Glob-a-log

I already mentioned this in a previous column but the people of Prague are very relaxed about sex. Whether you are male or female, you can approach about anyone and ask them if they would be interested in going to bed with you and no-one will call you a sexist pig or a hopeless slut.

This, of course, does not mean that people will actually have sex with you but it is safe to ask.

The following two anecdotes are, again, hopelessly autobiographical and will serve as a classic ‘How to get lucky’ text book - in reverse, that is.

1) Once upon a time I was sitting in my local non-stop, reading some book. I’ve forgotten what kind of book. It would be nice to pretend it was Shakespeare or Rilke but it is, statistically speaking, far more likely that is was a Stephen King or Terry Pratchett novel.

Anyway, I’m sitting there, reading and nipping from my beer & Fernet, when a woman sitting next to me approaches me. She apologises for disturbing me but could I do her a huge favour? Then she explains that the drunken neighbour to the right of her, who has just gone to the toilet, has been bothering her and won’t take no for an answer. So, if I could just talk to her for a bit, till the obnoxious drunk returns, so that he will then get the message that she won’t be going home with him…?

Well, the woman was quite pretty and I was raised to be polite, so I agree to do as she proposed. So, we start to talk and when the drunken guy returns to the bar, we keep talking (and ignoring his efforts to join in) till he sees the light, pays his bill and leaves. The woman thanks me, buys me a new glass of Fernet and I return to the immortal words of Shakespeare/Rilke (or, in all likelihood, to the gory/funny tales of King/Pratchett.)

After a while the beer or the Fernet starts to get to me and I go to the toilet. When I leave the toilet the woman from the bar is standing there. She says ‘Hi!’ and smiles at me; I say ‘Hi!’ and smile back, and then return to the bar and my book. Well, everybody knows that when you start to go, you keep going, and so it is this time. And the next two times I come out of the toilet, the woman is standing there, smiling & saying ‘Hi’ and I, being quite the clever little sod, simply deduce that she has the same kind of bladder capacity as I have.

The fourth time I go to the toilet she’s not there when I’ve done my business. Back at the bar the barman - who, by now, knows me well - hands me a note, left by the woman. The note is pretty polite, all things considered. The barman shakes his head, pours me another glass of Fernet and says, with a very long-suffering kind of sigh, ‘You are such an idiot…!’

It has been suggested by some (well, by Cherrycher, anyway) that writing poems will get you laid. Well, I’m not suggesting that there aren’t any poems around that will get all kinds of juices flowing and poets who, so to speak, are able to collect this spillage or steer the flow towards the bedroom. I’m just saying that doesn’t happen all the time - and more to the point: that it hasn’t happened to me. In fact, the exact opposite happened to me. Which leads us to today’s second cautionary tale:

2) I was sitting in a bar, finishing a letter to the Lady Renata. In fact, I was copying out some poems I had written for her earlier in the week, to go with the letter, as appendix. (A hand-written letter, yes. There’s something intensely satisfying about writing & receiving hand-written letters, especially if they contain poems.)

Renata had been in Australia for five months already and had just E-mailed me that she would stay there for at least another eight months. Earlier she had also informed me that she’d picked up another temporary companion (or, in her own words, a ‘beau’.) I had done my usual bit of mournful pining when she’d set out on another round of travelling but was slowly beginning to notice Prague’s many other extremely beautiful women again.

Like the one who was, in fact, sitting at the bar, in this pub where I was finishing my letter to Renata. She had looked in my direction a few times, and I had looked more than a few times to where she was sitting and whenever our eyes met, there was smiling & polite rejoicing on both sides. Hmmm: interrrresting… but I really wanted to finish that letter first.

So, I had just copied out the last poem, when another woman came to my table, and asked me what I was doing. She was also quite lovely (if not as beautiful as the woman at the bar) so it was no hardship at all to smile back at her and to explain (somewhat ruefully) that I’d just finished a letter to my girlfriend who was in Australia.

The woman smiled back at me. (She reminded me of someone but I couldn’t think of whom, so I ignored that niggling voice.) Then she looked at the letter and said, ‘You have written poems for her? You must love her very much.’ So, I said that yes, I did love her very much and then I waxed lyrical about Renata for a few more minutes. The woman then praised my steadfast heart and romantic soul and said her goodbyes. I waved her a manfully steadfast goodbye (thinking that I’d done very well resisting any possible kind of sexual overture, while still managing to send her on her way, feeling good about the whole encounter - and that now it was time to finish my beer, seal the envelope and go over to the bar and talk to that other woman.)

I was about to do just that when I noticed that the woman I’d been talking to was now in deep conversation with ‘my’ woman. And then I remembered where I’d seen the woman I’d been telling about Renata before: she’d come in with the woman at the bar before toddling off again to spend some time talking to other people.

Damn.

When woman A had explained the whole thing to woman B both looked at me, smiling approvingly. I smiled back at them and raised my glass in their direction, cursing myself mightily inside. When the women had finished up their drinks they left. On their way out ‘my’ woman smiled quite wistfully at me - a bit sad but still approving. I smiled bravely and wistfully back, cursing even louder on the inside.

So, I ended up going home alone, after posting my letter: the mighty player/poet striking out again…

Still, it did make a great opening for my next letter to Renata (who subsequently wrote me back, saying that she hadn’t had such a good laugh in quite some time…) and now it also makes a nice cautionary tale in this ongoing ‘How to get laid in Prague’ saga. Or, as that great sage Aristotle once wrote, ‘Go figure.’

(You can find ‘How to get laid in Prague: part one’ here.)

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 17:27 and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.