Storm Watch

For years my dear Grandfather kept a daily record of his barometer readings. I remember as a child seeing the book in which he noted and plotted the twitch of a needle. The world was a small place then. All the boffins doing their sophisticated works at the Met Office (apart from that hot weather girl who was the sister of somebody famous) could tell me nothing more important than the contents of that slim and faded volume. There was something profound laid in those years of carefully drawn lines of different coloured inks, even if they told a story that everyone around me already knew: Buxton has crappy weather.

The naiveté of childhood ends, but I hope that he still has that book tucked away somewhere in his possessions. Maybe he keeps a record still. I don't know. We're men. We don't talk much. But, in the spirit of his great endeavour, I now have one of those digital weather station thingies in the flat. With one probe on the balcony and another on the bookshelf I know exactly what temperature my books are at and what temperature they would be at if I put them outside. If Al Gore is right (such a horrible and repulsive thought that I shudder in my chair at the merest contemplation of this) then I want a ringside site with subtitles and half-time scorecard for the apocalypse.

I want to watch the numbers on the digital display climb up and up and up as Norfolk and France disappear down and down and down under the advancing briny waters. I'll be able to tell you how hot it was in Prague when the last Calais hypermarket launched its lifeboats from the roof. I will be able to give you the time and date of the great yokel drowning in King's Lynn. Me… I'll be okay. We're on the second floor. I'm looking forward to having a sea view from the balcony. I'll flick dog-ends into the water and speedboat to work with a Martini and one of those dumb captain hats that Essex stockbrokers wear when they hire a barge for a week.

Before the Great Floods come my little weather station has an even greater purpose than documenting such merriment. Theoretically it gives a short-range forecast and I will be relying on this in order not to get soaked to the skin. Summer in Prague is marked by hot weather that suddenly dumps vast amounts of rain on your head. I got caught in one of these a couple of years ago. It was as if the Cosmic Landlord had suddenly emptied the drip tray out of nowhere. Splat. It's amazing how translucent those thin summer dresses go when they're soaked. We will see if the predictive powers of my new toy equal the predictive powers of Al Bore.

In the event of sudden water it is always best to head somewhere high, and I don't mean the sixties. You can't go back to those, no matter how much you try. Prague has a high place, but there isn't room for everyone up Žižkov Television Tower so you'd better make a booking at the restaurant should Mother Nature decide that we all need to wash behind our ears. It is only 216 meters tall, meaning that you could spit on it from the top of the Empire State, but round these ways that passes as very tall indeed. The Communists started building it in 1985 in order to block West German (remember that country?) television signals. Having watched a lot of German TV, with the exception of the late night naked lady stuff, I can see why they wanted it stopped. The stories go that the jamming signals gave local people headaches and caused domestic appliances to receive radio stations. Given that Žižkov has more pubs per square inch than anywhere else in the world I can think of an alternative explanation for all those splitting craniums and talking toasters.

These days it is harder to find an excuse for your wife catching you trying to chat up the vacuum cleaner, but the Tower provides epic views across Prague. It is often said that the best thing about the view is that it is the only panorama of Prague that does not include the Tower itself. Those red-tiled roofs sprawl away into the middle distance, occasionally broken by woodlands and the roads that reach out to us all. The spires of the Old Town hold proud in the haze, refusing to be bowed by the silver upstart on the hill. Žižkov has the height, but the old guard still have the class.

There's nothing left to jam these days. Broadcasting is the name of the game. For all its critics I'm quite fond of the towering Tower. It is incongruous, but not as trivial as London's Millennium Wheel or as odious as the Dome. The climbing babies on the outside, courtesy of the Czech Republic's resident art-prat, David Černý, are an eyesore but from a distance they cannot be seen. Distance is, as always, a great healer. The fifth-floor bar is not too steeply priced, and on a clear day it is worth handing over the necessary bumwad in order to take a view from platform halfway up. Plus there is the hope that its phallic nature is making some radical hairy feminist somewhere very, very confused and angry.

When we were up there the wind was sadly still. I prefer tall buildings when they sway a little, just as I prefer flying through turbulence. People look funny when they're green. I like high places. Empire State, Sears, medieval church towers, and pointy hills. Should the end of the world come I want to be somewhere high to see it. Whether it is a nuke sent over courtesy of the Gulfy nutters or a comet with our collective name on it, I want a good view of the final act. I've been to enough gigs to know that the last notes are the sweetest. That's all folks. Thank you and goodnight. No encore.

It's currently 19.5'C outside and 21.5'C in the lounge. The sun is heading down over the rooftops on the other side of the square, and one tree outside has leaves that are the most beautiful shade of green I have ever seen in my life. All is peaceful in the world outside my window. But still from the corner of my eye I watch for the storm. Only a fool wouldn't.

Holy Days and Holidays

At midday on Thursday I put down my pens and picked up a glass. I put the glass down again on Friday, with a hefty thump, at five in the morning. Such were the celebrations that came with the end of term, the traditional Czech Graduation Ball, and the inevitable descent into a basement bar. The inner Party Reptile reared its long slumbering head and turned its back to the wind. Make mine a double and go easy on the ice, barkeep. This is how the West was won!

Most of the music was dreadful modern dance crapola, not much improved by the resident bongo player. Quite how tunes are meant to be enhanced by a sound akin to a wet Frankfurter being slapped against a bucket I fail to fathom. It must be a young thing. However there were some gorgeous moments when the real records were dusted off. Hit The Road Jack? Satisfaction? Indeed. Another moment of timelapse: music out of time but not out of place. It could have been a scene from any day in the last thirty years in Britain, only the youngsters were better dressed and not up-chucking in the street or pool table pockets.

It took two days to recover but it was worth it, if only to prove that I can still keep going for seventeen booze-sodden hours. Never again though. Well, not until next year at least. Long before that there lies the serious issue of the Easter holiday; that annual celebration of the birth of spring, the rebirth of our Saviour, and the whipping of Czech lasses with sticks. Apparently they're meant to enjoy it and give you their eggs or something. Little tarts.

I'm not going away this particular break. Being away already it would make little sense. After coming to Prague for holidays on a regular basis it would be perverse (even more perverse than Easter whipping) to take the first opportunity to hop off somewhere else. I will even try to get round to actually doing stuff over the next two weeks. There is nothing quite like living in a city to help you see nothing of it at all. The urgency of a snatched and fleeting weekend break is lacking, and everything gets put off until another day. There's always time, so the thinking goes. Except when there isn't time at all, and you find yourself run out of town by death, destiny, or a dirty old man with a willow stick in one hand and his pride in the other. So, just this once, I will be here now and be elsewhere later. Fortune cookie wisdom for the lost generation.

Prague is, in many ways, an ideal sort of location for my favourite sort of deeply unfashionable vacation. Holidays should be nice and relaxing. The trend for "adventure" holidays, slum-surfing through the nastiest bits of the globe in search of "authentic" experiences, is symptomatic of a society that has too much time on its hands and too little bulk between its ears.

White middle-class kids who go hiking through tapestries of Warlord-governed badlands expect to be rescued when kidnapped. Their families also bitch and whine when they get eaten by crocodiles. Accountants that go to the Far East to find themselves are usually the sort of people that you wish would just get permanently lost. It's not like we don't have enough perfectly good Gods around here: leave the bloody tree-spirits to the heathens. Deliberately chasing discomfort these berks revel in getting sand in their pants, ants in their socks, a lifetime of malaria, and wooden carvings of things with too many heads. And this is meant to be fun. I'd rather go play with the dudes wearing mouse ears than share my environment with roaches the size of spaniels. I like my art hanging in a gallery, not hanging off some guy's nose. If I want to see primitive poor people I will go to Liverpool. On a cheap day return.

The only shots that a holiday should require are served in the airport departure lounge. Protective clothing should be available in packets of three. If a Visa is required it should be purely for the purpose of racking up a bar bill that you can't cover in cash. No outpost should be on a wilder frontier than the Ho-Jo on Eighth Avenue, and the water must be drinkable. Especially the fun fizzy water that goes in Scotch.

Given what lies in much of the world, staying put here is not a bad option at all. My wanderlust is in temporary submission. I haven't got to the stage of being edgy whenever I see an aeroplane. Then I know it will be time to fly again. The lure of the big blue will call soon, but the greens of spring are coming into their full glory this week. I can get some rest. Pagans, God-botherers, and whippy perverts alike can rejoice in the coming of Easter. For 'tis the season to be born, reborn, and whipped eggless.