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...