Glob-a-log

Two-and-a-half years ago, I started with an online diary, for this blog. This was one of the entrances:

Monday, April 30th, 2007

And so, it was that time again that all men good and true picked up their swords and cross-bows and went to (re)conquer the Holy Land – or more to the point: time for me to throw a few T-shirts in a bag and hop on a plane to Prague.

Every calendar year I spend at least three (sometimes four) months in that most majestic and beautiful of cities. I used to live there, many years ago – I met the girlfriend there – and, through an old friend, I still have two rooms in the Žižkov area that are mine whenever I want to come to Prague.

Prague has always been good to me. I like its relaxed attitude, its beautiful, old stones, its many parks and countless little bars and restaurants, its suicidal trams and cabs, its wonderful beer and incredibly beautiful women. The only drawback I could think of would be the millions of tourists that also flock to Prague but then, they stick mostly to the centre, so you hardly ever see that many of them anyway.

Of course, one of the most wonderful aspects of life in my Prague rooms is a complete absence of a certain animal. I pay my Dutch neighbour’s early teen daughter a minor king’s ransom to feed the bloody cat in my absence. She claims the job is even harder than it would be to baby-sit Calvin (of Calvin & Hobbes fame) and I know that that’s most likely true, so I pay her without complaining all that much. Any options other than killing the little pest would be much, much worse.

So, I suffered through the indignities of modern travel. Paying through the nose to get a ticket on the plane, with less free legroom that galley slaves enjoyed – after hanging around for almost two hours at Schiphol airport for security reasons. Then a rattling Prague bus, a boring underground journey and one tram stop later I was back home again.

To the right of me football stadium FK Viktoria Žižkov and one of this city’s many parks; to the left of me a pub with a very nice, enclosed back garden - what rested of the journey just a two minutes’ walk to my apartment, taking me past two other bars, three restaurants, one wine cellar and two small evening shops. I was back in Prague indeed.

On the third step of the four-step entry of the building where I lived sat something unspeakably vile. It was cleaning its nails and looked at me with an air of proprietorial disgust:

“What took you so bloody long?” it asked.

I’ll be returning to Prague in two weeks time. I thought it would only be fair to give fair warning that I plan to pick up the diary writing again…

(The joys of DIY…?)

Now, people are always going on about the perfect this or the perfect that. Lists of favourite music, cars, movies and, of course, movie stars…

… and each journalist, blogger or columnist knows that you can almost always get away with writing another list-based piece. Because there will always be an audience for lists (or cats.)

No cats today though - okay, one short paragraph to keep our feline junkies happy. So, here’s one cute cat picture and one strange cat story. On to the next, cat-free paragraph now.

Before I so rudely interrupted myself with that stupid cat paragraph, I was talking about lists of favourite things (because I obviously have nothing better to do right now and still have this column to write.)

So, most people, at least sometimes, make these lists in their heads. They see a car, or a house, or someone wearing a cool outfit and think: I wouldn’t mind having one of those, and those, and those…

Some people go for composite lists. So, for example, they would like to have Oprah’s bank account, look like Brad Pitt and have sex with Angelina Jolie.

Obviously, when you try to make a perfect composite fantasy figure, you need to be careful, unless you don’t mind ending up with someone who has the sense of humour of Eddy Murphy, the body of Jack Nicholson and the tastes of Hannibal Lecter.

Right, so you can guess where I am going with this - and here is my very obvious question: If you were given God or Frankenstein type powers and could create the perfect man or woman out of three (or more) celebrities, who would you pick for what parts and attributes precisely?

As I said, be careful out there - or, at least, don’t come back to complain to me when you’ve managed to provide your composite woman with Jolie’s tats, Oprah’s hips and Paris Hilton’s brains.

Anyway, have fun and, if you want, let me know what your favourite composite man and/or woman would look like.

(And the risks of DIY…?)

(Jeremiah: Patron saint of all tedious Crusaders and other lamenting nuts)

I used to like the English columnist Jeremy Clarkson very much but the last few years he’s become a bit of an eco bore. Proving that on both far ends of any issue, only the useless and the tedious seem to gather, spoiling any kind of meaningful discussion for all sides.

Of course, on the few occassions that Clarkson is not behaving like a latter-day Cato, ending each and every speech to the Roman Senate with his trademark ‘By the way, I think that Carthage must be destroyed’, J.C. can still be very entertaining.

Only last Sunday, he was complaining about the British government, which was, yet again, wasting money and time, in its never ending campaign to keep the whole of Britain healthy & safe & bored out of its collective skull:

“Genuinely, it staggers me that with all the problems facing the nation right now, some of my tax money is being used to work out how much wine I should drink before supper. What next? An enormous Prora-style holiday camp on the east coast where smiling families in lederhosen will be ordered to do star jumps from dawn till dusk? Drinking to excess is what separates us from the Greeks. Being drunk is what separates us from the beasts.”

I was reminded of yesterday’s jeremiad by Clarkson when I read an article in one of England’s less serious newspapers - okay, a tabloid really: The Daily Telegraph. The Telegraph specializes in putting out stories of a highly dubious scientific nature.

What they seem to do is half read some serious science story, latch on to its most dubious bits, paint those purple and then inflate the poor things till they are buggered up beyond recognition and belief.

Obviously, almost nothing that appears in the science section of the Telegraph has anything even remotely to do with real science (reporting) but these pieces can still be quite amusing.

They are like those ‘How about that!‘ sections that most papers now carry - with the added advantage that what is written in the science section need not even be true at all.

Anyway, I thought the following story was quite entertaining:

“Rather than curbing a man’s prowess in bed, new research from Australia claims that alcohol can actually improve sexual performance. The suggestion flies in the face of conventional thinking which insists that men who drink too much are more likely to suffer from erectile dysfunction. The new findings are based on a study of 1,580 Australian men, carried out by Western Australia’s Keogh Institute for Medical Research and published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. It concluded that those men who drank a moderate amount of alcohol reported 30 per cent fewer problems than teetotallers.”

Now, I’m sure these new findings (such as they are) will not change the government’s attitude to alcohol. In fact, it might even harden their stance - since this adds another potential pleasure to the act of drinking.

Which is probably the most annoying aspect of this whole health & safety obsession: That you can’t help but think that those who claim to act for the good of all of us are, in fact, miserabilist spoil-sports who simply can’t stand it when other people are having fun.

Whether it’s the fanatical, total war on smokers, the drinking of alcohol or the eating of fast food, there’s always this impression that these campaigners don’t really want us to be healthy: They just want to convert us to their risk & pleasure averse faith - and, failing that, take everything that gives us pleasure away from us by force.

In that sense, I have to say that the extremists on the environmental front very much seem to be operating according to that same principle. While I am - unlike Jeremy Clarkson - not a Global Warming denier, I’m not exactly a paid up member of The Latter Day Green Church of Total Doom.

So, I do feel that, like the health & safety Nazis, a sizable number of the fanatical environmentalists simply hate it when other people seem to have the kind of fun they disapprove of.

Something tells me that, if tomorrow would bring absolute & undeniable proof that all those scientists had been wrong about Global Warming, quite a few of the more obsessed Greens would not be pleased with these good tidings at all.

Like all the fanatics who want us to lead healthy & boring lives, these environmentalists would probably plain hate it if things like cheap flights, fancy cars and other, in their eyes, almost evil pursuits & assets would prove to be absolutely harmless in environmental terms.

Mind you, I’m not saying that Global Warming will prove to be as much of a real threat as the Wizard of Oz was - but I’m quite convinced that at least some of the doom sayers would actually prefer an environmental catastrophe over a scenario where consumerist pleasures would not lead all of us to ruin.

In that sense, the colour green suits the Mad Hatter’s part of the environmental movement as well as a more Calvinist black would. Not, however, the pleasant green of meadows and trees and what have you but the glaring green of poisonous envy.

Of course, every generation throughout history has been saying that the human race and all its works are going to Hell in a designer handcart. Still, that little and much maligned thing called ‘progress’ does indeed come with some real advantages too.

Now me, I loathe the mobile phone and all the stupid drones using it to call people that they are now on the train, or plane, or in the shop etcetera, etcetera. On the other hand, the phone itself is a noisome but yet quite useful invention. We’re now so used to it that we can’t truly imagine its absence – but it hasn’t been with us for all that long. Consider the following, quite delightful little anecdote I read in the Times, in an article by Graham Stewart:

The telephone was more than 60 years old when the Second World War broke out. Yet the Prime Minister was only easily contactable if he stayed in the vicinity of Downing Street. Unfortunately, Neville Chamberlain preferred to spend his weekends at Chequers. The country house had only one telephone and it was there to help the kitchen staff to order supplies rather than to secure the survival of the British Empire. Whenever Hitler made a surprise move, Chamberlain had to be whisked off to the butler’s pantry.

So, yes, there is something to say for humankind’s never-ending search for new gadgets, new things that go ‘boom’ in the night and quite a lot of other stuff we get used to so fast that we forget that someone actually had to invent them – and even the most dedicated pessimist and ‘hell in a handcart’ prophet must admit that the following story is good news indeed:

The dentists’ drill could be consigned to the past. Scientists at Leeds Dental Institute have created a solution that mimics the way the body forms new teeth, which can be used to repair holes naturally without the need for drilling and filling.

Prague is full of beautiful little parks, impressive churches and handsome bridges. True, there are some eye-sores too. Everything that was built in the communist era is loathsome to behold. Of course, the Soviets were more into plundering or neglecting what was already there, so they didn’t leave all that much in the way of an architectural heritage - apart from their dreadful panelaks: those housing blocks that look even worse than what all those optimistic young architects built in England after the second world war.

“You poor, poor baby” I said - and no, I did not mean that bloody cat of mine - nor the aliens, of whom no trace was left, as far as I could see.

As boats beget barnacles, cities grow stories. Prague is an old city, so it has gathered a lot of interesting stories. Some are hidden, some are almost too big to be noticed any more and almost all of them are interesting - and some are damned funny.

Did you know, for instance that the seriously land-locked republic of Czechoslovakia once had its own navy? Strange but true. ‘T was in the communist era, of course - most mad tales come from that unhappy time. The Russians needed money, so they came up with yet another thieving & blackmailing scheme. They had some old boats that they wanted to be rid of and so they forced the Czechoslovakian puppet government to buy these ships (that were rusting in some faraway communist harbour.)

Thus, the republic of Czechoslovakia got its own navy and its own admiral, no doubt, who after the Russians had finally buggered off probably spent his retirement in his splendid uniforms, ceremoniously opening one McDonald’s outlet after the other.

Anyway, like I said, cities accumulate stories like cats gather the corpses of their unhappy victims and leave them for their owners to clear away. Right now though I was thinking of another true story, from another small country - and how I once came upon the story that the Swiss government had built an official landing site for UFO’s.

I was also thinking about my cat and cursing it enthusiastically but that was just business as usual. Well, maybe not quite that:

“They want what?!” I asked, hardly believing my luck.

“They want me to come with them, to their home planet, where they will build temples for me - and a palace, of course.”

“Those stupid aliens still think you’re a God?”

“Yesss.”

“What fun. And of course you told them you would be happy to come and be their God for ever and ever amen?”

“Yes. On one condition though.”

“Ah…?”

“I told them my slave had to come too.”

“Your slave…” “

“Yes”

“By which you mean…”

“Yes.”

“Of course. And then I trust they explained to you that I would not fit into their tiny spaceships.”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

“So I told them to go home and build a larger spaceship.”

“To which they replied…?”

“Yesss…!!!“

“Bloody Hell.”

(To be continued.)

Prague, to me, is the most beautiful city in the world. Of course, they say everybody who’s seriously in love thinks the woman he loves is the most beautiful gal on spaceship earth. Well, fair enough: after all these years I’m still in love with this city, so I admit to a certain bias. It’s still damn beautiful though.

(To be continued) 

According to Einstein nationalism was the bane of humankind - humankind’s measles, he called it. Others would say that claim was só 20th century. They insist climate change is the worst threat that humanity will face in the coming decades.

In fact, there are those who are sure it already affects other planets as well. (And then there are those who see any newfangled bit of nonsense news as an excuse to get seriously nostalgic.)

However, all those good folks who do think nationalism is as bad for our health as, let’s say, sunbathing, or that climate change will do to us in the 21st century what rats brought us in the 14th century, haven’t met my cat.

My cat is more evil than Vegan parents, and far more annoying than the combined top ten of most annoying pop lyrics. Believe me, you’d rather hear someone in the street scream ‘The fridgemen are coming!!!’ than you’d have my cat enter your living room.

Right now I was staring at the little brute in utter disbelief. It had just told me how it had managed to arrive at my Prague apartment before my plane from Holland had brought me there.

“So you’re saying…?”

“Yup.”

“And they really believe…?”

“‘Fraid so” the cat said, smug as only the biggest smug- or smeghead can be.

“Unfuckingbelievable.”

“Great story, yes?”

I shook my head. That was one way of describing it, yes. Like old Popsicle Oates saying to his friends that he’d just go outside for a bit.

“So, those idiots returned.” I said.

“Yup, yup.” said the cat.

I shook my head again.

Remember that car park I mentioned some time ago - where my cat had seen fit to have its own first contact celebrations by way of eating the leader of a rather small alien delegation from some faraway planet that had just landed their UFO outside my local supermarket?

Well, they’d managed a second coming.

“And they didn’t come back to do an Arnie…?”

“Nope.” said the cat.

“They came to surrender instead.”

“Yesss…!!!” the cat hissed triumphantly.

“Even worse, now those stupid, green wankers think you’re some kind of God.”

The cat did a truly irritating victory dance.

“And then they flew you to Prague, just because you told them to…”

More sur place fancy feline footwork followed.

I shook my head again - and then went for my coat.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the cat asked.

“I’m going to get seriously drunk.” I said and then left my cat-infested apartment, still shaking my head.

It was a very Victor (I don’t believe it!) Meldrew moment: numb-skull aliens now saying their pathetic prayers to my bloody cat - and playing celestial cabbie too.

Ah well, so much for the theory that there are other, maybe even more intelligent life-forms out there.

It’s not easy being green, Kermit the frog sang long ago. No doubt having legs that makes millions of French mouths water isn’t much of a picnic either. Still, as far as I know, nobody knows or has ever recorded songs about the plight of your average cat owner - let alone the not-so-average-owner of a cat who gets from Holland to Prague faster than its plane-sailing cat food provider. And it wasn’t even as if the plane had been flown by some Stevie Wonder wannabe pilot who took the scenic route via Vladivistok or Sydney.

Anyway, so here I was in Prague again, which was great - and so was the cat; which, on the whole, was as welcome as Yeltsin’s knocking on Heaven’s door or George Bush posing for even more action shots in Iraq.

What made matters even worse was that the damn animal flatly refused to say how it had managed to get to Prague before I had done so. In other words, it had become time for desperate measures.

“What’s this?” the cat asked, looking like a guy who’d finally found out why the curry had tasted so weird, the last few weeks.

“The best pet food money can buy.” I assured it.

“It smells like shit.”

“That’s just one cat’s opinion. Millions of dogs love this crap.”

“You’re trying to feed me dog food? You want to kill me?”

“Weeelllll…”

“I’d rather starve to death than eat that stuff.”

“You know that old proverb?”

“What?”

“Curiosity killed the cat. Well, I’m curious and till you give satisfaction in that regard, you will eat dog food or starve.”

“Blackmailing bastard!”

“Mutinous moggy!”

“Okay, I’ll tell you.”

“Finally…”

“It’s like this…”

(To be continued)

Cats can do smug like no other creatures on this planet – and my cat is better at it than most other moggies I’ve known. Right now, it was looking as if it had secured the copyright for the word (and the T-shirt franchise.)

Admittedly, it had some right to look smug: I’d left it to the greedy care of its baby-sitter, locked inside my Dutch apartment – and here it had arrived in Prague before me, while I had taken the fastest route possible to get here. Fastest for humans, that is. The cat had somehow managed to arrange a more speedy ride.

“You’re going to open that damn door?” the cat asked.

I opened the door.

“I’m hungry.” the cat said.

I walked through the hallway, shaking my head. This was so not the way I had envisaged my return to Prague. I unlocked the door to my apartment. The cat sneaked in before I had the chance to fully open the door.

“What a dump.” it said; “Where’s my food bowl?”

“In Holland”

“My Prague food bowl – you idiot. And I need a drinking bowl, and a cat flap and a litter box – a bigger one than in Holland, mind you: I’m sure the food here won’t agree with me… And while you’re at it… Hey! Where do you think you are going…?!”

“Out. If you need me, you can reach me somewhere in outer Mongolia.”

I didn’t stay away that long though. Tempting as it was to leave the cat without all its normal creature comforts, I was rather attached to my Prague apartment and I knew what a seriously miffed cat could do in terms of interior redecorating, if you let it on its own for too long.

So, I went to the nearest pet shop – luckily there are many of those in Prague – and bought the full set of ‘keep your cat moderately happy’ paraphernalia. Food & drink bowls, scratching posts, a bed, a litter box, some small play things. The lot. Then I bought cat food and returned to my apartment.

“What took you so bloody long?” the cat complained; “Let me smell your breath. I’m sure you’ve been in the pub!”

“Go fuck a duck.” I muttered, putting food in the cat’s new bowl.

“I heard that.” the cat said.”

“Good.”

“There are bunnies on that bowl.” the cat said; “I hate bunnies.”

“Tough. All the other ones had butterflies, or dancing mice.”

“Liar! I’m sure you bought the most disgusting bowl they had.”

“You know me so well.”

“And where do you think you’re going now?!”

“Out.”

“Bloody boozer!”

“Fucking felix!”

Outside, the sun was shining; about a hundred cellar bars and garden pubs awaited me within less than half a square mile. Life wasn’t all that bad – but for that bloody cat of mine…

Ah well, the next few hours at least would be a feline-free fun fest. I had money in my pocket, a good book, some notebooks & a few pens in my trusted plastic bag – and a major thirst.

Obviously, I was still wondering how that bloody animal had managed to arrive in Prague before I did but I knew it would have been a major mistake to ask.

Let the animal believe I didn’t care; then it would tell me soon enough, just to brag. Show any sign of curiosity though and it wouldn’t tell me in a million years.

Bloody cats.

(To be continued.)