing while saying "oven" in Czech wrong, and eventually end up with a glorious choice of no less than three types of suitable cleaner. And the mop. And so, the quest for the clean grill has been achieved. More or less. *insertangelchorushere*

A quiet man

Honza is not one of those flighty types who emotes in public. Even when he speaks his facial muscles barely twitch. His voice is similarly controlled - he commits no feats of vocal daring. He never varies from a measured rhythm and tone, even when speaking in his native Czech.

When he switches to English, his mother tongue strongly affects the inflections of his speech. Most of his generation never believed they would use English as more than an academic exercise. The closest many came to hearing native speakers were ancient recordings of received pronounciation or illicit voices on fuzzy radios. Speaking Czech has trained him to place equal weight on each syllable and he pronounces them all with deliberation. When coupled with the uncertainty that comes from twisting his tongue around unfamiliar sounds, the result is a slow, driving monotone.

Everything about Honza is round: glasses, hands, face, cheeks, eyes, tummy and bald patch covered with dark fluff. This past weekend he went to his cottage in the mountains with his family for the public holiday.

Seventeen years ago, on the 17th November, Honza and 14,999 or so of his fellow students went on a government-sanctioned march through Prague. They said it was to commemorate the day that the Nazis closed all Czech universities and colleges, stormed Charles University, deported 1200 students to concentration camps and executed 9 student leaders after mass anti-Nazi protests at the funeral of Jan Opletal. Jan was a medical student had been killed in an anti-Nazi demonstration some days earlier.

Fifty years later, Honza and his fellow students marched with anti-Communist slogans. He went, he says, "because no one really knew, but we thought something might be changing." They continued past its official end and walked to Narodni Trida. There, riot police blocked in and attacked the demonstrators. Rumours started that another student had been killed. That evening, students and actors in Prague agreed to go on strike.

By the following Monday, a mass demonstration in Prague attracted 100,000 people. The protests escalated and spread through the country until the 28th when the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia ceded its monopoly on power.

Honza has no photos of his velvet revolutionary days to show his children. If he ever had long hair or wore tie-dyed jeans, he won't admit to it. At the time, he says, "no one wanted to stand out... or have their pictures taken, just in case..well, just in case. You didn't know, really, who was looking or what they were thinking."

Reasons to be cheerful. Part tři

(except it won't rhyme)

Public holiday tomorrow and since my cultural clock is still set to Greenwich, I'd forgotten about it until today (joy unbounded!). It brings in its merry wake:

Lie-in possibilities of the kind described by others (with lesser gifts of concentration) as hibernation.

No reason for work to ring this weekend (touch wood, particle board and skull).

I have a lead on a source of oven cleaner/ammonia.

New flatmates have now been in residence for almost a week and so far no one appears to have plans to inflict The Death Of Ten Thousand Paper Cuts, or The Hideous Torture Of Thirty-two Late-Night Flushes on anyone else. Too early to tell about The Horror Of The Mysterious Bowl Of Green Fur That Creeps At The Back Of The Fridge, but I am strong.

I have managed to not accidentally lock anyone in the flat thereby causing them to miss work and disturbing the delicate harmony of domestic life.

One of them has a student who has kicked things off a treat by giving her enormous quantities (ten of those posh 150g Swiss tablets) of chocolate.

They showed no sign of fear and dread when I revealed the Awful Truth Of The Late Evening Vocal Effects Produced Through The Living Room Wall By The Woman Next Door (in keeping with tradition, did so only after they had paid rent).

Tarry, tarry night

I give up. I mean, there's always the odd thing that you miss from other places called home. Usually it's food, sometimes it's entertainment. It could even be peculiar national customs (standing on the right, extreme cutlery, service with a snarl). But this? This is insane. This is a cleaning product.

Something is wrong with this picture. Smoked paprika? No problem. It's something you can reasonably ask a friendly compatriot to pick up if they're back in Blighty for the weekend. Friends and family can post emergency magazines. Well-trained sales assistants can be persuaded to sneer and ignore anyone who looks furtive and dresses badly enough. But oven cleaner? Oven Cleaner?

'Tis true. Over the last couple of weeks, my grail runneth over with caustic soda. And it's not even my oven, per se, that's the problem. It's actually the grill pan. While I was on holiday it seems to have acquired a thick layer of goo the consistency of road tar on a sunny day. The first notice of the problem was when cooking a pizza filled the flat with clouds of noxious black smoke.

Brillo pads and cream cleaner just won't touch this new blight on my domestic soul. I've used half a bottle of lemon-scented Cif, and destroyed three scrubbers in the process. Soaking it with vinegar merely gave the sludge a nice sheen. It's time for the big guns.

Except that the land that gave the world the dumpling-distribution cannon appears to be somewhat lacking in kitchen heavy artillery. I've spent hours scouring the aisles of various Alberts, branches of the well-known-supermarket-that-ate-the-world (sorry s-i-l, but desperate times and all that), and local potravinys (corner shops) for a heavy-duty bottle of noxious looking fluid bearing a picture of an oven with a little *ting* star of sparkling shininess and a skull and crossbones.

So far, nada. Not a sausage. Well, actually plenty of sausages, for this is sausage country and we are moving into sausage season. But sausages, no matter how old the horsemeat and how strong the garlic are of no use whatsoever. The slick is too goopy to beat into submission. Anyhow I have deep suspicions that the whole household environmental catastrophe may have been kicked off in the first place by the roasting of an unwise pig product. But nary a bottle, flask or spare lead container of nuclear waste to be found sloshing about anywhere in downtown Praha.

In desperation, I abandoned my devil-may-care insouciance and approached my cleanest-looking colleague for assistance, only to hear her proudly declare with a merry laugh, "We don't have that kind of oven." Oh, the shame. Presumably the oven, grill pan and baking trays in question have never been permitted to reach the state where only industrial-strength chemicals will suffice. The humiliation. I am unclean.

Some other cabbages

Oi. That's not a rose, that's a růže.

One of the things that tends to happen when I go off to live abroad is that my name changes. Not through any choice of mine, even that time I was on the run from a really big library fine. Honest, guv. But I've got one of those ordinary names that has versions in most European cultures. Because the name's been around for a while, it always seems to have a local variation which is usually spelled differently as well.

Versions 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 & 5.4 (western and southern slavic languages) of my name also come equipped with an enormous number of different nicknames, depending on language of origin. They decline like all the other Proper Nouns in the neighbourhood. But that's not all. My surname, owing to its anglophone-ness, doesn't benefit from this kind of linguistic upgrade but does get a bolt-on owing to my female gender. And so Peril becomes Perilova.

Somewhat disconcertingly, the correct form of address in this case, "Pani Perilova" is usually translated to "Mrs. Peril", even though I'm not married. This is because I'm too old to address as "Miss" and remain polite (yeah…). Of course, this ends up making me feel entirely too mature for my liking, or just looking around for my mother.

But it turns out that the -ova suffix is a matter of some hot 'n' fiery debate. Mrs. Jana finds it to be an absolute linguistic necessity. For her, it's up there with the proper declension of the masculine animate in the accusative. The world will stop turning before she leaves it off. Quoth she, "We are Czech, and we must speak the Czech language PROPERLY. This is correct. It is the way it is supposed to be."

But others find it, "…really stupid. Everybody knows that these words are foreign, and it's stupid to see them like this with Czech endings. They are foreign names, not Czech names. This isn't the proper way to write these names." I'll leave them to fight it out with knedliks at dawn.

All this is why when scanning the book racks, it's not unusual to see the works of Jude Deverauxova and Jude Deveraux side-by-side, depending on the translator/publisher's preference. It's also why I cherish a secret hope that the Paltrow/Martin offspring, Apple, will marry a chap called "Tern" and then write a book which is published in Czech translation by "Apple Ternova".

Given my childish amusement in such things, is it any wonder that when wandering around the cemetary at Vyšehrad this weekend (key phrase: "it's really nice here, when it's not raining") I was filled with delight to come across the memorial for Jakub Benda and his wife, Zdenka…

Of knedliks and kings.

Actually, queens (see below), but then there'd be no obvious connection with walruses...

Firstly, I must apologise to the entire Czech nation. For some reason, probably related to other dumpling-like potato-based products I have consumed in the past in other countries that were formerly located behind Mr.Churchill's famous ferrous window-dressing, I assumed that the noble and glorious knedlik was uniquely of potato origin. But it seems that nary a whiff of Mr. Raleigh's preferred New World tuber has made it into some of the recipes for this Czech culinary delight. And me having lived here for (on-and-off) five months, too. I hang my head in shame. Ignorant foreigner. No knedlik.

So although the knedlik distinctly resembles a squishy boiled spud in certain incarnations (unsliced), it actually resembles bread in others (sliced). It's all down to the recipe, flour, (potato or wheat) cooking and cook's creative muse du jour. Or which packet of ready-made frozen knedlik dough you buy in your local Albert supermarket. (None shall speak of the supermarket chain that ate the world, as a mark of respect for s-i-l's "commute from hell" period after construction above collapsed railway tunnel beneath on the main line via the Chilterns to Londinium.)

Knedlik dough is made from either potato flour, wheat flour or even mooshed-up bread, eggs and milk. Regardless of type, it's squeeshed into balls, boiled and served as an accompaniment to your favorite meat (pref. pig)'n'gravy-based main dish plus sauerkraut and PIVO (beer). Exciting variety can be obtained by stuffing the knedlik with things, mainly of the meat variety, drinking more PIVO, or taking the novelty approach to food service and delivering multiple smallish filled knedliky to the awestruck diner in a small brass cannon mounted on a wooden cheeseboard affair. This somehow seems more amazing if you drink more PIVO.

For the herbivores among us, the lack of acceptable gravy might make the knedlik a little hard to swallow. Inexplicably, despite the hordes of Czechs thundering through the mushroom groves (or fields, or patches, or rings) after the rains, straight-up pig-free mushroom ragout does not feature on many menus. But this is where the glorious and wonderful fruit, or "sweet" knedlik comes into its own. Yeasty or even soft cheese dough, filled with seasonal fruit compote, boiled and smothered in smetana (runnier than sour cream) or icing sugar or both. Mmmmm... My own bizarrely puritanical nutritional tendancies force me to class them as technically a dessert, but more reckless types do eat them as a main course.

One knedlik, two knedlik, three knedlik, four...

Fashunating fact only discovered while idly internetovating for knedlik recipes: the fore-runner of the slurpee (ICEE) was invented by a chap called Omar Knedlik who sold them in his Dairy Queen franchise. Queens, see?

Czech delicacies

Personally, I blame the intense discussion about knedlik (Czech potato dumplings) that proceeded these events for filling my mind with the most unlikely thoughts. I mean, there was some guy rattling on about how knedlik were like fine wine, or beer, to choose a more apt cultural metaphor. The taste had to be cultivated, but once acquired, the desire for potato dumplings would hold you in its deathly grasp for all time. No more would a victim, or their goulash meal accompaniments, be the same.

Fortunately for the fate of my dining future, I'm not one of the goulash-guzzling fraternity, but I was wholly absorbed as the gentleman described in halting terms his slow recovery from the knedlik-eating pit in which he had dwelt for so long.

Then, a discussion of my goulash-dodging tendancies steered the conversation into the calmer waters of mushroom-picking. This, the couple described as a traditional Czech sport, "like hunting, but not so violent." Throughout the year, it's possible to see people tripping through the city streets with baskets filled with freshly-foraged fungi (look, kids, alliteration!). Wicker baskets, even. People even take special mushroom-hunting holidays (more alliteration!).

So I had food fantastic on the brain when I headed off to exercise my feeble Czech language skills and deal with my share of the meal bill. To pay for my fried aubergine salad with warm stinky garlic and balkan cheese spread (mmmmmm...), I announced to the (fluent-English-speaking) waitress in my best "stress-on-the-first-syllable-banged-out-on-the-desk" Czech that I had eaten "smaženy lístek". Sounds good, you might think.

Except that Czech for aubergine is "lílek". Last night, dear reader, I proudly announced to the waitress and half the patrons of the restaurant that I had eaten fried menu.

Flat to the future

Astonishingly, this is a completely different individual to those mentioned before.

"Hello?"
"Hello. This is K---. I am here for the flat."
"K---. Have we spoken before?"
"I am here to see the flat."
"Yes, but you are new to me. How did you hear about the flat?"
"You are not comfortable to live with me?"
"I want to know how you got this number."
"You don't want to live with strange person? I am a good person to live with. I like people. I have a job. I will not torment you."
"That's fine, I'm sure. But who gave you my phone number?"
"I work for [insert name of well-known courier company here]."
"Yes, but how did you hear about the flat?"
"I live all over the world. Shanghai, Chicago."
"Where in PRAGUE did you hear about this flat?"
"I live ten years in Chicago. I am an operator."
"WHO GAVE YOU MY PHONE NUMBER?" (catching, see?)
"R---.* He did not like the flat, but I do."
"Oh. I am sorry, but I've found someone else."** (should've done that six questions ago)
"I live ten years in Chicago."
"I am sorry, but there is no room to rent here."
"No room?"
"No. No room anymore."
"You sure?"
"Yes, quite sure."
"It's not because you don't want to live with me?"
"No. There is someone else."
"Oh. Okay. Bye."
"Bye."

Drrrrr....
Five minutes
Beep.

Text message: "Hello. This is K---. I am sorry if my phone call offended you. Will you go out for drink with me?"

*Viewing no-show. Apparently psychic.

**At the time, this was a lie. Luckily, didn't mess karma. I think.

Snooooowwwww!!!!!!!

It's clearly catching

... and then rain.

I've been too preoccupied with other matters to mention it, but I am hereby fulfilling the naturalised-culturally-enforced demands incumbent upon me to comment on the weather and consequent state of the national traffic and rail networks. Gosh, it fair warms the cockles (and mussels alive-alive-o) of my icy northern heart.

Actually, the snow happened last Thursday morning and went by lunch, but there was a visible layer of slushy white stuff for at least a couple of hours. The sort that grinds the UK* transport network to a halt. And it has been cold. Warmed up a bit now, though.

On the matter of cultural obligation, be warned that house prices could feature next. (May-be it's be-cause oi'm a Landanaahh...)

Blame blogger - it went down for aaaages. Oh, and I'm emotionally strained from dealing with flatmate candidates. What is it about a)the price, b)the location or c)the advert, that attracts these rather odd characters? Or is this like those occasional phases I go through of being chatted up at bus stops and in front of estate agents' windows by scary bearded old men who stink of rough cider and wee?

*Of course, being in Prague, everyone apart from me smiled knowingly and said helpful things like, "Snow? You call that snow? This is your first winter here, right?"

Did I mention how scary I find this sort of comment and how it makes me want to rush out and buy a portable igloo and large, angry walrus (useful for subduing hordes of hungry citizens after my stash of baked beans, or worse... Who knew I'd be this damaged as a consequence of studying post-revolutionary Russian winter famines at an early age? And yes, I know I'm in the Czech Rep., which is nowhere NEAR Russia, but I'm still working at hammering my stupid, deeply-entrenched western ethnocentricities, generalisations and ignorance into submission.)

Punch-tuation

Hi!!!

My name is Z--! I was very EXCITED!!! to read about your flat! PLEASE!!!! answer IMMEDIATELY!!! I am DESPERATE!!! to find a NEW PLACE to live!!!! I am living in a HOTEL!!!! and it is VERY EXPENSIVE!!!!

PLEASE!!!! call me VERY!!!! SOON!!! I DESPERATELY!!! want to find a new flat NOW!!!!!!!!

Do you have INTERNET??????????

PLEASE CALL ME SOON!!!!!!! I must move in QUICKLY!!!!!

I am a VERY FRIENDLY!! HAPPY!! PERSON!!!!! Also CLEAN!!!!

CALL ME PLEASE!!!!!!!! I am VERY HAPPY to hear from you!!! Also EXCITED!!!!

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

I have a pathological fear of extreme punctuation. It's not irrational as this person is clearly insane. Eeek.

Flat-tery

Going nowhere

"Hello, I am phoning about the flat."
"Yes?"
"When are you leaving?"
"Sorry?"
"When are you leaving? When can I move in?"
"I'm not leaving. It's a flatshare."
"It's not a flat?"
"Yes, it is a flat. But we share it. It's a flatshare."
"What is that?"
"It is a shared flat. A shared apartment."
"It is an apartment? An apartment is a flat."
"Yes. It's an apartment where everybody lives together."
"You are sharing a room?"
"No. A flat. An apartment. It's a flatshare. Everybody has their own room."
"There is no bathroom?"
"No. There is a bathroom. We share the bathroom."
"Everybody has a bathroom?"
"There is one bathroom. There are three bedrooms. There is one kitchen. Everybody has their own bedroom. We all use the same bathroom and kitchen."
"Everybody is in the bathroom together?"
"No. It is a flatshare. This means we all use the bathroom. We share the bathroom."
"Everybody shares the bathroom all together?"
"There is a separate toilet."
"Oh."
"It is a flatshare. A shared flat. A shared apartment. We live all together. Is this what you are looking for?"
"Yes, yes. A flat."
"You want to rent a room in a flat."
"Yes, yes. A one-room flat."
"This is a three-room flat."
"Three rooms? In the flat?"
"There are three bedrooms. Everybody rents one room. They share the rent."
"Oh."
"Is this what you are looking for?"
"Yes. When are you moving out?"

Dunno...

Cheeeeeaaaatttt.

Yep. Brazen hussy cheatamacphile. That's me. These came via email from the shy and retiring I. But it's sort of thematic, and I did edit/weed a bit. And I'm reallyreallyreally tired and my brain is like soup because, well, just because. Because, because, because, because, becaaaaauuuuse. Great. Now I'm hearing munchkins.

Aviation quotes, no idea of their authenticity. But they're still better than anything my poor brain can come up with tonight. Toniiigght, toniiiigght, there'll be a moon toniii-- aaarrrgghh

"You, you, and you ... Panic. The rest of you, come with me." – USMC Gunnery Sergeant

"If the wings are travelling faster than the fuselage, it's probably a helicopter -- and therefore, unsafe."

Advice given to RAF pilots during WWII: "When a prang (crash) seems inevitable, endeavour to strike the softest, cheapest object in the vicinity as slow and gently as possible."

Basic Flying Rules: "Try to stay in the middle of the air. Do not go near the edges of it. The edges of the air can be recognized by the appearance of ground, buildings, sea, trees and interstellar space. It is much more difficult to fly there."

Packmule

"Are you carrying anything for anyone other than yourself, madam?"

Errr….

1 book West Indian cookery (soft-back, recipes include jerk seasoning and Guiness punch)
1 large box Yorkshire Tea
1 large block Irish extra-strong cheddar (store-brand)
1 packet organic bacon (no moral objections to carrying products of animals that died happy, it appears)
20 security key fobs
1 box "Celebrations" chocolates
3 trashy magazines and a "Hello" to lend an aura of respectability to the proceedings.
1 book piano nocturnes (Chopin)
30 concert programmes (with peak performance stapling effect)
3 half-tubes toothpaste (sorry, oh bearer of the collective suitcase, but I don't want to check my bag)
1 gentleman's disposable razor in plastic bag (ditto)
1 nearly used tube shaving gel, "Jill Monroe" brand (sorry, oh bearer of the painfully bulging suitcase, but the zipper on my bag is broken)
1 box sausage rolls (mini)
1 jar Thai red curry paste (large, extra-hot)
4 rolls toilet tissue (extra-large, extra-soft, extra pillows - this last person is a forward planner)

Courier fees:
Percentage chocolate and first dibs on the caramels
Bottle fizzy water
Discourse on leopard print as a fashion choice
Mug tea
Bowl pea soup with mint
One W.Indian veggie dish containing ackee and cooked to perfection for dinner
Explanation of the meaning of the word "jerk"
Three filthy Czech phrases, with context-appropriate translation
Begruding gratitude of IT dept.
Mouse

And miraculously, my luggage was no. 2 off the carousel twice in one day. I am the champion. I can be bought.

New words for old.

Loanwords came up in the comments in my last post on things orthographic. I've mentioned the impact of Czech words on English once or twice, but have somewhat neglected the reverse process. And of course, what with English being the devious language-invading hydra that it is, there are a quite a few of them.

Despite the howls of outrage from language purists, English loanwords are no bad thing for the anglophone language learner. For one thing, it's always helpful to have bits and pieces of vocabulary that sound the same as words you know, but with a funny accent. It gives you something to say in those loooong, awkward pauses. And besides, the borrowing language often takes its revenge and shoves a few false friends in a learnerly direction.

Czech has four main groups of verbs that conjugate in similar ways, depending on the ending of the infintive (leaving out exceptions group here). The third group are verbs that end -ovat, and tend to be formed from nouns. Foreign imports tend to find their way into this category, which means that for nonce, my favorite activities in Czechland are the following. (At least as far as Mrs. Jana and our agonising Monday-morning, "What did you do this weekend?" conversation is concerned.):

plánovat
pózovat
modelovat
telfonovat
fotografovat
testovat
cyklovat
relaxovat
luxovat (think Electrolux and hoovers)
waxovat
faxovat
internetovat

(May have messed up some diacritics, but the accent on a vowel is meant to make it long.)

I like the "x" ones best. Long may they live. And may I humbly offer the following words at a modest rate of interest to the Czech language:

blingovat: to ornament oneself in a roccoco fashion
hardhatovat: to protect oneself from the consequences of defenestration
alfalfovat: to forage for green leafy vegetables in the supermarket
eskimovat: to buy flannel bedlinen
muffinovat: to over-indulge in palačinky - Czech pancakes
navelovat: to use one's higher consciousness to contemplate the texture of an orange

Fleeced.

This is probably going to scupper something, and I'll return on Sunday night to a white-out, but we've been having lovely weather lately. Chilly mornings that make me contemplate gloves, and lovely clear days. Even the rain on the weekend was the warm gentle stuff of early autumn.

All of which perturbs me somewhat, because my original notions of Czechland were that it was a land-locked country, forever prey to the chilly claw and howling maw of Icy Winter. A bit like many think of Canada, akshully, so I should've known better. But since I made my first foray here in April I've been experiencing ye olde Bohemian spring/summer. Which has been lovely.

In fact, the closest point of reference I have is a trip here late last November when the snow lay thick on the ground. Although it wasn't exactly bikini weather, it wasn't particularly bad either. But when I mentioned this at the time, one of my colleagues commented, "Ah no. It's not so cold this week, but last week it was minus 15."

Eeek.

So with this in mind, I've been making shopping lists to help me see out the season in fine style. When you start looking, it's amazing what you can find in the fine fabric that is known as flannel. Woollens have never seemed so wonderful. Fear makes manolos (not that I wear them, but I'm all alliteration crazy today) out of mukluks. Now, where did I leave my thermal nose-guard?

Meme-ries

A book meme

Cheating slightly on my content rules, but this came through via email, and dammit, it's relevent. Anyhow, it's sneaking under the wire because I won't tag anyone, but if anyone would care to be tagged then they're more than welcome to post here, there or anywhere. Or just sing along.

Total number of books owned:

Absolutely no idea. Vast numbers. Reinforced floor demanding quantities. Unfortunately they aren't all in the same place, or even the same country. It boils down to:

40 smallish boxes (bigger than a breadbin, smaller than a teachest) in storage,
Carrier bag at one relative's. I think it's a supermarket one.
Shoe box at another's. Male relative, size 13 feet.
15 or so boxes in another's attic.
(none of these people know about each other…)

Two shelves here.

All this, despite my occasional ruthless periods when I cut a swathe through the paperbacks like the barbarian hordes of old. I'm slowly coming round to the notion of eventually retiring to a house constructed entirely of used novels. I'll probably tile the roof with old category fiction.

Last book bought:

These days, I buy in bulk when I get to a bookstore that sells in a language I can read. Some of them can see me coming from miles away and rub their hands in glee - I suspect it's the wild-eyed stare or something. Anyhow, I'm in a dark and grisly mood at the moment, so last trip's haul included:

Petty Treason Madeleine E. Robins
Triptych Karen Slaughter
Break no Bones Kathy Reichs
About three Lindsay Davis (glomming)
Sacred Pain Ariel Glucklich (have read it, but it was in the sale rack so couldn't resist - yes, he needs an umlaut, but the yesterday's post exhausted my supply of diacritics)
The Magic Circle of Rudolf II Peter Marshall
The Surgeon of Crowthorne Simon Winchester - the OED, murder and insanity. What's not to love?

Last book read:

That's not on the above list? Uhh… There's a half-read Angela Knight floating around the flat that I just haven't been able to finish. Not what I fancy right now. I've usually got a fiction and a non-fiction on the go. Just finished off Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (Charles Seife)

Five books you remember:

I think I'll do ones I haven't mentioned before here.

So, in some kind of chronological order of encounter.

Anne of Green Gables I was so obsessed with this series as a child that I used Mum's rouge and red felt-tip markers to try to make my hair red. Haven't read it in years, because I'm worried the magic won't be there.

Pigs Have Wings. Actually, I want to say everything by P.G. Wodehouse. This just floated to the surface of my brain 'cos it has pigs in it and is the most recent one I've picked up. Perfect comfort reads, with added glamour factoid: he was published by Mills & Boon. Really. Him and Georgette Heyer and Jack London were all stablemates.

Good Omens is responsible for the first time I ever managed to clear a space on a train through uncontrollable insane laughter. Although the mildly goth outfit and aura of teenage angst probably helped. I think I own about three copies in varying states of decay because I have to read it annually.

The Age of Extremes. I could have picked a tonne of stuff in this area, but it's all pretty much Hobsbawm's fault. Well, him and the poison dwarf, aka sixth form history teacher. In a major moment of intense geek-girl squeeing excitement, I actually got to touch the man's hand (Hobsbawm's, not the dwarf's) a couple of years ago. Since it took place during a ceremony thingy, I didn't have the chance to actually say anything to him except a choked-up "Thank you". All told, this may have been for the better, since impartial-yet-caring witnesses noted that I was pretty well incoherent. Nonetheless, there is Actual Photographic Evidence of me holding the hand of Eric J. Hobsbawm. Oh, and he said a nice thing too. I did wash the limb eventually.

The Strange Hours Travelers Keep (August Kleinzahler). This was a present from someone I didn't know very well who magically managed to get it exactly right. Just fantastically good poetry, words, ideas. Love it.

Spellczech

(heh heh heh hehehehe)

Think about it. I have. On long journeys up escalators. In supermarket queues. While addressing postcards. Whither the "Cz"? I mean, the Czechs don't do it - they invented a handy little hook called a haček (rhymes with hatchet) to do the job. They speak Čestina in the Česka Republika, děkujuverymuch.

Their European neighbours aren't too bothered about creating extreme orthographic weirdness despite the sound not being a standard in some of their languages. They just cobble together a few random consonants and leave it at that. Thus "Tchèque", "Checa", "Ceca", "Tschechien" (Okay, maybe the Germans...). Or they fake it as best they can with exotic-sounding versions like: "Tsekki" "Tjecken" and "Txekiar".

But these languages use the same clusters of letters (aka digraphs, trigraphs and assorted multigraphs if you're in a pedantic mood) for similar sounds in other words, even if they're loaned ones. Whereas Czech? Well, there's "Czech" and ermm… "czech", and ermmm… "Czerny". If you're of a musical bent. And he was Viennese of Bohemian origins. Well, they did think about these things differently back in the day. After that exhaustive list, we're pretty much left with "Czar". Which you say "Tsar". As in "Twinkle, twinkle, little Tsar." (Hahahhhaaahhaaahahaha)

But if it's not from the Czech, and it's not from some weird English historical thingy, what is it? According to various online dictionaries it's actually 19th century from the Polish. Unfortunately, I don't have handy access to the OED, so no citations or anything. But why Polish?

Digging a bit, things actually get more interesting. Since it kicked off around the 10th century, Czech's pretty much always been usually written in Roman letters, rather than Cyrillic, but is full of sounds (aka phones) that don't exist in Latin. So after getting annoyed with just writing the letter closest to the sound they wanted, people invented clusters of letters to represent these sounds. Like English does with "th". But whereas English uses "h" to indicate that the preceding letter should be softened, it seems that Czechs used the letter "z" to do the same job. Hungarian and Polish still do this, which accounts for those eye-popping words that seem to twist their tongue in the face of human physiognomy.

Buuuuttt… then along came a man called Jan Hus. (Sounds like "house" and "moose" in a really bad fake Scots accent). In between sermons, rabble-rousing, reading Wyclif and generally making a nuisance of himself to the Holy See, he apparently found time to pen the stirring work, De orthographia Bohemica. Well, it's at least attributed to him, and since he was immolated (nice word, nasty death) at Council of Constance in 1415 he hasn't been in a position to confirm or deny things for quite some time. In it, he proposed a system of diacritics (little dots and slashes above letters) that would almost completely replace diagraphs. From now on Czech, sorry, Ċech (he left the "ch" in) schoolchildren would no more cower 'neath the tyranny of silly spelling rules. Well, that was the plan, anyhow.

The hostest with the moshtest

When in a foreign country, if offered mysterious liquid in an unlabelled, re-used, green plastic soda bottle, the normal response is as follows:
"What is it?" sniffing dubiously at plastic cup.
"It's good. Drink some!" genial offer from smiling host.
"But what is it?" more dubious sniffing.
"It's healthy. Very good for you."

These are danger words. Any drink touted as "healthy" by locals usually is only so in the sense of "healthy" competition. As in Darwinian competition. As in, if you can drink 2 litres of this liquid without undergoing immediate and dramatic liver meltdown, and retain the ability to bear children (some places, I think they make visitors drink this sort of thing in an icy stream) you are a survivor of the fittest.

So this sort of offer at quarter past nine in the morning is bound to make the gooseflesh rise. Especially as the liquid is the sort of murky brown that I last saw while ambling through South Bohemia's peaty swamps.

"Drink! Drink!"
"Ahh… It's quite early and I haven't finished my tea yet."
"No. It's healthy. You must drink." Three beaming faces watch the cup in my hand assiduously. I attempt to discern any trace of guile or deviousness in their eyes. There is none. This makes me more nervous.

I sniff. I sip. "Oh! It's apple juice." Knees go weak with relief.

"It is not apple juice. It is mošt!"
"Moshed?"
"Yes, yes. Mošt! It is just the apples, prrrressed." Mirek demonstrates the prrrressing of an invisible bushel of apples between his hands.
"But not apple juice."
"No. It is just the apples. Nothing else."

Petr likewise squishes some invisible apples. "Mirek's friend makes it. We take apples to his factory and he presses them."
Mirek adds, "Yes. They press many fruits. His parents make the alcohol."
"Ah, I see. But this isn't alcohol."

"No. It is not. It is mošt." Before, uh…" Jacek pauses. No one really talks about "before" here. "Before... In that time, we could not buy apple juice in the boxes in the shop. So we took the apples and pressed them. Now, this is not so common."
"I see. Why so?"
"The apple juice in boxes is different. It lasts longer but is full of, full of… chemical things."
"Preservatives?"
"Yes, preservatives. Mošt, you must drink quickly. But it has better flavour. Very healthy." Mirek and Petr nod in agreement and we all take a sip of healthy, short-life mošt.

Maybe it's just that the tea's so bad...

Last night I unsuccessfully attempted to mime (in Czech), "Please kind sir, I beg you, do not froth the milk before putting it into my tea… Pleeeeaaasssee…. Noooooooooo!!!!!!"

Perhaps it was the lack of white facepaint and stripy jumper, but it didn’t work. Paper cup of tea arrived at the end of the station with a lovely frothy head that would do a cappuccino, or even a Belgian-style serving of lager proud. I wept. It always seems to be the way. You spend time in a place where good coffee is steam-pressed by a million precision-engineered geysers, and the tea just goes wonky. If the tea is perfectly brewed nectar of the gods, then the coffee is made by someone running warm tap water over a few clumps of petrified instant coffee and shaking it about in a polystyrene cup.*

All of which leaves me, a tea-drinker at heart who has a fondness for really good coffee, somewhat bemused. I mean, why go to the coffee place and order tea? That's just asking for trouble. But sometimes, I just gotta dice with the gods. Live on the edge. Oh yeah, baby.

So given the deep and abiding excitement of my life, is it any wonder that I enjoy the odd spot of evil-villain(ess) excitement in my reading material? Possibly not. Nevertheless, I've never really had character identification as one of my top ten reading requirements. When I encounter this sort of bad dudette, I don't gush, "Ooh how thrilling! Secretly I have always wanted to claw out my enemies' hearts but lack both courage and pointy fingernails. At last, I can vicariously satisfy this thrill within the confines of a novel!"

Of course, I'm not going to deny the odd fantasy about bashing people's heads in after a stressful day. But it's a big step from that to thinking, "Aha! I have at long last discovered my soulmate, the one person in this crazy, mixed-up world who can truly understand me!" As I said, I don't actually like her. But compared to the witchy-washy heroine who's out to defeat the Mega-Evil That Lurks 'Neath The City, the villainess has more internal conflict, more personal growth and more tension. Could it be that a lifeless heroine makes the scary lady come alive by comparison?

*leaving out places Middle East in this, because there both tea and coffee are good, but neither taste the way I usually expect.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

In an effort to do my bit to reduce my guilt over the effects of my recent zooming about in flying machines I've gone and forked out a load of cash to make my year (so far) carbon neutral. Observe my shiny green halo. *ting!*

But all the effort to decide whether I'd get someone to plant a small woodland glen, or just sponsor a wildfowl whanging windfarm has exhausted me. I am thus inspired to reach back into the dawn of time (or around October last year) and haul out a very old rant that I never got around to finishing or posting anywhere handy. These things happen. It never got posted because it was too damn long.

Paddling about in the primordial soup that is my "drafts" folder hasn't really helped much in the length department. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if it had grown. So I'm going to chop it up into manageable bits, edit them a tad and then post them up in chunks. Genius plan to keep blog entries up in a busy week, methinks. And now, without further ado, I bring you, the unholy tapeworm that is:

I don't like you much, but your friend's kinda hot… Part 1

(It's all about books, and it's long - be warned)

I've just finished reading a book. Shock. Horror. Was okay. Again, falling off seat with astonishment. Hero and heroine both suitably imbued with purportedly likeable qualities? Check. Lively action scenes? Check. Good dash of healthy animal spirits (no, not the Keynsian ones)? Check. Fiendishly evil villain? Che--.

Ahhh, well here's the rub: I didn't like the villain(ess) - too tame. I didn't even love the villain(ess) - she's a bad guy, right? But I loved her scenes. Don't get me wrong, I'd run off screaming into the night barefoot over broken glass at the possibility of an real-life encounter, however unlikely, cos y'know she was baaad. And scary. And a people-eating human-possessing monster from the depths of the underworld with claws, scales and freaky glowy eyes. So I doubt she'd be overly impressed by my fascination with her inner demons if she stumbled over me cowering in a darkened alley. She'd likely eat me for being annoying.

But dammit, she was interesting. She had internal conflicts a-go-go. Best of all, while she was eeeeeviiilllll, she was interesting eeevvvillllll. She wasn't some two-dimensional monster stalking the pages like a badly-produced publicity bookmark. Yes that's right, kids. A character I'm pretty confident I do not like, but still want to read about. It's not such a big step. After all, I read about real-life bad guys all the time. Others do as well. So what's the appeal?

(to be continued)

More cheese

Some Czech-related news. Czechs in the news in fact. Not just the country, which seems to have become the location for all manner of conferences (it was in Prague that they decided a couple of months ago that Pluto was no longer a planet). The new Miss. World has been crowned, and she (for it is still a she) is a Czech student by the name of Tat'ana Kucharova. Apparently she likes sports, her pets and "listening to music with a nice melody". It seems her favorite food is chicken, rather than the traditional Czech dish of fried cheese with tartar sauce and some potatoes. Which probably helped her no end in her quest for world beauty domination.

Interestingly, last month Warsaw's conservative administration altered a poster advertising the contest with a discreet white scarf after deciding it was too racy since it depicted a mermaid with an artistic "wardrobe malfunction". Fortunately, Ms. Kucharova and her fellow candidates appear to have avoided that hazard. No one ended up in Narnia or anything.

In another beauty competition mercifully unlikely to feature a "wardrobe malfunction" but still featuring persons of Czech origin, posters are up everywhere for elections to the senate. Now I only have the foggiest idea of Czech electoral procedures, so I'm not going to dwell on these here. In brief, things are a bit iffy, constitution-wise. But frankly, looking at these characters' faces on the way to work doesn't give me huge faith in the imminent future.

None of them really look as if they like animals very much at all, even the one chap who resembles an aerodynamic stoat with a little grey moustache. There's another truly terrifying woman who greets me with a manic grin and hugely-shadowed eyes from the lamp-post by the metro entrance. And then there are also a couple of other likely lads who look as if they enjoy regular tasty snacks of fried cheese with extra sauce much more than Ms. Kucharova.

Of course, many would argue that elections are fought on policies, not potato consumption. But funnily enough there aren't many actual words on these posters.

Bok, Bok

So much more than a mis-spelling of "Book, Book"

It is a truth universally accepted that a family during the festive season must be in want of good telly. Fortunately, the folks at Shaw (Canadian digital provider) have come up with the ultimate solution for Thanksgiving (which is today if you're in Canah-diah): Turkey TV. All day long, lucky lucky Canadians celebrating the holiday can tune in and watch a turkey being roasted. Live. (Just the filming, not the turkey, one hopes) With occasional basting. There is even the roasting of vegetables and the stoking of fires. Most festive indeed.

Moi? I got to watch the little plane move slowly over a digital map of England, the North Sea, Belgium, Germany and the Czech Rep. Not a golden brown roasted parsnip in sight. Not even a baguette, since the gastronomes on the incoming flight from Milano had scoffed the lot. I was offered a "snak-pak" as a substitute, but refrained on the grounds that the spelling would give me indigestion.

But I am thankful. Mainly and rather selfishly, I'm thankful that I don't have to get on another plane for four whole days. Even a floatplane. I'm on bended knees with gratitude that for the last couple of trips I've come out good well hunting in the charter flight/cheap airline seating roulette, and ended up at one end of a row graced by an unoccupied middle seat and a non-psychopathic neighbour with progressive ideas about hygiene at the far end (now I've gone and done it…) Then there's the business of the rediscovered, unsquished mocha brownie extravaganza at the bottom of my carry-on bag. And of course, I'm also thankful for the usual: family, friends, sentience, fruit, opposable thumbs, the recent dvd release of season 2 of Green Wing.

So happy thanksgiving to those who celebrate it today, even if your turkey is only virtual (and by that, of course I don't mean turkey twizzlers). And happy advance thanksgiving planning to those south of the 49th parallel who have to wait another month(?) but may even be looking up pumpkin pie recipes as I type. In case anyone's wondering, I'll be having eggs tonight. But I might decorate them with a drumstick-shaped splodge of hot sauce.

Le Wibble

Well the plan was to dodge the jet-lag bullet by going and coming back so fast that my pineal gland barely noticed anything funny going on with the big yellow thing hovering in the big blue thing. Unfortunately, it appears to possess a rudimentary cunning and the sea of clouds shown in the plane's "flightcam" (position: forward) bestirred it to hideous action. I'm currently wrestling against the urge to sleep… sleepp….slleeppzzzz…

wha? sorry?

Oh yeah…my only aid the mighty coffee and the mightier still chocolate. But even these valiant weapons are beginning to flag, and I seem to be stuck in a mid-Atlantic time zone, perhaps one just off the coast of St. Helena.

A fascinating, witty and brilliant post came to me in one of those lucid dreams: the sleep-deprived kind that seem so real while sitting in a micro-chair four thousand or so feet above the Atlantic swells and distinguished only from its neighbours by a peculiar lump at mid-hamstring level. Unfortunately I've forgotten it. All I can remember wondering is how far I would actually have travelled across the surface of the earth if I bounded forward a couple of feet down the aisle towards the drinks trolley.

The post may have had something to do with float planes. Or parrots. I'm not entirely sure. And to be fair, it was probably less unmitigated genius and more along the lines of "Wha-fooo. Flrrrr... Parrot heehee means the life of the sailor. Oh my. Mmmm... Flffrry pillow. Wsfrgt my head stugg nunder armwrest?" But in the finest spirit of blogger, it's entirely unrecoverable. So instead I should probably reveal that I did end up taking a float plane (couldn't find the helicopter terminal), but the parrot was a completely different conversation altogether.

I probably shouldn't be operating this heavy machinery.

Extra! Extra!

Exciting new book-related novelty discovered yesterday!

Airport duty-free normally holds very little appeal to me. I'm not one for perfume, booze or fags. The clothes shops are all a tad upmarket for my scruffy tastes, and full of scary assistants that wear too much make-up and give my very disreputable carry-on luggage their most professional scornful glare. I've taken up the habit of not buying top ten bestsellers in regular bookshops because they're the only ones that ever seem to appeal in the better airport bookshops. The worse ones are where Sidney Sheldon books go to die.

However yesterday, as I hauled my appallingly-to-a-shop-assistant-non-Burberry-clad self up to the departure gate while chatting to rpc via mobile, I was compelled to interrupt the flow of our conversation.

"Oh my god, it's a book vending machine. In the airport."
"I see," says rpc, being his usual supportive self. "Tell me about it." (or words to that effect - maybe I just imagined those ones, but they're true to the spirit of the man and I have hardcore jet lag).
"Well, it's a vending machine. But with books in it, not chocolate. They're covered in clingfilm wrappers and everything."

Pause while I reverently stare at the glass case of a red metal box. I note the books are not the same price as chocolate, but are not apparently over-priced either. Downside is the lack of ability to read back-blurb or browse. Upside is that I can imagine these mushrooming all over the country, in motorway service stations, train stations, left luggage offices, work breakrooms and so forth. Imagine someone wandering into a service station thinking, "Ooo. I'll just get a packet of mints. But look, a book vending-machine. Perhaps I'll pick up a paperback too."

"So what sort of boks are there, then?" (more support from rpc, who understands these things).
"Ermm... the usual. Dan Brown in the top row, the latest Jodi Picoult, Zadie Smith, Kellerman and No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency a Harry Potter, some colouring books, a few Sidney Sheldon..." Reverential silence as I realise that I've already read the books that appeal to me. "Maybe a colouring book. I could do with some felt-tips on the long flight." Not sleeping for 24 hours does put me in the mood for colouring.
"Yes. Well you'll have to blog about it."

Can't help feeling that like the German cigarette vending machines on the street (I'd only ever seen them safely indoors in pubs/clubs before) it's the novelty, rather than the content that appeals.

A bit about the ???

Frankly, I wish it could be more exciting than it's turned out. "???" looks mysterious and cool. It has potential. (Like the Riddler, but without the stupid leotard... Err..., lets just skip lightly over that analogy.) The truth, as always, turns out to be far more mundane. Without going into one of those subjects that dare not speak its name, namely wErk, I was originally shipped out for a mere summer season in luverly Praha. Apparently it was because this is where they keep the enormous cold war technology brain sucking machines of the James Bond (Roger Moore) era, and they wanted to extract every particle of information from my grey matter prior to my departure. AKA training. In fact, brain hoovers would have been more entertaining.

Originally the plan was to then find another job October-time elsewhere, but I've now accepted a new job here so hip-hip-hooray for the lovely landlord and Mrs.Jana is chortling all the way to the bank as I sign on for another term.

So the "???" regarding location in the short-term can now be removed from my profile, when I get around to it. Luckily, to keep things interesting, the lastminute.com nature of the whole thing means I have a tonne of other things to sort out that I'd previously put off until the end of the year. The intention was to deal with them when I had more time. Now I have less of that commodity than before and have to do everything from a foreign country too. Roll on November.

Consequently, the "???"s have been let loose to frolic all through my life. Which is both good and bad, and leads me to my latest dilemma. This week I have to whizz off to God's Own Country for family reasons. 'twill be an occasion on the sadder side of life, but had thought to cheer myself up at the end and brace myself for jetlag hell and hideous charter-flight-return-induced-dvt by adding to my small-but-perfectly-formed list of more unusual methods of transport I have used. The float plane has been done before but I wouldn't object to a repeat, especially if I can do it from a different harbour. But in the course of my research, I have discovered that there's also the possibility of the never-before-experienced helicopter ride... oooo???

Boing boing

The Maasai are possibly East Africa's most well-known tribe. They're renowned for their warrior fierceness, their cattle currency, and their long thin silhouettes which appear against the setting sun in numerous postcards. Sometimes near a thorn tree, sometimes just with a spear. The young men are also famous for their demonstrations of youth and vigour in the form of jumping very high from a standing position. To do this, quite flexible achilles tendons are required, which is also helpful exercise if you're interested in improving your running style.

This jumping business is often described as a dance, but I can report that some Maasai also boogie, bounce and hip-hop. They may even do the funky chicken, but the night I saw a Maasai man dancing, the music wasn't appropriate. They play mainly reggae in the Come-Back Club, Watamu. In any case, he looked far cooler than the sprinkling of badly aging wazungu on the prowl for younger, more attractive Kenyan *koff* girlfriends and *koffkoff* boyfriends. Since they both share the same fondness for jewellery, and he'd checked his spear at the door, it must be the lack of a slightly-too-small, uncannily black toupee that does it.

Parklife

In Nairobi National Park, the speed limit is 20km/h and warthogs and children have right of way. Pets are prohibited by law, and only wild animals are allowed. Wild children raised by warthogs are probably covered. What's amazing is that this enormous wildlife park backs onto the city. So as drivers curse and shake their fists at the zebra that have a tendancy to block roads rather like herds of Welsh sheep (only stripier), tourists who have had their fill of black and white photography can admire the city skyline in the distance and watch small planes flying into Wilson Airport.

At the other end of the park, about 100 km or so away from the city, there aren't any fences. It just sort of stops being nature reserve at the Athi river and starts being something else. Buffet, perhaps. In the middle it's a black rhino sanctuary and is the scene of the summer wildebeest migration. I missed both these things, but did manage to see loads of buffalo (not shuffling so much as snuffling) and a pair of lions having a snooze. So that's two out of my big five.

The male lion spent most of his time hunkered down in the grass pretending to be a furry leaf and graciously ignoring the over-excited tourists and the enormous green lorry of the KWS (Kenya Wildlife Service) as it thundered past several times. The female on the other hand was sprawled out in a pose remarkably similar to the one the dog-niece adopts when she flaunts herself illicitly, pr0n-star stylee, on elder bro's fatboy when I do the dog-sitting. So you heard it here first. Dog is merely in touch with her inner lioness, and I am her enabler. Rar.

Toto-lly doomed

They are testing the internal radio system in the office today, and consequently ABBA Gold has been now playing for the last half hour over the announcement system. Despite the fact that I don't actually own this album and haven't listened to it all the way through since my student daze, I know it so well I can actually remember the track order, to say nothing of all the words. It's not right on a Wednesday morning.

Related to this, I realised last night that the noise the boiler at home makes as it switches itself on is identical in rhythm to the opening drum riff of Blondie's "Call Me." Also, when I flew up from Malindi to Nairobi the other day, I looked out to my left and saw Kilimanjaro rising above, er… Tsavo East.

(Favorite bit of that journey: the security screeing at Malindi airport. Two men in a uniform book-ending the most enormous steel beast purporting to be a luggage x-ray machine, but no one actually looking at any images it might produce. Mind you, it could have been emitting rays of doom to neutralise any illicit goods instead. Which would have been cool. It did have that kind of look, and that might have been an explanation for the peculiar grinding sound.)

At least the inevitable looping riff (Sehh-ren-ge-teeee) kept my mind off the pilot's unswerving determination to hit every pocket of air turbulance en route. (Quote from white-knuckled nearby passenger after we landed, "I wish to get out and kiss Kenya's good and Godly earth".)

Clearly, the 80s have left their neon and be-permed mark on my soul. Can a mullet be far away?

Of men in matatus

One of my most iconic memories of previous trips to Kenya has been the sight of overloaded matatus (mini-buses) flinging themselves around potholes at death-defying speeds as yet more passengers attempted to hitch a lift by grabbing hold of the ankles of those clinging desperately to the roof. Maximum speed limits were treated as a target to reach and exceed as quickly as possible. Eye-popping colour schemes vied with ear-deafening music volumes to attract the attention of any orbiting spacecraft. Danger and excitement wrapped up in one teeth-rattling package on four wheels.

But it appears that the matatu's vim and vigour has been muffled of late. From the danger point of view, this is rather a good thing, since matatu accidents have traditionally been fairly horrific. In Nairobi, fleets of nicely painted uniform minibuses in either purple or green now clog the rush-hour traffic. According to a taxi driver I spoke to, it all has something to do with the relative of someone in government who owns a bus-import business. Consequently, the green ones are better than the purple ones. Or was it the other way around?

Down on the coast, matatus have retained their free-spirited approach to music and décor, as long as it doesn't involve actual people and their relatives doing performance art out of the windows. However, a new new form of transport appears to be filling the gap 'twixt bumper and gearstick. The same three-wheeling star of Public Transport Destiny shines on the coastal towns of Brighton, Malindi and Mombasa: they have all taken the tuk-tuk to their hearts and made it their own.

I have seen at least six and a half (counted limbs and divided by 4) people crowded into one of these motorised rickshaws (what else is a boot for?), but the more usual two (fat) or three (skinny) passengers appears to be the norm. As for me? I'd advocate a sports bra on most routes.

The cheaper, more eco-friendly alternative, the boda-boda remains popular as well. Since proper ladies ride sidesaddle these, a certain degree of genteel fearlessness is necessary when it comes to maintaining dignity on the padded seat. Particularly while flying over speedbumps on a downhill slope. It's all a bit like swans, really. Frantic movement below the surface, while above, a serene smile and unruffled countenance. If I can ever get the hang of toting a bundle on my head while riding as well, I'll be indominatable.

In no particular order

When it came to my choice of holiday destination, I decided to opt for somewhere very, very far away from work, Prague and all things Czech. This is harder than one might think. For one thing, this sort of guideline strikes out most of N.America. In Texas, Czech is apparently the third most widely-spoken language. I kid thee not. If it's in easyjet's in-flight magazine, it must be true.

Since I was mainly hoping to think of little more than fish for about two weeks, the cunning option was Kenya, helped by a couple of handy-dandy off-season deals and the prospect of diving in bath-temperature waters. So it was na shledanou to Praha and jambo, habari to Malindi and Watamu with a big bottle of insect repellent so strong it melted English flip-flops more quickly than the midday sun, and an even bigger bottle of factor 50 sun protection that managed to bond with any sand to form a rock-hard cement within seconds.

All very far away from knedlik, cobbles and the conditional tense, you might think… And yet… And yet… I'm not even speaking of the ubiquity of Bata, the Canadian shoe firm of Czech origin. Even though it's just opened a new branch in down-town Nairobi, just off Haile Selassie Ave. Oh no.

As I sped away from Nairobi airport through the African night, my eyes were inexorably drawn to the placards affixed to every lamp-post along Uhuru Highway (and if that doesn't make you think of Star Trek, you're a better earthling than me). For one thing, advertising in foreign countries is way more fun than the home-grown stuff.

Consequently I bring news that Mada hotels are "always in the right spot," and that "you never know what you might find" at Nakumatt shops (including love in the paper products aisle brought on by puffy red cartoon hearts). In fact, even sponsoring a lightpost is "more than just an advertisement".

And so my brain shifted into low gear, hypnotised by the flash… flash… flash… sequence of signs. Until, to my horror, the hoarding for a new and upcoming Ugandan tyre company hove into view. Later billboards revealed the fact that "Africa rides on [these] tyres". But little could the founder have known that his choice of corporate name would strike fear in the heart of this unwary student of the Czech language.

And so my gales of laughter at a fortnight's escape from dreaded grammar turned to hideous screams of terror that cut through the night like demented hyena juggling chainsaws through granite. For the PR people had chosen that particular overpass to make a bold and uncompromising statement of the company name in red and white block capital letters, eight feet high:

YANA

I have seven minutes to write this

So, I haven't run off with a trapeze artist named Dave and his collection of fascinating beer mats. It's just that the dramatic developments in life which have a lot to do with removing the question marks after "Prague" in my profile have also made it extremely busy.

Dramatic developments being what they are, I'm now on holiday, and therefore internet-deprived. But am shortly about to head off and perfect my imitation of a submerged wounded seal (something to do with lack of neutral buoyancy, and mysteriously light ankles - who'd have thought in?) and attrack the attention of any wandering Great Whites. Or something like that.

The good news is that I'm scribbling loads of stuff on old-tech paper, and it may eventually find its way here. If I get a working connection.

Must dash...