Rockin' up the Hill

The natural world is at its best when it is in balance. For every winter there must be a summer. For every sunrise there must be a sunset. For every enemy there must be a friend, and for every fall a rise, and for every school a pub. Such is the equilibrium of the cosmos, and to defy and reject it is to defy and reject a universal truth: all the odds will even out in the end.

Thankfully in the district of Praha 9 known as Vysočany the laws of nature are strictly adhered to and 10 steps from the English College is the Black Hill. In less time than it takes to say "I want a beer" you can walk from the temple of learning to the temple of understanding and order yourself a mug of frothy wife-beater. It is a classy joint, mind you, and the beer is expensive. Sixty pence a go, to be exact. However it is worth paying a premium for the convenience of locality.

The Black Hill was a regular calling spot on our recent trip to find our feet in our new world. After a visit to the school to take a look around, and for me to decide that I liked the height of the ceiling in my laboratory (nice and high for good echoes when I shout), it seemed an obvious place for refreshment. Combining lounge, restaurant, and titchy beer garden for evening musing, it also has the best jukebox I have ever seen.

A good jukebox is an essential companion when viewing life from the mahogany ridge. It provides conversation when you are alone, a talking point when you are with company, and a chance to claim moral superiority over others by inwardly criticising their ditty choices. Your choice is of course a choice of class and wisdom, and all around will benefit from the musical education that you have kindly provided for a handful of crowns.

These devices have come a long way since the vinyl clunking beasts of the American movies. Loaded with digital music files they can store more tunes than even the largest record shop, and they can be an absolute bugger to work. What does this button do? Press this? Oh crap… It was by such a process that the good drinkers of the Black Hill got to hear Jethro Tull's "Sweet Dream" three times in a row. All I was trying to do was pick "Living in the Past…"

Most of this stuff would have been a prison sentence under the Soviet -controlled regime. Dissident Western music was strictly banned, and musicians and fans alike were hounded, persecuted, prosecuted and jailed. If the NME thinks that it knows how to hand out a bad review it has nothing on the KGB. The satanic secret squirrels on Moscow's payroll gave you more that a sarcastic comment and 0/5 in the margin.

The repression of rock music, alongside many other cultural outlets, explains why it has such a prominent role in the free countries that have taken root on the far side of the Iron Curtain. Big concerts truly become events, as the people finally get to see stars whose music they once risked punishment to own. It still has magic. It still has a voice and a purpose, rather than just being a throwaway commodity… a here-today, gone-tomorrow, ripped to mp3 Woolies bargain-bin of the soul.

Amongst the grooviest post-Wall partiers has to be Václav Havel himself. The dissident playwright, a hard-drinking revolutionary who frequently found himself beaten and jailed for failing to comply with Soviet censorship, must be a front-runner for the "most rocking President" award. It was not only for the bloodless nature of the revolution that it was dubbed "Velvet" - some serious Lou Reed fandom played its part. He helped celebrate the departure of the Soviet forces by getting Frank Zappa to play at Prague Castle. When Billy-Bob "have a cigar" Clinton visited in 1994 Havel gave him a saxophone as gift, and proceeded to duet with the old intern-worrier in a downtown jazz club.

Jazz is huge in Prague. Every night of the week you can find groups of musicians blowing harder than Lewinsky in countless smoky clubs. The Old Town teems with busking bands playing skiffled-up versions of "When The Saints Come Marching In". It makes a nice change from scruffy members of the underclass playing Oasis songs in dark corners of the Tube network.

Back to the Black Hill… I was making progress with the jukebox, and at last a different song was playing. Stairway to Heaven. Gotta get my money's worth. Some Queen followed. Some Simon and Garfunkel. The Scorpions with their rousing fall-of-the-Wall anthem, Wind of Change. A large chunk of Dark Side of the Moon. Gina left me to my beer and nipped down the road to a local supermarket. I ordered another. She returned shortly with wine, a twelve pack of beer, amaretto, fizz, and some pencils. Bloody sudoku addicts. It set her back the thick end of a tenner.

The songs had run out and it was time to head back to the hotel. It was nice to place a foot in what will be my new local. I forgave them the extortionate price of alcohol because they are next door. And I fell in love with the jukebox that contains so much that the old regime would have hated. Good music might still cost you, but at least the price you pay is in crowns, not in months and years.

Travelling Light

The practicalities and logistics of this move get more real… too damn real… as every day goes by. The wholesale transportation of two lives and one home, with all that it involves, is not a simple task.

As I sit in my makeshift study, savouring a glass of red (don't point a finger - it's my first) and listening to some Crimso, I am surrounded by packing boxes. Once more my life is sorted, summed and totalled before my eyes, and the truth is that there ain't that much of it. Gina might have half a century of collected crap to deal with but I always travel light. If you don't count the ghosts, and the collection of knives extracted from my back, there's not a great deal there. In this fact I follow a great tradition.

Man has travelled light for all his time on Earth. It started with Ugg the Caveman and his mates back in the Cradle of Civilisation. They were fine and dandy living in a handful of caves, exploring the novelty of being upright and playfully burning out their neighbours with their new toy: fire. One day Ugg got bored of mammoth stew, gathered his cronies together, and announced that "I'm sure there's a good curry house round here…. Can't quite remember where it is, but I'm sure we'll find it. Anyone up for a vindaloo?"

And so Ugg and company picked up their clubs and headed out on the town, grabbing their women by their hair and dragging them along the ground in tow. The great migrations had begun, and they travelled light, because they didn't have much stuff.

The trend has continued to be celebrated throughout history. Moses was another light traveller, although he really should have taken a map. But guided by Divinity he finally got himself out of the wilderness, and promptly occupied the only bit of Arabia with no oil. Prat.

Even now, in modern "culture", we admire the man who travels light. Fiction is full of mystical strangers who come and go and leave no trace. And every red blooded male worth his testosterone has got utterly plastered in a pub and put "Freebird" on the jukebox at least three times in a row. An epic anthem to buggering off before the morning comes, it fulfils a need in our primordial psyche.

And so I prepare to travel to Prague, and I will travel light. There's lots of records, enough clothes to make it through the week, a much pruned book collection, and a shoebox of ticket stubs, photographs of me with long hair, and Concorde memorabilia. I'm sure that Concorde was made financially unviable because we aero-junkies kept stealing the napkin rings. Petty middle-class theft is much more fun at twice the speed of sound.

I have seldom crossed a bridge without burning it, and as I move from place to place I try not to look back. Looking back doesn't achieve very much. If there are lessons to be learned I take them to heart and forget how they got there. No documentary evidence is required. No letters and cards. No unused lithium prescriptions. They take up too much room in my case and can only cause pain. As much as I hate the ghosts, I prefer those souls dead than alive. The present takes precedence. I don't need to poke the scars and hurt myself to see if I can still feel pain.

Similarly I refuse to burden myself with the trappings of former joy. If it was so bloody joyful I'd still have it in the here and now. Apart from the napkin rings and ticket stubs I refuse to have keepsakes. Nothing is older than yesterday's dreams, and what there once was will come to dust as my mind decays.

With no kids to follow me there is no legacy to leave. No offspring will decode my papers and notes, and lose themselves in the secret lives of someone they thought they knew. There will be no fights over the family Bible, no claims on the estate, and no feuds over the remains of a dead man.

However this move to Prague is different. While I may be going in both body and soul I have no desire to burn the bridges. Maybe that is the difference between running to something and running away from something. This will be a new life to coexist in space and time with my old one. Alice may be stepping through the looking glass, but she still wants distant reflections from the other side. Shame on sentimental, mercurial, inconsistent Alice.

All this doesn't change the packing boxes that wall me in. Those that are mine… well their number is small and their content is sparse. But what I have will travel with me. Like Ugg, Moses, and Ronnie Van Zant before me, I will travel light. Not because it is romantic or traditional, but simply because I don't have much to take. But I have new dreams in my head and a new fire in my heart, and that is all I need.

Pivo Dobrý

To go back a little… it is late July 2006. The heatwave that roasted most of Europe until it smelled of frying goat is in its early days. For we teacherly types the summer holidays stretch ahead like the path to the promised land, rather than being a memory as distant as a first kiss or a Tory government. Tony Blair still had control. Tony Emmerson was having a beer.

It had been a long day. The early morning hike to Gatwick was as much fun as having my teeth drilled. I was half asleep after not being at all asleep for most of the night, and my BlackBerry was fooling around causing me great agitation. Gina just about kept her patience while I took out the battery, banged it on the table of the train carriage, and swore at anything that moved. If looks could kill every passenger on that train would have been dead. Not even some uncalled for cursing about the price of the tickets made me feel any better.

Gatwick was the hole it always is, although it does have many happy memories. It was the meeting place of me and three of my best friends when one of them kept flitting in and out of the country. I can't go to that place without having the urge to get hammered in Garfunkels and talk about Progressive Rock all night. We knew it was time to leave when the waitresses would hoover around us, the shutters would come down, and Pete was in danger of missing his last train.

But this morning there was no Garfunkels, Gina doesn't like me drinking at breakfast, and I bet not one soul in that place would appreciate a high volume blast of King Crimson's majestic opus "Red" if their life depended on it.

The flight was boring: stuck in Cattle Class with nothing but a BA Delipack to eat. They've hit upon a new wheeze: half the sandwich is meat, half of it is salad. That way they can give all us schmucks the same parcel, and the veggie loons in the crowd can trade their bit of meat for another carrot slice. I guess, given the lack of turbulence, this passes for in-flight entertainment. The pain I sometimes get under my left eye when I fly was causing agony. The compass I brought to entertain myself by following our flight path remained forgotten in my pocket until 10 minutes before landing. I couldn't even get drunk: see above for the whole Gina/breakfast/booze problem.


It takes about 30 seconds on the road. That's when it hits. The airport doesn't do it for me: airports are airports, and once you've sulked in one you've sulked in them all. It's the road that does it. I don't know whether it’s the road-signs, the number plates, or the fact that they're all driving on the funny side and I am sitting in what should be the driver's seat without anything to do. That is when I am there. That is when I get the warm glow of home that I have only felt in Central Europe. I get the same feeling when I arrive in Tallinn. It is hard to say what it is, but it feels right. If there is one thing I need more of in my life it is feeling right.

Things were still not perfect. The hire car squeaked and shuddered every time Gina hit the brakes. It made every sudden stop a nervous cliff-hanger moment that the Dr Who producers would be proud of. We knew where we were going but we weren’t entirely sure how to get there. We knew there were a lot of tram-lines in the way. If anyone fancies setting up a successful business I suggest a suspension workshop in Prague. Bounce. Bounce. Boing. Crunch. Oof. Splat. I thought I broke my ass.

But we got there. And that's the Czech Republic in a nutshell. It had a terrible journey but got there, and maybe that's the most important thing of all.

The sprawling beer garden of the Hotel Duo is a glorious place in the reddening evening light. Chunky wooden tables are strewn around, each sporting an umbrella urging me to have a Pilsner Urquell. The hotel itself is large and pink and that is not good, but without the paint it would be large and concrete grey and would be very bad. Pink paint might scream "bad taste", but bare concrete grey screams "Communism".

The waiter brought me a beer. And a bottle of the local fizz to share. And I had another beer. Then we had a huge plate of freshly grilled meat containing just about every edible animal known to man, filleted and sizzled just like God intended. I had a beer. There were a lot of good natured, if overly hairy, German tourists, and the old boy with a keyboard sitting by the steps played some hummable modern tunes.

Gina went over to him, to see if he would play any traditional local songs. She tried to explain that her father was Czech and that we liked that sort of stuff, but his English appeared to be worse than her Czech. This was not a conversation that was going anywhere, but at least she tried. Another easy-listening German-pleaser followed. Time for another beer. And another song.

"Old Češka," the player said, as he smiled over to our table. It was the big stupid happy smile of a hotel gig musician who has just had someone take a real interest in what he does. The unmistakable bouncy rhythm of a drinking song filled the dimming gardens of the Hotel Duo. As intoxicating and comforting as the beer that it celebrates, a drinking song smothers the senses and drowns the worries. A good drinking song has the reverence and deference of Handel's Messiah towards its subject, while at the same time it wants to make you boogie like the guitar solo in Freebird does. Most of all, it makes you want another beer. Judged by these criteria, this was indeed a fine drinking song.

"Pivo dobrý " the chorus ran… beer is good! As he played into the dusk my mind started to skip. It skipped to the future, and this new job at a truly unique school. It skipped to the fact that an earlier incarnation of the school was closed down during the Russian occupation. It skipped to the images of tanks, and show-trials, and barricades and imprisonment. And it skipped to the thousands of Czech men who fought against Hitler, but never lived to see the subsequent post-war foul, stinking, murderous Soviet regime crash and burn. The exiles and émigrés. The boys who survived the bullets, but still never came home. Those who were true.

To all those who fought for freedom, but never lived to see what they were fighting for, I raise a glass here and now just as I did in my mind back there and then. Only this time there are no hairy Germans about, so I can't be bothered to keep myself from crying as I deliver the toast. I hope wherever you are there is beer and music… Pivo dobrý!

Lost in a Foreign Land

Nothing has changed. People who have "blogs" are tossers. If you doubt this then check out conservativehome.com. If you guys are so smart why aren't you running the country? I never knew the staff at McDonalds had internet access at work…

So I guess I'm just having a toss. Heads or tails? Welcome to the site. Pull up a chair. Have a beer.

Foreign lands are strange and desolate places. The people are weird, the customs baffling, the language unintelligible, and the prevailing culture can be darkly sinister. I don't like them very much. I have seen many foreign lands, but not one of them can hold a candle to England in terms of foreignness: a place that feels more alien to me by the day.

I have to quit. When I look at our society, from the dark magi that stalk the Corridors of Power to the average berk in the street, I feel a sadness inside that I can not and will not live with any longer. This is not how it was meant to work out. The stench of intellectual and moral death hangs so heavy that even my tobacco-addled hooter can still pick it up. Too many people want a free ride. The world owes them everything. Everybody wants to go to Heaven but nobody wants to die. I'm bummed out and I drink too much. Sic transit gloria mundi…what's left of it anyway.

I am not going to walk away from the United Kingdom. I'm going to run. For the sake of what remains of my own tattered sanity I am heading to the Czech Republic at the end of 2006. In June I was appointed as Head of Chemistry and Science Coordinator at an English speaking school in Prague. It's next to a pub that serves delicious beer for 60p per half-litre. Gina is coming with me. Hopefully my ghosts are not.

Prague is a beautiful city, not only in terms of its architecture but also its people and culture. The locals are civilised, well-dressed and polite to the extent that I can visit a supermarket without wanting a gun in my hand. This is unusual. A visit to Tesco usually brings about the fantasy of pumping some random shoppers with hot lead. Anyone yammering on a mobile phone loudly is a tourist. Women dress differently from girls, who in turn dress differently from prostitutes. You can tell it is not Manchester.

The emergence of a liberal democracy from a former Communist state is a precious, if ungainly and sometimes imperfect, transition from dark to light. It is a sunrise of humanity. Not everything works, and the cab drivers will screw you for every penny they can get if you let them, but there is a sense of drive and purpose that thrills the heart. There are still hopes worth having, dreams worth dreaming, and fights worth fighting. Thankfully there are no deaths worth dying anymore.

So… what is this "blog"? It is a diary of preparations, tales, thoughts, transitions, anecdotes, accounts and other things to do with our migration. It is also a sketch pad for a book that may or may not be written. A place to doodle. Gina might contribute too - if she can stand to be associated with my opinions. It also serves as a line of communication for our friends and associates, who might occasionally wonder how we're getting on.

So yes… it’s a vanity project.


TE,
London