A GOLDFISH SWIMMING IDLY WESTWARDS

When I was at school, I was generally pretty good at geography. One thing that stumped me then, and still does now, was the statement in the textbook that we used that the Canadian Shield got its name because of its obvious resemblance to, well, a shield. I didn't get it then and I don't get it now. I can see the resemblance to, say, a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle in a state of semi-completion or perhaps the lungs of a heavy smoker, but in shield terms it just doesn't do it for me.

That's not to say that countries don't look like things. Well, at least some of them. Indonesia, with its 13,000+ islands, would doubtless present opportunities for an advanced chaos theorist, and Paul Theroux thinks Great Britain looks like a witch riding a pig, but he's a best-selling writer and thus no doubt has access to very good drugs. The rest of us are left with more mundane similarities. Like Italy being a boot - though not a football boot; look at that heel. No, it's a fetishist's boot. Chile is clearly a rough-cut walking stick or perhaps a Twiglet (Google it if you don't know and are really interested), and, persisting with the culinary approach, Sri Lanka is definitely a nice fresh naan bread.

So what about the country I live in? From 1919 till 1938, Czechoslovakia definitely looked like either a heavily pregnant tadpole or a particularly well-nourished sperm. Then they cut off part of its tail after the Second World War and gave it to the USSR and it's now in Ukraine, which, incidentally, looks a bit like a tyrannosaurus in the right light. And then in 1993 Slovakia got given to the Slovaks and we are the Czech Republic. And we resemble a fish; to be more precise, an ornamental goldfish, one of those jobs with more fins and tail than a car built in Detroit in the 1950s. The head' s on the left, with the mouth about to swallow a place called Tischenreuth, and the tail has its epicentre somewhere round Ostrava; we see it in a three-quarter view as it swims away towards North-Western Europe, a metaphor if ever there was.

You don't see it? Try some of this and all will be revealed. I promise.