Minstrel In The Gallery
Two weeks on and things are falling into place. Sometimes they fall as softly as the first flake of winter snow, and sometimes they fall as softly as a brick off a viaduct, but fall they do.
I spent three days in school organising my office, sorting out papers, and familiarising myself with my new laboratory. I also had lunch with a handful of colleagues and familiarised myself with steak in paprika sauce, dumplings, and half a dozen beers. That was a fiver well spent. I love this country. Now onwards and upwards…
Living in Karlin we are just outside the touristy spots that Central Prague is so full of. My view is generally untroubled by holidaymakers, stag-night brothel creepers, and miscellaneous dopey students having "an experience". Clothed in all their irritating gaudy noisiness they stomp elsewhere in this timeless city, enjoying a one dimensional view of a three dimensional world. However sometimes it is worth gritting your teeth and venturing onto the path more travelled; sometimes there is something worthwhile at the end of it. And so a few nights ago we found ourselves at U Kalicha (The Chalice / Goblet) - a tourist trap that it is actually a lot of fun to be trapped in.
In a former life U Kalicha was a pretty standard pub that had little of note, and indeed it had little noted about it. In the early 1920s Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek created the adventures of hapless Good Soldier Švejk, setting some of the events in the book within U Kalicha. Fact and fiction rolled into one and, like the tide pulling the moon around, U Kalicha was reborn as Prague's original Švejk pub.
Theme pubs are usually foul, but with a good enough theme even this bankrupt concept has a little gas left in its tank. Long tables, beer served in sloshing litre pots that need two hands to steady, pork and dumplings as far as the eyes can see, and pictures of Archduke Franz Ferdinand create an atmosphere of a different time. Yes it is artificial, but it is the pleasurable artifice of theatre as opposed to intolerable deception of "Irish Pubs". The fake world of a man that did not exist is more real than some of the realities created by men who unfortunately do.
Every few minutes our dining was interrupted by a pair of musicians in World War I outfits, one with an accordion and one with a tuba, wandering between the tables. They brought Tulips from Amsterdam, rattled through Colonel Bogey (for all the uni-bollocked Germans out there…) but their most popular turn was "Those Were The Days, My Friend" - cheap nostalgic twaddle that somehow hits home with a lyrical poetry that it has no right to possess. I promise you that until you have dined on pork and dumplings in a beer hall, with a hundred other drunk people clapping in time with Mary Hopkins played on accordion and tuba, you have a spiritual void.
I have always had a soft spot for the workmen of the music industry: weddings and bar mitzvahs, Friday night at the Legion, the pub on the corner, and yes, the restaurant minstrels. For every one of them that is only good enough for this gig there's ten that deserve better. Talented men who never got into bed with either good fortune or the head of a record company, and who are destined to wander this earth as the traveling players of yesteryear brought to lurid flesh. Maybe I feel an affinity with the two-bit dogs of the night, the unloved sloggers, and the strays. If I was born in another time and another place I have no doubt that I would be selling snake oil in a traveling show. But I got lucky…
The troubadours played loud and they played rowdy that night. I have seen less talent and less passion on stages that I have paid a vast number of beer-vouchers to peer at. For what it is worth they did a good gig. Some songs disappeared into the ether but "Those Were The Days" rang out with claps and hollers and the banging of glasses:
"Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way"
Only these are the days my friends… these are the days…
I spent three days in school organising my office, sorting out papers, and familiarising myself with my new laboratory. I also had lunch with a handful of colleagues and familiarised myself with steak in paprika sauce, dumplings, and half a dozen beers. That was a fiver well spent. I love this country. Now onwards and upwards…
Living in Karlin we are just outside the touristy spots that Central Prague is so full of. My view is generally untroubled by holidaymakers, stag-night brothel creepers, and miscellaneous dopey students having "an experience". Clothed in all their irritating gaudy noisiness they stomp elsewhere in this timeless city, enjoying a one dimensional view of a three dimensional world. However sometimes it is worth gritting your teeth and venturing onto the path more travelled; sometimes there is something worthwhile at the end of it. And so a few nights ago we found ourselves at U Kalicha (The Chalice / Goblet) - a tourist trap that it is actually a lot of fun to be trapped in.
In a former life U Kalicha was a pretty standard pub that had little of note, and indeed it had little noted about it. In the early 1920s Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek created the adventures of hapless Good Soldier Švejk, setting some of the events in the book within U Kalicha. Fact and fiction rolled into one and, like the tide pulling the moon around, U Kalicha was reborn as Prague's original Švejk pub.
Theme pubs are usually foul, but with a good enough theme even this bankrupt concept has a little gas left in its tank. Long tables, beer served in sloshing litre pots that need two hands to steady, pork and dumplings as far as the eyes can see, and pictures of Archduke Franz Ferdinand create an atmosphere of a different time. Yes it is artificial, but it is the pleasurable artifice of theatre as opposed to intolerable deception of "Irish Pubs". The fake world of a man that did not exist is more real than some of the realities created by men who unfortunately do.
Every few minutes our dining was interrupted by a pair of musicians in World War I outfits, one with an accordion and one with a tuba, wandering between the tables. They brought Tulips from Amsterdam, rattled through Colonel Bogey (for all the uni-bollocked Germans out there…) but their most popular turn was "Those Were The Days, My Friend" - cheap nostalgic twaddle that somehow hits home with a lyrical poetry that it has no right to possess. I promise you that until you have dined on pork and dumplings in a beer hall, with a hundred other drunk people clapping in time with Mary Hopkins played on accordion and tuba, you have a spiritual void.
I have always had a soft spot for the workmen of the music industry: weddings and bar mitzvahs, Friday night at the Legion, the pub on the corner, and yes, the restaurant minstrels. For every one of them that is only good enough for this gig there's ten that deserve better. Talented men who never got into bed with either good fortune or the head of a record company, and who are destined to wander this earth as the traveling players of yesteryear brought to lurid flesh. Maybe I feel an affinity with the two-bit dogs of the night, the unloved sloggers, and the strays. If I was born in another time and another place I have no doubt that I would be selling snake oil in a traveling show. But I got lucky…
The troubadours played loud and they played rowdy that night. I have seen less talent and less passion on stages that I have paid a vast number of beer-vouchers to peer at. For what it is worth they did a good gig. Some songs disappeared into the ether but "Those Were The Days" rang out with claps and hollers and the banging of glasses:
"Those were the days, my friend
We thought they'd never end
We'd sing and dance forever and a day
We'd live the life we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were young and sure to have our way"
Only these are the days my friends… these are the days…
