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.

BANÍK ON THE STREETS OF OLOMOUC

Apologies to The Smiths and Tim Jones for the title; take it as flattery, boys.

Spring is here! There are seagulls wheeling in the air of our landlocked country, the first dandelions are flowering, and this weekend we saw the first mosquito of the season. Another surefire sign is that the Czech football season has started again after its long winter break, so off we went in the sunshine with 11,000 other optimists to watch our local team, Sigma Olomouc, play Moravian arch-rivals Baník Ostrava in the top flight of the Czech Gambrinus Liga.

Following Sigma is like being a fan of most teams, I suppose; the odd moment of joy but for the most part it’s like being trapped in a bad marriage with no possibility of a divorce. They used to qualify for the UEFA Cup now and again a few years ago, but this season they are fighting relegation. Like with many provincial clubs, all their best players sooner or later move on to bigger or richer teams. Some of them are in the Bundesliga, others in Russia, and at least three current Czech internationals playing abroad, the forward Marek Heinz and the central defenders David Rozehnal and Tomáš Ujfalusi, started their careers there. How Sigma could have used them yesterday.

Baník (means ‘miner’, but funnily enough not in Czech but in Slovak) are a big-city side with a big-city following. Their followers have a strong hooligan reputation; their only serious rivals for the title of the most incorrigibly wild fans in the land are the ones who support Sparta Prague. Yesterday they turned up in strength and easily outsang and outchanted the home supporters, who are a pretty hopeless bunch when it comes to that kind of thing. The situation repeated itself on the pitch, where, especially in defence, Sigma played like bears who hadn’t really fully woken up from their long hibernation and lost 3-1. I doubt if they’ll go down – there are enough teams below them who are even worse – but it’s easy to see there are going to be more than a few hairy moments before the end of the season. Maybe I should concentrate more on getting the garden in order instead…

GENTS IN BLACK VELVET

When I lived in Britain I had a great weakness for the kind of crappy old films that used to be shown on daytime TV. One genre I was particularly fond of was the American sci-fi movies of the 1950s, not so much B-movies as Z-movies; they looked as if they had been made in a few days for less money than the average cinemagoer would spend on drinks and popcorn on a single visit, and frequently featured creatures that had mutated into giants, usually as the result of some scientific experiment that had gone horribly wrong. My memory might be playing me false here, but I seem to remember spiders, ants, and a giant pussycat, among others, and there was definitely a film with the fabulous title of ‘Attack of the Killer Tomatoes’ which, I think, was once voted the worst film ever made; my mate Pete, an even greater connoisseur of kitsch than I was, knew the title song by heart and used to sing it ad nauseam.

In the Czech Republic, despite the relentlessly downmarket style purveyed by the likes of TV Nova, the pleasure of titillating myself with the antics of enormous animals has, alas, been off the menu so far. But that may be about to change. Our village lies on the edge of a peat bog where, among other things, a Soviet tank from the Second World War is said to lie buried; the crew, no doubt high on a heady cocktail of victory and vodka, drove into it by mistake and had to bail out and watch it slowly sink.

Said bog is also very popular with moles, as, to my chagrin, is my lawn. Recently I’ve noticed the biggest molehills I’ve ever seen; just look at the size of the damn things. Some of them are about a meter in diameter! Is there some weird and wonderful strain of übermole developing down there in the dark? What are their teeth like? Will we wake up one morning and find that, weary of a diet of worms, they have broken in during the night and murdered us all in our sleep and devoured us? Or am I, like them, making a mountain out of a molehill?

THE WIND THAT SNAKES THE BARELY

Hi hi hi there!

The last couple of years have been a bad time for cinema-goers in Olomouc. We used to have four cinemas, each with a distinct character of its own. One of them closed in the early 1990s and is now a shop; it lay on a busy junction and you could measure the length of the film by the number of trams that went rattling past.

The Central used to do a slightly less commercial mix, while the Lipa was a real art-house gaff if ever there was; on occasions the punters seemed to be outnumbered by the staff, but they did a great line in left-field world cinema. Both of them were near the middle of town, so you could easily and conveniently meet your friends for a drink before the film and then walk to a pub afterwards and discuss it over a beer or a glass of wine. It was wonderful. It was a truly sad day and a heavy blow to the cultural life of the city when the Central, which first opened in 1920, closed its doors for ever in January 2005, followed six months later by the Lipa.

The only one that still survives now is the flagship one, the Metropol. It was easily the biggest of the three and always did good business, mostly playing a mix of mainstream Hollywood stuff and high-profile new Czech films, which always draw big here on their native soil, as well as hosting the cinema club on Tuesdays. It has good seats, Dolby sound, and a very central location.

The culprit is, as so often, a multiplex which has opened up in a new shopping mall on the edge of town. It’s a long way from the centre and very much aimed at those with cars, a group I do not belong to and never will. The prices are steep, the popcorn, so I am informed, knee-deep, and the menu depressingly predictable; I’m not exactly boycotting the place, but there’s been nothing so must-see that I have yet darkened its doors with my presence.

Which makes it all the more delightful that we are now in the middle of one of our annual filmfests, the excellent Projekt 100, which shows every spring throughout the country. So far we have been to a Hungarian film by the name of Taxidermia, one of the most grotesque slices (and I use the word advisedly) of cinema I have ever witnessed - my friend Jana walked out after fifteen minutes - the ever-fabulous Clockwork Orange, and the Oscar-winning Tsotsi.

Still awaiting us are the delights of Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Ken Loach's Wind That Shakes The Barley, charmingly rendered on the posters as 'The Wind That Snakes The Barely', and to round things off in style, the film that was voted the best British film of the last century, Carol Reed's fabulous The Third Man. Now that's what I call a decent week at the cinema, my little droogies.