Glob-a-log

The city has changed, over the years. Capitalism hasn’t been kind to it, to be honest. So many of Prague’s small shops have gone: the little bakeries and sweet shops; most all of the little pivnice, where you could have breakfast, lunch and dinner (and beer to go with all these meals.) Almost all of the small butcher and vegetable shops, the ones that sold cheap flowers and even cheaper presents: gone.

You had these hole-in-the-wall food joints, during the winter months, where you could buy pieces of roasted chicken - and the smell of grease and salt would follow you around for half a block: they are all gone.

Why? Well, the rents went up and all those small shops went belly up. Most people complain about all the neon that’s replaced the Calvinistic starkness and neglect of communism. I can’t say I do. Sure, there are more and more big supermarkets, more KFC’s and other junk food giants, more in your face and ugly consumerism - well, so what? The lady is still beautiful, under this new and garish layer of make-up.

I miss - and mourn - some things that have gone though. Those shops I mentioned and the self-made clothes of the young girls who didn’t have the money to buy ready-to-wear stuff. The material they could afford was cheap. They never looked cheap though: those lovely girls who wore these wallpaper patterned garments. They looked beautiful.

Still, at the moment I wasn’t bothered by old ghosts. What I was confronted with right now was a new insult: the most recent of horrors that had come to Prague.

I crossed the road, ignoring the latest monstrous high rise shopping temple and entered one of the loveliest of old cemeteries, OlÅ¡anskÄ“ hrbitovy. A beautifully neglected graveyard, worth a visit in all seasons. Communist mausoleums face immense crucifixes, like gunslingers who are ready to draw on each other at the drop of a white or black hat. Plants covering most of the humbler graves; trees everywhere - and, hanging from their branches: hundreds of small, home-made bird feeders. Big graveyard squirrels, forever waging war on…

“Ah, there you are then.” I said.

“What do you want” the cat asked, in an equally loving tone.

“Me: a quiet life. A few beers in a nice, little pub - a beautiful waitress, maybe.”

“What do you want?” the cat asked again.”

“It’s your bloody disciples” I said; “They’d like to see you.”

“Well, you can tell them to come here then.”

“Of course. Anything else, master?”

“Just piss off, will you. You’ve scared away those squirrels.”

“I have scared away…?! Ah, never mind. Happy hunting.”

“Thanks. Now, sod off.”

I shook my head and left the cemetery. As I said before: I’m not really bothered with McDonald’s outlets sprouting all over town like skin cancer. Not when there is real evil about - like my bloody cat.

And now I had become a kind of walking & talking answer machine for the monster moggie, whenever its little alien friends wanted to talk - or pray to it.

Still shaking my head I entered the first bar I came upon: a tired looking non-stop with more slot machines than customers - but I wasn’t looking for atmosphere right now. A large beer and a few shots shots of Fernet was all that I wanted right now.

I didn’t even care that the beautiful waitress came in the guise of an ugly, fat and bearded biker type. To be honest, he wasn’t particularly interested in me either and he yawned all through my opening line:

“You know, there are so many things they don’t tell you about in all those cute little cat food commercials…”