Bohemian Rhapsody

Over Easter Mrs Botogol and I revisited a city we last went to over twenty years ago.

Well, which city? you ask.  Well, work it out, say I : it's nearer to both Rome and Gdansk than it is to London, it lies north of the Lizard and west of Vienna and it's the capital city of a country that didn't exist in 1989 when we were last there.  Have you got it yet ? Answer below the picture...

Street Art  ²

Quick - which countries border the Czech Republic? ¹

The last time we went to Prague I was 26 and it was behind the iron curtain in Czechoslovakia, a communist country. We had arrived from Dresden and crossing the border from East Germany initially we welcomed the more relaxed atmosphere - until some 50 miles later we were stopped by police for slightly speeding, and relieved of all our Czech currency. Currency which I replaced later that evening in a somewhat unofficial transaction with a dodgy-looking Slovak just off Wenceslas Square: nervously exchanging few deutschmarks for a vast, uncountable, wodge of worthless low denomination Koruna.

In 89, we were camping: the only English in a campsite full of East Germans, Poles, Bulgarians, Romanians, Russians and Dutch. Prague was chilly that August, the castle was closed, and our pictures show a dirty, empty city, full of Trabants and Skodas. After two days we fled for the border and a green salad in FDR.

It has changed since then: there are many more tourists now, and more restaurants, bars, markets and stalls. And we have changed, not least because this time we had with us our teenage children, all three of them much closer to twenty-six than I am now.

And last week we weren't camping either - we were in a boutique hotel and each morning we gorged on the all-inclusive buffet breakfast - easily enough to keep us going until the afternoon when we bought deep-fried cheesy  slices of batter from the Old Square market (street food -- what's not to like?).

The tourist shops were full of Czech glass, and - oddly - matryoshka dolls, but the shops for locals were far more interesting: a hundred metres from our hotel an incongruous Korean family sold ersatz groceries in an open-all-hours store, and in a junk shop across the river from Charles Bridge, contents sourced from house clearances, I bought Soviet era postcards and 19th century pencils while Mrs Botogol leafed carefully through a poignant family photo album from the 1960s.

Not everything had changed: despite membership of the EU, the Czech currency is still the Koruna. But it no longer comes in wads of tiny demonations: going to the cashpoint and withdrawing 2000 Kc - about £70 - I had to smile when the machine coughed up one, single, 2000Kc note.

On our last day we hired a car and drove to Karlovy Vary (we Botogols get about a bit, you know). The name means Charles Spa and it's an ancient but mostly nineteenth century spa town not at all faded:  parades of grand and beautiful buildings last a mile, either side of a river in a steep wooded valley. Hotels, Thermal Baths, follies, a theatre, town hall, many buildings brightly painted, some gold leafed, all glorious.

Although it was only April it was warm and the town was full of tourists taking the spa waters and the cures and treatments.  Austrians, Germans, Italians, Ukrainians and - especially - Russians, but we didn't hear a single English voice. All along the parades and colonnades were boutique jewellers and clothes shops. The jewellers sold Czech amethysts and garnets and Russian diamonds set in soft, yellow gold in exotic purities.

The clothes shops sold the dowdier, more garish and more heavily branded ranges from international (and some suspiciously East European) designers, plus Louis Vuitton luggage, it was a town for the fabulously rich and tasteless. All the shops  had signs in Russian.

There was also a camera obscura and a funicular - the Victorians knew what they liked and what they liked were funiculars and cameras obscura.

We were in the Czech Republic four days, and had a splendid time. When we got back to Gatwick, dog tired but cat happy, we found we'd parked in the wrong long term car park. Not the cheap pre-booked rates then, after all. They wouldn't accept our left over Koruna, either

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1 The Czech Republic was established in 1993. It borders Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Austria.

2 The picture was on a street stall in Karlovy Vary. The painter did explain it: clockwise from Obama: Merkel, Charles, the artist himself, Berlusconi, Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, (I forget), (who knows), Putin, Medvedev. 
I liked it because Gordon Brown didn't make the cut even though Carla Bruni did.  That made me smile but nonetheless it's sad, isn't it, that in the 21st Century our country is represented in popular European minds by the 61 year old hereditary, done-nothing, Prince of Wales. Republic anybody?

Bonnie

Bass Rock bathed in Scottish sunshine. By D.Y

After nearly two weeks holiday in Scotland I think I can safely report that:

• it's true: Global Warming really has stopped.
  
• Indeed if the prevalence of wetsuits on the beach is any guide at all, then an ice age is imminent, again.
  
• fortunately we can rely completely on the ever-present lukewarm rain in Northern Britain to melt the glaciers and save us from the spreading menace.

It has to be said that the Kingdom of Fife isn't at its best in the rain. Which is a shame, because it seems to rain a lot.

"Out in the distance", proffered our guide, as we traipsed round the local National Trust castle "you can see Bass Rock. Keep a wee watch on it ev'ry morn" [Look, you'll just have to imagine the accent, work with me here, OK?] "and ye'll see it's a different colour every day, do ye ken? Perhaps you've even noticed some different colours already in your stay?"

Yes. Grey.

At the Cocoa Tree cafe, chock full of damp tourists, I divulged to the cheery waitress that I was from London. "Oh, well ye'll be wanting the internet access, then", she said (No, she wasn't Scottish).

But she was right! It's not at all a bad place to sit and blog over a small and extraordinarily good cup of intense hot chocolate with a dash of chilli (recipe kept determinedly secret despite two separate and heartfelt requests)


"When I was your age, you know, we didn't have wetsuits", I sniffed to the Botogol children.
I felt about 74.

From the Fringe..

Translation: It isn't very funny. With PR
like that, who needs critics?

The fringe festival is raw market capitalism at its best: while the official festival ballet and opera rest on their arts council subsidised backsides (more money than on wind farms, but less than on Olympic Cycling) the High Street throbs with hoards of performers pressing flyers into the hands of would-be play-goers, with hardly any hyperbole to speak of (we went to three world premières and fourteen five-star shows)

"Do you think they target who they give their flyers to" asked the Botogol girls, and their friend, after a particularly arduous ascent of the Royal Mile. We sat down over a deep-fried Mars bar with cider on the rocks, and compared our stash: the three teenage girls had received invitations to a dark drama about teenage suicide, the Women's stand-up comedy awards, a dark drama about bulimia nervosa and the Chippendales. I had scored a leaflet for The Scottish National Trust's Georgian House in Charlotte Square.

Later that evening, in an iconoclastic defiance of stereotype, I woke up Mrs Botogol to take her to the Supper Club in the Assembly Rooms at Midnight. I promised her relaxing cabaret, soulful jazz, tearful blues, the whole spiced with erudite and witty comedy. What we got was sub-1930s Berlin Cabaret, but more squalid and more low-brow. It's a good job we are broad-minded.

The lowlight of the show was the German MC in wig who sang songs of unbearable crudity, without rhyme or metre and totally devoid of wit. Perhaps in the original German they rhymed

The highlight? Well, Mrs Botogol told me not to mention the pale stripper who excitingly fought her way out of a gigantic parcel in a bikini (the stripper, not the parcel) for Mrs Botogol doesn't like strippers. So let's, rather, go with the middle-aged luridly eye-shadowed black man, 23 stone if he was a kilogram, encased from top to tail in a neon-pink lycra body suit, singing... well, I quite forget what he was singing, I was too busy shrinking into my chair trying to avoid attention, for I recognised him - indeed he knew us - for he was none other than the big guy who had plonked down in front of us earlier, and politely apologised for blocking Mrs Botogol's view "Don't worry, I'll be going in a moment".

Now on stage he picked us out of the crowd with no trouble and beamed and waved enthusiastically, flickering his mascara eyelids at us, until the music stoppped. I knew what was coming next.
"So what's your name dear", he asked me, "yes, yes, I do mean you"

I swallowed, sat up straight and looked him firmly in the eye: "I'm Brad Majors, and this is my fiancee, Janet Weiss"

Slip-Sliding Away

by Peggy Archer.

It's been a long time since I held hands with a grown man. At a guess 1973.

Until the weekend, that is, when I took a deep breath, shifted my weight on to my toes and held hands, quite tightly and more than once, with a young, tanned snow board instructor.

Reader, I even gazed into his eyes.

Until he told me: no, even though it was true, he had said to look straight ahead, perhaps I should rather look over his shoulder toward the crest of hill, and was I ready to let go now ?

I was at the artificial ski-slope at Sandown Park for private lesson. He was a lot better on a snowboard than I was, but on the whole I felt I was dressed more cooly: while he sported a bright red junior ski-klub sweatshirt and a baseball hat back to front. I was wearing my ultra-baggy (triathlon weight-loss) snow-boarder-cargo-pants and my sly hat.

Unfortunately, although I was cooler I was also indisputably hotter: it may be a miserable August in England but hopping up a steep slope wearing a hat and gloves and with a 10kg deadweight strapped to your ankle can certainly warm you up. Even when you have ventilated armpit holes.

When I took off my knee-pads, I had sweat patches on my knees.

Back to Work

Rat in a maze by :: Varda ::.

How people are expected to come back from holiday rested, energised and raring to go is a total mystery to me.

It makes no sense: you take two weeks off running, you come back slower, not faster. You take two weeks off work, you forget all your passwords.

And in my case also you forget where your office is.

You can only imagine how amusing that was: bursting in to find the new Regional Cross-Functional Inter-Department Coordinator sitting in my office trying out my chair. I must have given her a good half-minute of the Goldilocks treatment before I remembered that I had moved again just three days before I went away.

I actually suspect I have been away longer than two weeks, but have forgotten it all in a haze of manzanilla, or perhaps we were all drugged on that bus. As well as the memory loss, this would explain why it's become winter. And why everyone seems to have forgotten about standing on the bleeding right on escalators.

At least they missed me while I was a way (well, I left some little booby traps behind to make damn sure, of course)

El Presidente! Él está viniendo!

Yesterday the Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (for it is he) chose to visit the bird-watchers' paradise that is the Doñana National Park. So did the family Botogol. I think it is fair to say that of the two of us, he attracted the more attention.

Eventually, we found out it was the presence of el Presidente that was the reason we spent forty-five minutes parked on a beach in a sweltering bus containing 17 excitable and excited Spaniards, all speaking a style of impenetrable Spanish where all but the first two consonants of every word are silent.

We were waiting to cross the estuary back to Sanlúcar, a tantalising 500m away; the ferry was there, but it wasn't moving. Through my binoculars (with which I hadn't managed to correctly focus on a single bird all morning) I could see across the water people in the cool café shade enjoying their ice-cold manzanilla and tapas. We had 2 litres of tepid water.

With a peculiar sense of deja vu, I stood and approached the bus driver, plaintively, but the bus driver, he shrugged; I subsided.

Then without warning I leapt from my seat and made a grab for the door. Without even turning around, the driver snorted and hit the central-locking button, and I returned, defeated, back to my bench.

Perhaps, I thought, they are waiting for us all to collapse one at time in the heat, so that they can harvest our kidneys before propping us up in a bath of ice. I thought longingly of my phrasebook (Chapter 11: In a Hostage Situation). Why do you always leave it behind in the villa when you really need it?

Donana Bus
by jdsa2001.

At least our loved ones would have a decent photographic record of how we had spent our final hours: that is, bouncing around in a large-wheeled bus up and down a bumpy beach terrorising the local wildlife into panic or flight for the entertainment of the tourists. Totally ignorant of avian fauna, and in the complete absence of any English commentary whatsoever, we had enjoyed ourselves spotting big birds, little birds, medium-sized birds and - I think I can safely say - seagulls. Also, and really the highlight of the morning, a dead seal. And deer, lots of deer.

There are rumours of a lost stone-age tribe in the Doñana, living in prehistoric grass huts, feeding entirely off wild boar, berries, and medium-sized birds and totally unaware of the existence of Manzanilla sherry. But we didn't see any.


A shiny black Toyota suddenly roared from the trees and shot across the beach and straight on to the ferry. Spanish cameras clicked, the ferry turned and sped off towards Sanlúcar and we were finally released on to the sand to await its return.

When we finally got on the boat, some twenty minutes later, the ferryman was understandably excited. "You'll never guess", he said, "who I had in the back of my ferry this morning"

Manzanilla and more

Example of Flor
Originally uploaded by catavino.

If there is a single drink in the world that rivals the margarita for style and sophistication it's a manzanilla sherry. Produced from fields of alien, white soil in a remote corner of Spain, its pale colour and its dry, salty, yeasty flavour is without compare.

Thanks to the mathematically-pleasing solera system each and every glass of manzanilla contains wine of inestimable age and that, with its subtle flavours should ensure that it commands vast prices, yet its so unfashionable you can buy it in supermarkets from €2.95 a bottle. How does that work? What is there about this drink not to like?

Unfortunately for me, though, in last night's blind triangular tasting, I was unable to distinguish it from a fino.

It's hot here, but it's breezy enough to be comfortable; it's remote but we have sky TV; in the evenings the pool is warm and the tennis court is cool. I have hired a mountain bike; I have drunk a bottle and a half of manzanilla.

Zonked

Cornered Radiance
Originally uploaded by omalingue.

There are as many types of internet connection as there are ways to cook an egg. You have your basic hard-boiled dial-up connection; your easy-over DSL connection and your ADSL sunny-side up. For variety you might try poached wireless and for all round class and taste nothing can beat your T3 cable-modem a la benedict

In our beautiful, peaceful, shady Spanish villa on the Costa de la Luz we have the worst kind of internet connection; your deeply disappointing, white-only omelette connection: your infuriating intermittently working connection. Your OK, I can work around it, I can write it off-line…. hey look it’s back ! quick! edit / copy / blogger / new post / edit, / paste / publish, bugger, its gone again, did it go, did it go? kind of internet connection.

If you are reading this, it worked.

And if you are reading this then you will be most likely sitting at a desk in front of your computer. I will most likely be on the beach, or in the pool, or sitting in the deep, dark, cool shade of our perfect terrace, feet up, with the new Patrick Gale in one hand, a glass of ice cold Manzanilla in the other, and bowl of salted almonds balanced on my suddenly alarmingly ample stomach.

For I am on holiday.

This is the life, eh?

Sol y sombra, arena y sudor, vistas y siesta, tapas y vino

La Siesta
Originally uploaded by jose_miguel.

We're all off to sunny Spain!

...via Stanstead @4.30am and Ryan Air @15 kilos of luggage per person

15 kilos ?? My new flamenco kit weighs half of that on its own.

This evening, after working late, I am mostly packing. Also configuring a new laptop, bidding on eBay, weighing five different suitcases but not myself, downloading onto my eTrex the co-ordinates of every geocache within 10 miles of Conil de la Fontera, and - it transpires - updating my blog. All that before the highlights of the Tour de France and perhaps a quick game of scrabble with Mrs Botogol.

I don't know if our villa even has wi-fi, perhaps the laptop is a waste of 2.72kg; besides, it'll probably be too hot to blog the next two weeks.

UPDATE
15 kilos totally ridiculous. Only one way to manage: I'll have to actually wear the flamenco boots.
..as well as the jacket
..and the hat.

Berliner Denkmal

Nicely settled in our friends' garden, with a chilled Weißbier at one elbow, and a bowl of gemischtensnacken at the other, I placed side by side on the table a small-scale bus map and a pictorial tourist plan of the Berlin Wall in 1962.

Studying them intently, I tried to work out whereabouts exactly on our walk from Mexikoplatz to Kleinmachnow we had passed from the old West Berlin into the old DDR

It was hard. Tracing my finger along the along the route I looked back and forth at the two inadequate diagrams... trying to work it out.... looking for some sort of clue... well, now, judging by that bend in the road it must be just about....there!... yes, just where... Hang on, just where Benschallee becomes Karl-Marx-Straße.

A little stupider, but undeterred, I thought hard - trying to visualise it. So that would about around that odd bend in the road...where that strip of woodland was, and the empty lot and.... that memorial to "Berlin, a city divided"....


Our friends' house is just beyond the Berlin city limits; in 2007 this places it outside the dotted line that marks Zone C of the S-Bahn. Twenty years ago the house was outside a twin barbed wire fence and in the DDR. Our friends didn't live there then. It's a brand new house in an always desirable suburb, once the haunt of party workers, since turfed out and banished to small apartments, now the haunt of property developers.

We had a busy weekend. We sailed on Wannsee, toured the Pergamon, walked over Glienicker Bridge inspected Checkpoint Charlie, just missed Knut's visiting hours at the Zoo, tramped the length of the Kudamm (haunted by images of Knut) footsore and dusty until in KaDeWe we bribed the children with €10 each to explore the toy department while Mrs Botogol and I enjoyed smoked salmon, oysters and champagne in the food hall.

Berlin has become a city of symbols and memorials: through the centre snakes a double line of cobbles, marking the path of the wall, of which a few fragments survive (I wondered what would happen if I tried to add to the graffiti - are they still just wall or have they become monuments?) At the site of Checkpoint Charlie a sign still announces that you are leaving the American sector, the Reichstag stands proud, in Friedrichstraße the Topology of Terror records the Nazi history of the old ministry buildings, while near Potzdamerplatz we entered the eerie, disorientating, holocaust memorial, more than one tourist in tears on its blank grey slabs.

Strangest of all monuments: driving from the airport I saw a structure that I couldn't understand, but was sufficiently intriguing for me to note down the text. VVN / Der Toten Mann.

Google tells me the VVN is an anti-nazi organisation, the Vereinigung der Verfolgten des Naziregimes Der Toten Mann means The dead man.

Did I write it down wrong?


On the last evening we had dinner in a converted mill. It was easy to imagine it lying derelict under the communists' now with its aperitifs, amuse-bouche, ice-buckets, gliding waiters, it was an appropriate symbol for upmarket and sophisticated place that Berlin has become.

Still Germanic though: we had booked a table indoors and our decision to sit on the terrace for a pre-dinner drink caused just a tiny stir... but the Maitre D recovered himself, and ushered us smoothly through with a warm smile. And told us firmly told not sit in any one of the seven tables with the best view. They were all empty, but all Reserviert, all evening.

The menu was big on asparagus, and we did it justice - but not quite brave enough to indulge in that bizarre middle-class English idiom of eating it with our fingers (when in Rome...you use you knife and fork). For main course I had the veal (tasted like chicken) and my companion enjoyed the chicken (tasted like veal). Afterwards we enjoyed A selection of cheeses 125 gram. Don't you love the Germans?

Walking back several bottles of Trockenwein the merrier, a few yards off the road into the woods we came across a war memorial for the citizens of Kleinmachnow who had died for the Fatherland. 1914 to 1918.

There were fresh flowers at the base.

I asked if there were a second world war memorials. "Yes, I have seen one. It's not far from here... It commemorates the fallen Russians"

Walking in the Rain

About fifteen cold, wet and very-muddy miles along the Cotswold Way we reached the precise spot where in 2006 our hosts (so they were telling us) had encountered a naked hiker. The children looked around eagerly, hoping for a repeat sighting, as if the walker were a permanent feature of that section of the Cotswold escarpment but, like a badger, he was nowhere to be seen, and to be fair it was hard to imagine weather less conducive to nude rambling.

The rain hardened, I drew my hood in around my face. My boots were heavy with red earth and sheep-poo, I had long-since zipped up my ventilated arm-pit holes, so I closed my eyes and imagined hot, sun-baked earth.....while I listened to the children's questions.

"So he was just walking along, naked? Did he say 'hello'?"
Silly question: of course he said hello. I'm not sure if it's a countryside thing, or a rambling thing, but everyone on the Cotswold Way says 'hello'. The first day I had naturally assumed that our local hosts actually knew all these people, before Mrs Botogol put me right '"No, stupid, they are just being friendly". I liked the sound of that and the second days I was like Crocodile Dundee I was that friendly. In fact, I reckon I'm a chameleon, the way I fit in: last week throwing thundery glances at a chic gay theatre in London, this week throwing cheery 'Good Mornings' at ramblers on a national trail. Only my lack of poles betrayed me.

"No he didn't, he just walked by quickly" (Aha..not a real rambler after all!)
"Could you see everything?"
"No he held his hands in front of him as he walked past"
"Did he have a ruck-sack?"
"I couldn't see what type of sack he had, the way he was holding his hands in front..."

Altogether we walked 25 miles. It rained for the entire first day, and most of the second. I only fell over once but when I did it hurt a lot and because of the rain, the blood didn't really clot. On the way we did 4 geocaches, and we bought 43 doughnuts, muffins, buns and mars bars in Broadway; but we didn't go to any pubs because we were were too wet, too muddy and too numerous.

In Stanway we saw the largest gravity-fed fountain in Europe and high, high up on the hills, at Belas Knapp we ate ginger cake over a 4,500 year burial chamber where excavators have found 38 skeletons over the years; all of them, according to the audio-guide - all of them hikers who attempted the long climb from Winchcombe in inclement weather while wearing inappropriate footwear.

There were only 23 of us; a mixture of old friends and mutual strangers, but because it is a very small world one of the strangers turned out to have been to school with Mrs Botogol. Of the 15 adults four have indescribable jobs, four work for the government, six work for themselves and one is retired. Only one had a second pair of walking boots - dry you see - to wear the second day. Another carried an umbrella all the way - and had a spare brolly in his rucksack - which he didn't share with anyone, not even when we stopped for lunch.


"I guess you'll blog about all this when you get home", opined our host, later that evening, curry eaten, red wine finished, the barrel of beer considerably emptier than it had been when we all arrived.
"I'm not really sure", I reflected, "that you'd all want to read about yourselves",
"You could disguise our identities", he said, "and jazz us up a bit? Steal our best jokes? Put words into our mouths?"

"Yes", I said, "Well, yes, I suppose I could"

GON OUT. BAKSON. BISY BAKSON

The Botogols are away. If it's Monday it's Gloucestershire, if it's Friday then it's Berlin.

Germany /-/ Gloucestershire
Berliners /-/ Bucolics
Jungen /-/ Yuppies
Kurfürstendamm /-/ Cotswold Way
Unter den Linden /-/ Under the trees

They couldn't be more different, could they? One known world-wide as an oasis of ostentatious, decadent capitalist wealth, encircled by a hostile proletariat, for all the world as if there were a wall between them; the other the capital city of Germany.

I don't know if I'll have the time to blog.