STRONG LANGUAGE

Like a pussycat that has just been flattened by an eighteen-wheel truck carrying bridge parts, Life in Hana picks itself up, dusts itself off, and wonders just how many lives it has left. Not quite as infrequent a visitor as Halley's Comet, but by no means one of the more regular stars shining in the blogosphere...

Anyway, here we go again. It must be the spring that does this to me. That and having a sprained ankle that has got me firmly confined to barracks for the foreseeable future.

If you arrive at the main station in Olomouc (and allow me to recommend it - the rich pageant of humanity passing through its portals remains as multifaceted as ever and now the buffet has reopened in its latest guise you can even have a beer as you wait for the fashionably late train you were hoping to catch) there are various advertisements for commercial enterprises in our fair city. You might be surprised by some of them.

'PUSY' (vaguely continuing the feline theme) is actually the Czech for 'kisses', but the name of this emporium selling fabrics for fashionable young things of the female persuasion has caused more than a few double-takes in its time, I'll be bound; here's the shopfront:


Another place, the skateboard shop, doesn't much bother with, er, pussyfooting around. Dig that name; I wonder if they would use something like that (or get away with using a name like that) in Czech. And just in case you haven't got the picture, gentle reader, take a good look at the slogan for their sale:


Happy fucking shopping, sports fans!

FEET IN PRESIDENTIAL MOUTHS

The joy of my American friends at getting rid of Dubya and replacing him with Obama was a pleasure for me to see. Meanwhile, the nitwit of a president the Czechs are saddled with, Václav Klaus, has been at it again. This is a guy who first appeared on the political scene shortly after the 1989 ‘Velvet Revolution’ as a pushy economist with a lot to say about the direction the country should take in the post- Communist era.

His first major political gig was as the first Finance Minister out of the blocks in the Central and Eastern European region when it came to redistributing the wealth stolen by the communists after their takeover in 1948. He talked a good fight at the time but later a lot of people said he had made plenty of mistakes with his overconfident, can’t-tell-me-anything-I-don’t-already-know-better-than-you provincial attitude, and most people I’ve spoken to agree that this was the highest office he should ever have been permitted to occupy.

Sadly, that hasn’t been the case. He spent several years as Prime Minister in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a period during which he managed to develop a uniquely bad relationship with Václav Havel, the then President; they clearly loathed each other. Klaus is a man whose arrogance is summed up in the following joke:

Q: What’s the difference between Václav Klaus and God?

A: God doesn’t think he’s Václav Klaus.

Sadly for him, he always has been and remains a pygmy in the shadow of a giant in this relationship, and unless he’s even dumber than I think he is, he must be painfully aware of this, which is perhaps why he’s followed the increasingly deranged path he has done during the last few years.

He’s now in his second stint as president, a role he has filled with a glaring lack of stature, kudos, charisma, gravitas, or any other positive quality I would associate with the job. His particular niche is the increasingly untenable notion that global warming is a hoax. Earlier in the year, he described ecologists as being equivalent to fascists, and more recently, on a trip to Dublin in his presidential role, he described himself to journalists as ‘a European dissident’.

Let me tell you something, Vašek, you ox. Dissidents were brave men and women who protested against the totalitarian regime and were persecuted and not infrequently tortured and imprisoned for doing so. They lived in hope of a better future, with no great expectation that it would ever come. You, on the other hand, are the president of a democratic state, which provides you with extremely handsome financial and material rewards for the job you are supposed to do, which is to represent it with dignity on the international stage, and at the end of the day you are not shivering in a prison cell but tucked up as snug as a bug in a rug in Prague Castle. If I did my job as badly as you do yours I’d lose it in five seconds flat. Do the Czech people a favour. Keep your crazy opinions to yourself until you’re retired and a private citizen once more. For now, though, just shut your mouth.

STRANGE DAYS

I haven't written anything on this blog for well over a year, chiefly because for the longest time I had the feeling that I didn't really have anything of interest to write and that cyberspace is full enough with self-indulgent and tedious bullshit without me adding to it. But now I've recovered.

Which is more than I can say for my plaster bust of Klement Gottwald, the so-called 'Stalinist Butcher' who was the first communist president of Czechoslovakia and who died shortly after returning from the funeral of Uncle Joe himself in 1953. Some say he was poisoned, but the theory most people I've talked to seem to prefer is that he drank himself to death. Whatever. No one greatly misses him.

Anyway, I had this very tacky plaster bust of 'Klemo', which had been painted gold, although that had come off in various places. I used it to keep open my office window on hot days, of which, believe me, there are plenty here. It fitted just perfectly and enabled cooling zephyrs to wash over me as I worked. I was very pleased and it was nice to think of him doing his bit for the proleteriat. But during a recent storm it was tumbled base over apex and fell to the floor, where its plinth was sheared off by the contact. The head is intact, just about, though his nose and eyebrows are a tad battered, but, being wobbly at the base, is now useless as a window-holder-opener.

By one of those quirks of tumbling chance, however, I have found the perfect replacement in the form of a hard cover copy of 'The Downing Street Years' by Margaret Thatcher, which fits like a glove and is much more intrinsically stable. So now the two of them can stare at each other to their heart's content through the aspidistra which separates them and I can work in peace and comfort. And I do draw a great amount of satisfaction from the fact that Thatcher, who never did me any favours when she was in power, is finally doing so now, the vicious old bat.

THIRSTY WORK

THE OLD...

National anthems tend not to do modesty very well. Germany is simply above all, the French have their foreign cohorts, hordes of slaves, impure blood, and ferocious soldiers, and the British one is all about scattering enemies, knavish tricks, and rebellious Scots getting crushed. The Czech one is pretty pastoral by comparison, being full of murmuring streams in meadows, trees whispering among the rocks, and so on, but towards the end it does tell us that the country is an earthly paradise for the eyes.

...AND AGAIN...

And, it should add, for the mouth, especially if that mouth belongs to a beer lover. Czech beer is renowned the world over and the citizens regularly occupy top place in the global consumption table. You could always get some of the beers outside the country - my decision to come here in 1989 was partly induced by a bottle of Budvar beer (the real stuff, not the coloured mineral water they produce in the Benighted States) - and now there's a lot more that gets exported. I was in a pub in London not long ago where you could get Zubr and Litovel, two of our local beers, albeit at outrageous prices; you can pretty much have a bath in the stuff here for the price of a pint there.

...AND AGAIN...

But it's not all good news. Veteran drinkers love to moan that it's not as good as it used to be, and although there's a Czech saying that any government that raises the price of beer is doomed, prices have been sneaking up, to the extent that beer is now almost as expensive as it was in Britain thirty years ago. And although the family silver has been very explicitly not put up for sale, not all the smaller breweries have survived. The one in Olomouc, opened in 1897, didn't quite manage to hang round long enough to reach its centenary, for example. Its flagship beer bore the same name as the patron saint of the country and the man to whom our cathedral is dedicated - Václav.

...AND THE NEW

Last year, however, a beery phoenix rose from the ashes, as the Svatováclavský pivovar, the first home brew pub in Olomouc, opened its doors in the city centre, a mere hop, skip, and jump from the square. They do a range of beers, including the traditional 'desítka' and 'dvanáctka' (ten and twelve degrees Balling respectively) but also a wheat beer and one with cherries, which isn't nearly as disgusting as it might sound. And the food is good too. And it's approaching lunchtime. And it's time to bring this post to an end...

GOOD RIDDANCE TO A BAD TEAM

Football again. I wrote here a little over two months ago that Sigma Olomouc would not go down to the Czech Second Division because there are “enough teams below them that are even worse”. I was right, but God, it was close. Sigma’s less-than-glorious record in the twelve games played this spring:

HOME: Played 7, Won 1, Drawn 2, Lost 4

AWAY: Played 5, Won 0, Drawn 2, Lost 3

However, two teams go down, two of them, believe it or not, managed to be even worse than Sigma over the course of the season, and it’s those two that go down. So, farewell, at least for one season, to FC Slovácko and Marila Příbram.

FC Slovácko are no strangers to trouble and controversy, having got into deep trouble during a corruption investigation a few seasons ago – there are many who claim that Czech football is rotten to the core in this respect. They survived but emerged with a changed name, something that happens all the time in this league.

Marila Příbram, too, have got form in both these departments. They were deeply involved in an affair that resulted in then high-riding Drnovice ending up being relegated to the Third Division not so long ago, and nobody is going to miss them much either, and not just because of the dull and negative style of football they play (15 goals scored in 29 games in the 2006-7 season, for example).

In better times, as Dukla Prague, they won the old Czechoslovak League eleven times and competed regularly in European football, but they were never popular – Half Man Half Biscuit may have immortalized them in music, but they were much too closely associated with the Communist regime for the tastes of most people in this country. Once that regime went, the writing was on the wall. I saw them play at home against Baník Ostrava in 1990. In the stadium there were a few hundred old codgers nodding off and dreaming of the good old days, a thousand or so orcs from Ostrava rampaging round the stadium at will, and me and my mate Mark cowering somewhere between the two.

Later they shipped out to Příbram, a town to the south-west of Prague, and gradually metamorphosed via being Dukla Příbram into the unloved bunch they now are in rather the same way as the Crazy Gang of Wimbledon wound up among the concrete cows as the MK Dons. Marila, I believe, manufacture paint. Watching their products dry is infinitely more stimulating than watching the team play; I’m glad they’ve gone.

FUN WITH SAUSAGES

As you might expect from the inhabitants of a country which has lengthy borders with Germany and Austria, Czechs are very fond of eating all sorts of pork products. Go to any supermarket or butcher's shop and you will find not just lots of pieces of dead pig au naturel but also a splendid variety of ham, salami, smoked meat, cold cuts, and much much more.

There's even something called a 'zabijačka', roughly translated as a pig slaughter, which is a big social event. People buy a piglet and fatten it up and then, when it's good and big, someone comes and kills it for them and they make a big party out of the whole thing, with family and friends all joining in and cooking and smoking and salting everything but the squeak. There is, of course, plenty of eating and drinking involved on the day. Being a hypocritical English city boy who likes his meat in anonymous chunks rather than carrying reminders of where it comes from, I've never been to one of these, but a mate from Wales did, in 1990. He's been a vegetarian ever since.

One aspect of this orgy of porkiness that does rather disappoint me, though, is in the realm of sausages, which may strike you as pretty weird when you consider that in Britain, where I come from, what passes for a sausage is often more like a condom filled with brown bread. True enough, but it is really hard to find decent sausages for grilling here; what they go for instead is ones that you heat up in water, which are all well and good but somehow don't quite hit the spot.

However, one area which doesn't disappoint is how they advertise them. The jolly couple at the top were on the side of a delivery van I spotted in South Bohemia, and, while very cute, they pale into insignificance in comparison to this guy:


He is the human face of a pork products company from Kostelec, a town in the south of the country,and you can see his face on delivery vans and billboards all over the place. While Czechs see him just as a symbol of a culinary tradition, I, and many others, are startled by his obvious homoeroticism; a gay friend I showed a tin of the sausages to almost fainted on the spot. "Oh my God!" was his comment when he recovered. Just look at that facial expression...

I've always been quite a fan of the guy - there's something in me that just loves blatancy - and so you can imagine my joy when a Czech newspaper, Lidové Noviny, used him as the illustration for an article they ran last weekend about the nation's diet being less than perfect in health terms. Here he is in their version:



Enjoy your meal...

MY CZECH VILLAGE

Some of the people who were kind enough to post comments said they wanted to see pictures of where I lived. Here we go, though not without a digression – I am, after all, a wannabe writer, or is that a writer manqué?

Anais Nin is remembered, and quite rightly too, as a writer of erotica, which she apparently got into on a fixed-rate-per-page basis on a commission from Henry Miller, who’d been offered the gig by a wealthy perver…sorry, connoisseur. But she did have other sides to her, including a lovely little story about how she helped a bewildered fellow-traveller lost at a major airport, which concludes, as far as I can remember, with the reflection that ‘everybody should have a Turkish grandmother’.

That’s rather the way I feel about Czech villages. I’m fortunate enough to live in one and often think the world would be a better place if everybody could. Of course, this is the opinion of a man of fifty. When I was twenty and knew very little about anything I would doubtless have found the idea of nothing much happening from one year’s end to the next stupefyingly boring, but bitter experience has taught me to cling to it like a limpet to a rock. And here are some of the reasons why…


Here is 'downtown' at the height of its rush hour frenzy - the throngs, the traffic, the urban vibe - eat your heart out, Manhattan.


This is our church, captured as a storm threatened.


A water feature - the kids play ice hockey here in winter but otherwise it just slumbers away.


One of our two pubs - sadly, Colonio-Cola has reached even this far, but please note the Gambrinus sign (an excellent Czech beer) flying above it - very symbolic.