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SKETCHES by Fernz

The Game of Badminton


    She was only seventeen. Her time was spent dodging commitment to the world, denying it insight into what moved her or why she acted the way she did. I was twenty-eight. It didn't take me long to spot this; about three rallies. I had come to the sports centre for the afternoon because the writing had been getting me down. I had been asked to compile research on the moral wasps' retreat of boxing, and the morning had been spent toying with the liberal idea that there was nothing else these people could possibly do with their lives. By lunchtime I had reduced existence to mere pastimes, and in the afternoon, I drove to the sports centre in order to quash my own hypothesis, so that I'd have somewhere to start from tomorrow.

    The sports centre is set atop the downs as they merge with the ever-expanding fingers of Brighton & Hove. What was once fields, over which we could walk as children to visit my grandmother, had found its new existence, as prime real estate inside the bypass, perfect for transformation into housing, which I would view as a sad decline if it weren't for the fact that it cut down on homelessness. It's also too close for comfort to the home of an old flame, who cut off contact without ever telling me why. This last swipe of fate at my lovelife had gouged its way through my confidence only weeks before, and I was in that state of limbo where one doesn't want to buy a copy of Fiesta in case it should turn into a subscription. Not exact, but you get my gist. The night before I had sat with my A4 pad and a biro in the Crown and Anchor while at the next table flirting turned to argument turned to silence between this couple. I had chewed my pen trying with all my mental powers to attract the attention of the woman involved ("don't go back with him, love, take a stand!"). I had tried the limits of my own telepathy. At one point, she had got up and moved towards me, but it was her coat on the rack beyond my table that she was interested in; all I merited was the quick glance followed by the guilty look-away. Not wonderful.

    Perhaps I came out to the sports centre with the subconscious intention of going on to visit Ruth (my ex-), knocking on her door and asking her where we went wrong. Perhaps it was in the hope that there would be nobody around and I could drink myself stupid in the sports centre bar. Perhaps... well, I am prone to such speculation, but that doesn't make it any the less futile. All I know is that I was standing at the desk and wondering exactly what I was going to say to the assistant, when she came in, fair-to-brunette hair tied in a pony-tail that teased the back of her neck, darting, inquisitive eyes, and a voice like Pimms being poured onto ice, crackling with potential. All she had said was "Hi," and she had directed that to the assistant.

What took hold of me, I'm not sure, but in an instant I had asked her to play me at badminton, and she had said "Yes."

"Meet me on the court in five minutes then."



* * *



STORYTIME

The Instructed

He was on a different planet entirely. The driving he did was tinged with the unwittingness of one who feels empathically associated with the Duke of Gloucester, and he had quite specific ideas on how it should be performed. He knew others' borrowings to be more substantial than his present, materially-reprehensibel existence, but he had come into contact with the reasoning behind his results, and he couldn't see a lot of substitution questions, for he had used them all by the 63rd minute. He was still too much identified with Gloucester; he knew that. He knew the driving school's advice to eat a strict vegan diet, and had successfully given up cooking bacon. Eating it was a different matter - discussions on bacon and steak left too much of a drool to be possible renunciations unless demanded by that one person he would allow to have influence over him by her very existence. If she suggested, they would try. He recognised that he couldn't pass the test without having her in the back seat. He needed to build a new paradigm for his existence, and had to believe that, when the time was right, things would clarify for him. Yet he expected and wanted more of a handle on how he was doing.

    God was withholding so much. Perhaps the three-point turn should have told him, and the current that passed through his hands when he turned the steering wheel to full lock, and the flashes of brilliance his instructor must have seen throughout their short time together. He would definitely ask for a second lesson. Dealing with leaving in the early morning from the Acapulco cafe, where he had been all night sipping coca-cola with the express intention of frightening the customers with scintillating insights of brilliance, he told them all he didn't see why he should be allowed to learn to drive, when it was quite obvious he was a complete piss-artist. The coke had tasted foul, but had been worth it in order to get him into the driving lesson in the morning. He would take her wherever she wanted to go. As he veered towards a lamp-post, he felt a nagging kick to his consciousness. "For the thing you've already blotted out," she said with a smile that even in the eminently forgettable near-torpor in which he was simultaneously dying for a piss, a beer and several hours' kip, he would always remember. It had been her way of saying "Drive carefully," of course; she had been doing the kicking, and what a beautiful thought to be kicked for, but that was for her. When moments like this returned in the course of a normal lesson, he knew himself to be uncommonly knackered. Yet he only wanted eventually to be sent forth with confidence, if not with a licence. Perhaps they were all watching his results. Perhaps his life was being evaluated by unfair and misguided judges, and perhaps he had to convince those judges that he loved them all dearly and deeply and was ready to go into the Big Brother's house, as she had called freedom, scornfully challenging to make more of her attentions than he had so far, when they gave him the plastic wallet-cum-photograph. His overweening need now was to follow her directions. He was out of his depth, but it was a lesson he had to complete. He needed help, yes, but very specific help that only Divine Provenance could give.

    So he listened to the radio, and he heard all those songs, and the djs, and there were too many instances of good timing to be entirely dismissed as coincidence, or if they were coincidences, to entirely dismiss even that fact as completely irrelevant - for that meant that he was gifted at multitasking in some sense of the word, and he couldn't countenance that. That'd be the unwitting cue for him to go straight into the back end of a bus, like the young man in that famous book by Burgess, A.; again to him came the finale of a Beethoven symphony - he had to come into contact with the rationale behind his driving and that thought proved God, for where there was no rationale to be had - why, for instance, did he want to carjack a police vehicle and rampage through the city streets being chased by the cops before finding his way to where he could pick up an ambulance and drive it over a ramp and a 40ft drop and roll over three times, and drop over the edge of a steep cliff to the road below and survive and, later that evening, turn to the girl next to him and his guests and pull on a J and ask whose turn it was next while he went next door to play the piano? And when he was lost in this thought, the refrain was the finale of a Beethoven symphony, but when the outside lane failed again to live up to his meagrest expectations, when what it brought him was not a reason to, but no reason not to, when two futures were there to be compromised in the hope of attracting attention to his sorry plight and bringing to him her understanding and guidance, there was really not much more in the rest of this lesson than hard, sickening graft, and the tightrope to be walked between keeping awake and keeping alive. This remained the central dilemma of his existence as he woke on the Friday morning and gradually got a handle on the World of Thought. It seemed to him, all of a sudden, that time no longer meant anything, that fame meant nothing, so he went downstairs and strummed, and latterly beat up, the keyboard, mentally apologising as he typed to all those who would rather he left it to them to get some pleasure from it. And then, once he was up, he was not going back to bed without achieving something masterful, and he decided to clear up, for that was the most pressing thing he could do to shake off the triteness of the sentiments he had just regurgitated, and he considered how much other people were currently reading him, even though he didn't want to, but he found himself losing enthusiasm for the whole thing, with visitor numbers down, project, for he had always been cleaning up on the weekly stats, and he had been unable even to show friends a good time here because it was too packed with his admirers. They thought it had come from those paltry legal herbal drugs, after he had gone out with his last £6.00, to the shop where he had bought them before, and when they tried to dissuade him from taking the ones he had bought before, he kind of knew that something was up, and he gave the assistant the curtest of glances, and said "No, I'll have those, please." And he took them, for now he was alone, and he realised that there had been a mistake, and the mistake had been had casually lording it over everyone else while at the same time his life was falling apart because everything he could possibly stuff down his throat was going down there with alarming regularity. There were so many stories he could tell. Not that he would, of course, but his brother one day would discover that fact and, no doubt he would be properly humbled. And he laughed and made himself coffee. The coincidences, of course, kept on coming, and the deadbat nature of the world's response to him reminded him so much of his sister in a previous incarnation, desperately fending off the world from prying into his areas of shame and guilt, doing everything she could to protect uncomprehending him, and again that refrain came back, though this time, the finale to a Sibelius symphony, hovering around the minor before stepping back into the major and leading to its own refrain, and they'd have to hurry because his arms and his fingers were jarring now with every tap of the keyboard or stroke of the keys, and he imagined the ring at the door, and ushering people into the living room while he went upstairs and got something with which to smoke, and again he affirmed his commitment that the thing he really needed now, the specific thing he was searching for, was the company of friendly visitors, visitors who he could trust not to be offended while he left them downstairs for ten minutes while he changed, visitors who would be so welcomed into his house, and, observing the mulch that his existence had become, would not shirk from telling him how far he had sunk from the man of boundless energy and generous resources they had known in an earlier time. They would spend the day preparing some punch or bhangar. And then the 'reality' of his present existence, which really was just code for that which was inalienably true and in front of him, came back to him and he realised that this was all beyond the present and the place in which he was and he realised that it was all a tissue of wishes and unrealised hopes and dreams, and he went, washed his glasses lenses to de-smudgify them, laughed at the impromptu American, as if she were a much-maligned and underestimated future president whose displays of real and sincere emotion after a world catastrophe had been overlooked in favour of concentration upon what she couldn't do, to an extent that was never fair, especially in the light of her electing into the circumstances, by which he found himself enmeshed by a sufficient proportion of the North American national consciousness to render a decepcion effectible, effective, and inevitable, and he vowed once more not to be made angry by the failure of the world around him to react to his own progress in the way that he had promised himself that at some stage it would; after all, she had won. He vowed not to vow bloody murder on everyone and everything, reminded himself they were good people, and went to the lounge to lie down and work through the latest load of grudge & drudge before life called him back to its routine of socialising and decadentity.















TALES FROM PRAHA

About the author

About the text

I.


Lucerna. The nerve centre of a Prague Saturday night. The cavernous underbelly that hosts the Eighties Club Night to end all eighties club nights. A place where all corners of the anglophone world converge and merge with Czech popular culture. Not for this club the strung-out cliques of the Roxy, beautiful in their way, nor the agitated melee of Friday night at Futurum. No, this is the real deal. Even Fred, the most amazing acid-freak spiritual enthusiast (and as you will see, I mean enthusiast from its Greek root) was to be observed in the latter stages of my visit there engaged in improbably difficult and amazingly graceful dancing which looked more like a  leading wizard's battle with the forces of evil. And as you watched him, you became entranced in the possibilities of dancing. What happens to all that magic? How does one perform such athletic feats? And how come he can stand there qualmless on the stage, flinging his arms about when he knows that it's all so public? But Fred was nowhere to be seen on our night in question.

"Coming to Lucerna, then, boys?" I'd addressed the question to Bufty and Geezer. Marshy would be going home. He had written up the notes from the game, (we were walking out of the Bohemka stadium after a 3-1 defeat chiefly notable for some pisspoor defending, woeful midfield play and stunning klobbies - Czech sausages of dubious quality, served on cardboard plates with industrial mustard and a hunk of bread, as much a staple part of the football experience as the football itself).

"I should think so after that pile of steaming bollocks." Geezer meant either the klobasa or the football - it was an adequate description of them both.

"Aye." Bufty agreed in his Scottish ripple, that I had first heard in the Manna-Cortés School cafe. No one knows how the school got that name, but it's a fair bet the co-owners, the Báná family and the extremely laid back Honza Revovevino, had thought long and hard, and their unwillingness to explain was symptomatic of the mystery that surrounded most of the workings of the school.

And that was that. We were going to Lucerna. We bade Marshy a cheery goodbye. He was happy enough - he didn't need Lucerna, and anyway, his book, when it eventually was released, sold out within two weeks. Bufty was happy enough. It had been his first visit to the ground. "Just like East Fife," he reflected. And when the kangaroo, the Bohemka mascot, came on, that was that. He was sold on dear old Bohemians, and once even posed for a photograph beside his beloved kangaroo. Geezer was happy too. This was his freedom, his time away from the missus.

Of course we were all happy. It was nice to escape the oppressive atmosphere of a workplace where only the blandest progressed. Last I heard, that was all changed. That began with the infiltration of Management by a tall, advertisible Canadian epitome of cool. Len had already chatted up various of the Czech admin staff and received from them something they don't afford many foreign men - respect. Once this thoroughly likeable chap had been 'placed', this gave support to the idea that charisma and judgment were assets in Management. I think most of the deadwood has now been shamed and bullied from the school. You make your own luck I suppose. In their place are some cool people, like Alison, the dreadlocked American-born woman-with-a-laugh who really was the [wo]man on the Clapham omnibus, which is where she transcended her nationality and learned life. And now here she was in Prague. "Why do you talk yourself down so much?" What a generous question. Good management too. And once Len and Honza were established as best of friends, it sealed the deal. And suddenly Keith, also Canadian, who had been leading the dance to bring reality to a school dominated by its opponents, could count on support. Marshy got in there as well, as ever, a top chap. But I digress. We were off to Lucerna...


II

... but not yet. It was only about six in the evening. I've seen the place fill up from about half-past nine at the earliest, and I've been unable to get in by eleven o'clock without a queue that while standard in Britain (certainly in Brighton or Oxford) would be intolerable if it were at any club apart from Lucerna or the Roxy, but the standard time to get into the club is about ten to ten thirty. I said goodbye to my two colleagues, off in their various directions, and toddled off to Sídlišt ě Osklivé, to the block of flats where I endured my tenancy of a small sector of a communist high-rise estate. I shouldn't be so downbeat about it. My flatmates were the English couple of Jim & Basil, a relationship of strength, of frank exchanges of views rather than arguments, and of petting rather than foreplay. They would disappear and re-appear at odd times, clutter and clean up the kitchen, and ensure that the masonjar of plantlife on our table was in constant need of replenishing. Jim, while I was there, had a conversion from Scruffy into Tidy which he put down to the influence of his new-found partner, and it was hard to disagree. The fourth member, perhaps the viola player to the violins in the front room and the cello that I provided, was the amazing mr fedescu, our landlord, a gent of rumanian descent who was chiefly notable for his three piece suit, his habit of acceding to requests for palm readings and his unshakeable grasp of simple wisdom. He was hardly ever there. I had a great time within the white walls of that flat. It may have been a communist panellak, but our flat really *was* Communist. It was here I was headed now, and when I got home, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine provided the soundtrack to the purple-hazed party. Which was in full swing , as Barry, the doctor from the remote wilds of Nova Scotia had come over with his hippy wife, Maureen...

III

A word on these characters. We called Barry the doctor. In point of fact he was a doctor of literature. Picked up books and tore them apart as he tore through them, pieced them back together, apologised for the impoliteness, and delivered spot-on critiques of everything from teaching to bus timetables with a quotation or a reference. Maureen, a little his junior, was actually Morína, a girl of amazingly little energy. No-one ever quite knew where she was from, and Barry was obviously regretting his marriage and was fighting a particularly sticky divorce. If it hadn't been for his unerring ability to break into a grin at the end of any routine, you'd have thought he was psychotic. However he was in fact one of those people for whom violence is impossible directly, for whom justice has to be discerned and cajoled rather than imposed. His first love was books, and reality was to be read and critiqued. He was Jnanically Yogic perhaps. The geography of his homeland was stamped on his face to such an extent he was the only man I knew who could appear weather-beaten in a room, as if he had just come in from the trawler with the morning's catch. Morína figures less in these stories than he does.

"It's Ern, everyone," Jim called out as I came through the door. No really I mean it. Sounds a cheesy line? Be more Stanislavskian! There are apparently 274 different intonations you can give the same sentence in the English language. Language can't by itself "be" cheesy. The picture you have formed of Jim and the flat and everything will be tested against the relevance that the language pattern "it's X, everyone" has to the situation. Almost a comparison. Admit it. You're totting me up now as you read, going "Well, how realistic exactly is it?" Either waiting for a chance to pounce or praise. Well, trust your author, please. Respect your author and understand that what he writes comes from real experiences that could be retraced wholly if only he hadn't randomized them on purpose to avoid causing fame or giving offence. The only real person round here, buster, is the author. And the only real person where you are is the reader. What I write is my business. What you read is yours. Maybe the twain meet occasionally, but there's one of me and there's hundreds (thousands, hopefully) of you. Outnumbered I claim an unfair fight and retreat.

I assured them the game had been crap, but highly amusing, rushed to my room, brought out my pipe, and returned to the jar on the table. They always marvelled at my ability to come up with great supplies of this stuff, but one of my clients was in the interior ministry, and knew the police to be relaxed on the matter. If it had been skunk it was a different matter; but Czech national pride is strong and they are proud of their marijuana cultivation tradition. Well, if you've ever undergone a repressive regime at home, work or at school, quintuple that, because these people, as anyone who's been there will tell you, have suffered just about as much as anyone. They deserve a lot of their pride. And it mustn't be begrudged.

Then it was a small matter to stuff the pipe full, and relax into a heap. "Hey, Lucerna anyone?" Assent was general.


IV & V

Until Lucerna though, it was conversation with Jim, Basilina, Barry and Maureen. To a background of Carter, Billy Bragg, Dexy's Midnight Runners and Beethoven's 9th, we spent a blissful few hours in typically stoned fashion. Food was eaten, beer was drunk, smoke was smoked, and Barry & I made light work of a few World Cup games on Jim's PC. That was a good flat. Most of the teachers when they arrived were housed in the Hotel Špatný, on the 16th floor of a formidable building indistinguishable from the panellaks that surrounded it. Every so often, Ukrainian maids would come to clear up and pilfer selected items that had amassed on unattended desks. Usually 'clearing up' meant opening the door, turning on the hoover and pausing to debate the price of this year's Christmas pstruh (trout), which every December appeared on streetcorner after streetcorner in tanks. Passers-by select their beasts; which are then bludgeoned to death in front of them and rivulets of fishblood wash into the city's sewerage system. Not a squeamish people, the Czechs. They furnish forth the Christmas dinner table with potato salad, that, when it laid Bufty low one year, brought forth the comment from the doctor he went to see; "Yes, it's usually poisonous in this country." Poor old Bufty was laid low on a diet of stale bread and water for a week. This must have been nigh-on intolerable for the poor wee lad.

It is asking too much of this humble author to remember the topics of conversation, but Jim was on fine form as usual. Basilina kept us liberally supplied with food, and every so often, one of us would do a pivo run to the shop on the corner. It had long since ceased to amaze us that for 20p we could buy a pint of Budvar; the cheapness of that comparison only holds when thinking in English salary. That was the one true thing the people from Manna-Cortés said to us at our interviews - don't expect to save. I remember being interviewed by the Báná family. Eva Bánova was a furiously insecure woman who insisted on telling everyone all the occupational problems she was having at great length, in passable English. Generally she was a woman with a penchant for making speeches in which she addressed class after class of businessmen & headstrong women as if they were about 10. It amazed us that so many of them put up with her "Don't let the school down" speech, which she delivered (again in English) on the first day of any course. Like us teachers, the students were just stunned into submission. This topic certainly came up.

"Honestly, she f---s me off something rotten that woman" (Jim)

"She's utterly grotesque. How the f--- did we end up working for her and her money-grabbing family?" (Basil). We were all laughing about it.

Barry interjected next. "I don't work for her," he declared, "I work for Honza."

"Good move," I nodded. There was a stoned pause and then somebody (perhaps me - I was at least four lines behind the conversation) added "Yeah - it's corporate culture though isn't it? You sit there on the first day of a new course - what are you going to do? You still have this naive belief that actually the school knows best - or at least that it should get the benefit of the doubt - and so when they act like arses, you politely nod and make a mental note not to take any of that shit in the future." I was rather pleased with that, and to celebrate I smiled at Morína, who looked, as usual, as if she hadn't understood a word. With typically stoned thought-process, I invented a cockney rhyming slang - "purple hazed" for dazed. We often wondered why she came round. I didn't enquire as to the basis of their relationship, but I got the feeling it wasn't a shared love of literature.

Time was whiled away somehow, (there may have been a moment or two of Trivial Pursuit, but it wasn't very committed...) and 9pm came round soon enough. The grapevine, bush telegraph and word on the street all carried the same message. Woolfian whispers ran round as teacher after teacher after teacher decided "Tonight is Lucerna night". The Manna-Cortés contingent would be there in full complement, and full voice. It only remained for our troupe to go out to the bus-stop. Residential teachers in Prague are a breed apart. Quite possibly honorary residents, we despise tourists with a fervour Czech in its vigour, but our job is to patiently mediate between the poor unfortunates who see everything in terms of Anglo-American attitudes and the Czechs themselves.

While we waited watching our breath and wondering if it was going to snow, Morína ripped up a piece of paper she had found in her pocket, and we all chewed, as much to keep our jaws warm as for the taste of the paper. We were about to have one very strange night.


VI

Publisher's Note: we apologise for the cancellation of this service, due to staff shortages on the line at Didcot.

What do you think of it so far? Level of feedback v poor. Is anyone reading? Authorial insecurities vie in the early-morning underslept stupor of an uninspired Friday. More will go up later, despite the resounding critical silence. Oh well, I'm enjoying it anyway. Hope it's readable.

VII

"Christ, there's a man under a tree!" Geezer's remark as we walked down one of the streets that connect Náródní T řida metro station to the nirvana of Lucerna wasn't wrong. We had met Geezer in the metro itself. He had managed to get time off from his girlfriend for the evening. How would I describe Geezer? Well, put it this way, if you wanted to have a f------ great time, you'd make sure that Geezer came with you. A man who would just listen and be as honest as he possibly could. You got the sense he could go much farther than he had achieved so far, and you also got the impression of a man who loves where he comes from, whilst having embraced Czech culture in such an amazing fashion that along with Marshy he was the fount of all Czech knowledge. When I arrived, the Bánás thrust me in the way of some Czech with nothing better to do than turn up for a free lunch with a new Englishman. I gleaned lunch and my travel pass and the quickest of tours from the forty-five minutes I spent in his company. After that, I never saw him again. But soon I was lunching with Marshy and Geezer, the only two Brits that predated me at the school by the time I left, and being de-programmed from the awe that struck me when I realised that what I had joined was effectively completely unregulated and therefore opportunity-laden. Whatever impositions the Bánás could throw at the school, Honza would always be somewhere around. He was given rough publicity by his association with this shady family, but he was a great guy. All it took was confidence, the confidence to know that Honza saw everything from a different point of view. He wasn't the teaching staff. Unless the staff told him about things, there was nothing he could do because the school wasn't really his main interest, just the place he owned. He trusted those around him to run it properly and appeared at teachers' meetings to show how little he cared about officialdom. He would assume that staff were happy. Which is quite a fair assumption when you run a school as well-appointed as the Manna-Cortés school. A café the envy of Prague, a library stacked with titles, a wonderful five-storey building that kept everyone fit with its utter lack of lift, and the loveliest, if least helpful and most moneypennyish, admin staff that side of the Sudetenland. Only the sophisticates got peak hours. Like the police force, the blandest progressed and the wise veterans remained at the bottom of the pile and just got less bolshevik about paperwork. After all, this wasn't our country. When you take a TEFL job, you're faced with a choice between admitting that you're not that committed, accepting the pocket-money wages and having a good time or swearing undying loyalty to the people who gave you the job, believing, with their every encouragement to trust your own judgment, that your professional career hangs by the slenderest of threads. Who are they to question your opinion of yourself? They pay you wages, but you make them profit. You can make yourself equally valuable by doing such a good job that you become a lynchpin of the organization. The trouble starts when you seek to know whether or not you are 'the' lynchpin. Assume responsibility for your job, help others where you can as long as it's not to your detriment. 'Experience, thogh noon auctoritee wer in this woruld, is right ynogh for me to speak" - the Wife of Bath. Hamlet's key moment is when, on the verge of going in to see his mother, he says something emphatically not mad. If neurosis can be defined as the tendency to violence and madness the tendency to specifically-physical violence, that is. He says "Though I'll speak daggers, yet will I use none". Moral disgust that she should have betrayed his father moves him. That much goes agreed in the plurality of ideologies clashing (Billy Bragg) that constitutes Shakespeare criticism. Whether his moral disgust is justified or a product of his own neurosis is a matter for individual interpretation, but as soon as he utters that line, he cannot be realistically portrayed as mad. Anyway, for a reader to wish for any character to endure madness is despicable. And in Hamlet we have an unusually free hand in deciding whether he's mad from his inconsistency of language and manner which either is evidence of blessed communication with heavenly beings or a right con. But what matters is his attitude at the death. Unlike Othello or Macbeth he is not forced to come face to face with his own madness. Rather he is forced from introspection to extroversion, forced into 'doing something' for the first time in his life, and in the heat of the moment, the attachment to his mother is naturally broken, and he comes to maturity, instantly paying a heavy karmic price for his sins of deception on everyone from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Ophelia. Look how many people he manages to confuse. How many characters are enlightened by Hamlet before it's too late to do anything about it? (silently when he appears in Ophelia's bedchamber, verbally in his conversation with R & G where he repeatedly makes fools of them and actively when he forges the warrant that gets R & G killed). Here is a Prince with a serious power-complex who goads the headstrong-but-only-foolish Laertes into tipping his weapon with venom. It would be interesting to portray Laertes as one of those youngsters who ran amok with guns in American schools until the crumbling of the WTC shocked them out of wanton destruction. One killed his 'best friend'. Now that's madness. But I digress. We were on Vodi č kova, turning in to Lucerna Pasaž.

VIII

Words always failed me when we went in. I loved the eighties. It was when I lived, before, well before whatever happened happened. All I know is that "the pressures of life used to cut like a knife at this humble clown" (Midge Ure's fittingly angst-ridden final Ultravox album, U-Vox, usually demeaningly referred to among 'Vox'-fans as 'The Pink One', pulls a huge joke on everyone with its banal opening and follows that up with some brass and backing singers in among the thrashed guitars. Banal in itself is ordinary, and therefore not a crime. Not only this, my lovelies, but it has been practised by such luminaries as Mozart, Mahler, Haydn (Symphony no 83, 'The Hen', or was it 84?). And Currie, Ure, & co manage to make this album musically passable, and almost philosophically unimpeachable. I often think that was bestowed upon them with the name - thus Ultravox, 'Extreme Voice', once it was a named and public entity, coloured both what the audience heard and what the composers composed. Ultravox lost sight of this a little on 'Quartet' and 'Lament', presumably due to success scaring them, like it scared Marc Almond with Soft Cell. Was there a more important duo around in the eighties? Only 'The Pet Shop Boys' who took on the mantle of Soft Cell and reformed it like Ultravox! took on the mantle of punk and reformed it. John Foxx's claim to have pre-dated techno by ten years with his seminal masterpiece Metamatic may not be an exaggeration).

By this time strange things were happening to me. I had lost all sense of direction about ten yards from the club and had heard the glorious echoes of carol-singing choirs in my ears, transporting me simultaneously to a dozen Christmases, most of which never happened in the life that I remember. It was cool. But we still had to get to the club. The ceremony of handing over the 80Kc (£1.60) to get in fillled me up emotionally - inside I could hear Wouldn't It Be Good? by Nik Kershaw. Inside the video would be plastered all over the back wall, and, as it was only 9:34, there'd still be room to move.

Without pausing to deposit my coat at reception, I plumbed the depths of the club to bang out the closing bars of the song. I could feel the day beginning to melt away, languid calm to turn to Guru-fed joy. O what a lovely club!

"Ern!" Ernest had, up till that night, been my preferred sobriquet , but now, the mellowisation of it into its shorter comrade touched my ear with a forgiving lightness.

IX

I turned around to find Bufty standing with his Miss World of a girlfriend beside him. I was so high that I needed to be reminded to tear my gaze away from her bosom as I gulped a guilty "hello", guilty for having the thought in the first place. After which I was no conversational match for Bufty, and no conversational partner for Bufty either. I had coveted another man's wife. I had looked in envy at the man whom I loved as a brother and could consequently be nowhere to be seen. My quick departure would leave Bufty ever more convinced that I wasn't his friend, but it had to be done. Conversationally first - after the intros, I remained silent, gazing elsewhere. Then I said "well, I guess I should go and get a beer..." I had no intention of getting a beer - that was an absurd suggestion. A coke, merely, for beer held no attraction tonight.

Barry and Morína were already in separate parts of the club.My head felt very very funny, and it was obvious that I was going up. Barry meanwhile was coming down. We met on the stairs and in a flash I was transported back to a club in Oxford, where I had searched a club all night just to say "hello" to a girl and ask her to dance. She then had appeared on the stairs with the other man, who happened to be her boyfriend. This she hadn't told me about. And now, in Prague, I crumpled up in agony - sliced apart by a knife that had just twisted in a long-forgotten wound. The Doctor knew what to do.

"Jeez, Ern. Don't worry. Stay with me, bud, we're gonna find you a table."

"I ..."

"Yeah. I know. Listen. Don't. Stay calm. Remember, the world hasn't changed. You have. Part of your ego just got killed."

Suddenly, instinctively, this seemed right. Without knowing why, I laughed and laughed and laughed. Bryan was there too; Bryan Ferry was lamenting Slave to Love.

"The main thing now is not to panic."

I continued laughing. I laughed until the laughter dribbled down my chin. Then I stopped and burst into tears again. Colours were beginning to swirl. They told me later I cried for ten minutes.

"What happened?" asked Barry. Just that. No fancy footwork, no clothing it in fine language; straight to the point he came.

"You ever seen Blackadder II?" Well, he was from Nova Scotia...

"Go on..." he was fixed in my gaze.

"I saw that darn program ten years ago, at about the time I thought I was gay." During my cry he had brought out a joint and was sucking on it.

"Gay? You?"

"I was taken by that Melcher character, you know?"

"Melchett. Taken?" I was a picture of horror.

"Oh I don't mean I fancied him or anything - fact is I thought he was brilliant. Why didn't I fancy him? Why was it that years of telling people I was gay, and only chasing after the most pathetic little vermin that were so unworthy of me they didn't even trust me, had led me to the point of finding a homosexual philanthropist (I researched the actor up a little) who believed in all the things I believed in (except cricket - I haven't quite gotten into that one yet), and could point to the same background (oh I went to an English public school - 'cept it wasn't the public school that did for me - it was the prep-school, where I fell in love so deeply with a girl that when her brother came out of the headmaster's office crying one day saying "She was involved in a crash", I cried because he hadn't told me whether she'd lived or not. I remember my dormitory mates who had been teasing me up until that point suddenly looking on me with awe, awe that I didn't understand because I'd just given away my deep love for her, to myself as much as anyone, and it was much easier to admit that I was so curious about sex that I'd look anywhere for it. And do you know what?" he asked

"What?" By this time he could have told me that aliens had landed and I would have believed him. For a second, at most, but I would have believed him. Which he would have loved.

"I can't remember." Now I laughed. He cried and laughed. We looked up at the big screen. It was the first time I had heard Modern Romance, but I was simultaneously shocked and impressed that it's one of the only bands to get a mention in Howard Marks' "Mr Nice". Shocked because they were crap. And my mind wandered back to Barry. Why had he not admitted he loved her?

"Did you not tell anyone at all?"

Barry shook his head. He never lied. I cried, he laughed. We both laughed. I went to buy us two cokes and cried. At the till I laughed, with a little bit of crying. He was laid out double, laughing so hard he was crying. Then I took over the crying from him, he laughed a little and lit up a joint. I joined Laura Brannigan as she launched into Gloria, to which I forgot the entire second verse, took over the joint, and laughed painfully for fifteen minutes. Then all was peace.



X

Jim wandered over. "Is there anyone here?"

The dance-floor, always the barometer to the attendance, was by now quite populous, but to Manna-Cortés teachers, the question referred to colleagues, fellow employees, victims of the same banal, overbearing, and unthinking oafishness the school called its personnel management. It wasn't just that the Báná family were unfit to run a brothel, let alone a language school, or that Honza wouldn't fight for us (why should he? The argument to which Marxism cannot respond. Why should he?). Management of day to day issues orbited a black hole in the centre of the company structure. Michael Pall. American by birth, he had travelled to Czechoslovakia in order to work in a communist country, which tells you all you need to know about the resentments and malformations of a childhood that wrecked the poor bugger. He couldn't even get that right; within two years, they were marching on Vaclavské Nám ěstí (Wenceslas Square) and he was faced again with all the confusions of a world in which he was given responsibility. He was known as the Director of Studies. He was known to the teachers as the Director of Surfing, an unendearing little mouse of a man who spent his working hours trawling through the world wide web for no very good reason, and had told one teacher whose father, in distant Vancouver, had just suddenly passed away, that to take more than a week off would be unprofessional. Since he had no raison d'etre apart from to hover around the corridors of the school collaring teachers, pretending they were friends of his (which involved listening out for someone to say your name and then repeating it as if you'd been out with him for several beers and a plate of Svi č kova the night before) and asking you to commit yourself to the school for another eighteen months, he wasn't particularly good for morale. Risible, yes, but unstable, and you feared that one day he might lose it and turn up with a gun shouting "Death or Glory".

"Is there anyone here?"

This simple sentence sent Barry & I back into fits. ,  Basil who had just arrived with four shots of Absinthe, joined us, and Jim started rolling another joint.

"I shan't have an Absinthe," I tried to turn it down.

"What? Oh Ernest," she complained "you can't leave us to drink it all." She had a point. I relented uneasily. At that moment the Gods smiled upon us. A flock of transatlantic teachers arrived, comprising Bill & Ewan, the Manna-Cortés gay couple (from one of those places that ends in -umbria or -umberland, you know, the ones they ask in pub quizzes then pedantically point out that -umbria is the county while -umberland is just some vague cultural memory from the days when monks outnumbered sheep in those parts), Rebecca, a strait-laced girl from an unprepossessing part of Canada, and Ted, a large Greek Canadian who had perfected the casual and fortissimo moaning procedures of those from the New World, but without any of the attendant arrogance that can accompany American tourists when they find out that it really does take an hour for the Czechs to come up with a lukewarm gulaš in most places. Which made him great fun to be with but unlikely to make you any friends on the terraces where you feared he could turn a dull 0-0 draw which everyone was on the point of placidly accepting into a battlefield of rival supporters, and rather like Obelix inducing a fight between rival sets of Romans, he could walk away oblivious.

"Ted! Here. You want my absinthe, don't you?"

"Jeez. Thanks Ern. Kind of crowded tonight, isn't it, huh? Lot of gorgeous women around." He downed the absinthe in one go.

No-one ever quite knew what to say to Rebecca. Quite attractive, she was also exceptionally prudish. "Where have you lot been tonight then?" Barry addressed the entire group.

"We met them at the bus stop" announced Bill.

"We went shopping in Tesco's and then went for dinner." Rebecca.

The idea of Ted having supper with Rebecca was bizarre, but then life very often is. I looked at Ted, but he was already looking at the bar. "Rebecca, do you fancy an absinthe?"

She smiled. "Yeah. Thanks."

So Ted lumbered off, and our party grew. We now occupied an entire table. Boney M were halfway through Daddy Cool and while the rest of them engaged in some conversation, I watched the figures on the screen gyrate and explode, and the figures on the dance floor merge into an indeterminate mass. Then I took a couple of puffs of the joint that Jim had passed round and settled back to listen to my mind for a few minutes.

XI

You will have surmised by now that I hadn't seen Geezer since we came into the club. He had wandered off, as was his wont, to find an attractive young female to charm. He would be back. These casual liaisons could never develop into anything much, since Petra would notice his absence from the flat in the morning. He had an impressive way on him though, and if anyone could find some no-strings-attached fun to be had, it was him. Time passed back on the sidelines. An unspecified amount of time, and when I looked up, it was to find Geezer making his way to where I now sat with Bill, Ewan, Jim and Basilina. Barry had gone to find Morína "to try to talk sense into her", and Jim and  Basilina were just heading off for the dancefloor. Geezer sauntered over while Bill was speaking

"... oh I can never do things properly."

"I know, you're useless aren't you?" Ewan seemed happy to assent.

"Evening chaps." (Geezer).

"All right, squire; what's been happening down your neck of the woods?"

"Beer mainly. There's some decent totty tonight but they all seem very attached."

"I've given up in clubs." Truth is, I'd given up generally; I prefer my Sunday mornings completely hassle-free, and I've always been a social anthropologist in clubs, the result of my first experience during a particularly difficult adolescence. I was thrust at a boxing day club night with two friends from primary school, (when I wanted to do little more than play Howzat , the incredibly cheap'n'cheerful ZX-Spectrum cricket simulation notable for grippingly realistic gameplay and all the counties & national squads and its crowning glory, the ability to create your own teams - no need to deal with reality at all if it wasn't safe to do so!). My mother had launched a crusade to get me to do "normal things", so I was packed off to this under-eighteen night with these two best-friends-from-primary-school whom I hadn't seen since those hedonistic days of chocolate and The Beano. When I was picked up, some six hours later, they found me tight-lipped. I had just discovered how unpopular I was, how unmerciful the world could be, or how warped my own impression of my own impression was. In the first minutes of the evening, those two childhood mates had turned round to me, having basically ignored me since our arrival, and had pointed me in the direction of our supervisor, the sister of one of them. "Look," they said, "She's calling you over."

I was hesitant at first (how could they tell from so far away), but saw I had little choice. In the battle of wills, I gave up the ghost and went. Of course, she had no idea, and when I turned round, they were nowhere to be seen. If inwardly I collapsed at that moment, externally I just went ‘Oh,' and sat down. Periodically after that, Sister would appear to ask if I was o.k., or to bring me another coke, and at the end of the evening I found myself standing next to her brother. "How did you enjoy it?" he had had the gall to ask. I was polite.

"Mmmm. Probably a good thing," replied Geezer, adding in a curious echo of my thought-process, "makes Sunday mornings easier."

XII

"I'm leading a campaign against spectacles" said Ted as he sat back down. He was laughing. He was always laughing. Even when there was a death in the family and he had to go back home he was laughing, when the torture allowed him. I went for a coffee with him the next day after he had phoned me at 10am with the shocking news. Neither of us particularly wanted a coffee, but we felt that would be appropriate for a talk that was to be intellectual, laden with private grief, but good for both of us. We went one better and did the drink that the Czechs really take seriously - tea. It seemed appropriate, respectful and the waiter was refreshingly honest. There are several good tea-houses in Prague, and even the ones in tourist places such as Charles Bridge or Wenceslas Square charge reasonable prices and afford an hour's easy peace. Tea as a civilizing drink. England conquered the heart of civilization. It bypassed the renaissance and headed straight for the Orient. What else were the Opium Wars about but protecting Indian and Malay territory? And in the guise of 'civilizing the natives', England itself was being civilized. It was in effect, as Barry had once pointed out, "We must love one another or die."

"How come?"

"Well firstly I think I just made one of myself and secondly, you'd do better to take take yours off."

"Go on" I said, apprehensively removing my glasses. I really didn't want to get punched. Had I given bad advice? Did I give any advice? That didn't matter. He might be about to hit me. And I wouldn't be asking questions if he did, because I can stop a well-armed grammarian at twenty paces with a sentence of pure syllablery, and any non-believer in violence must be able to defend himself with words.

But the attack never came. Do what your enemy least expects and what your friend most wants. It's the same thing.

"I tried to be Barry."

"Go on?"

"Well, after I'd bought her an absinthe and drunk mine, I turned to her and said, as a joke as much as anything, 'Jeez, Rebecca, I'm so relaxed I could have sex with you right now!'."

"Go on"

"She didn't think it was very appropriate. Then I followed it up with some Auden."

"What"

He chuckled. "We must love one another or die."

"Oh dear. That bad, was it?"

He nodded. On screen they were striking up "Should I Stay or Should I Go." Lucerna was revving up.

XIII

Fisticuffs. That's what there was none of. My brain swooped and wobbled on the verge of seeing things and seeing through them, like a cyclist on the A23, or the road that heads inland from ciudad de Lázaro Cárdenas to Guacamayas. That's really what set this club apart from any I knew in England. The lighting, yes, that was different. With minimal concessions to hi-tech and very little use of strobing apart from with the most familiar of the music, a strange timbre was imparted, a timbre of content. The sound system was dire, it's true, but compared with the awful Club Futurum sound system, it was generous. And the video screen provided a focus for those moments where emotion threatened to get the better of you. It is absolutely imperative, if you are to open a club, that you show videos. In the eighties, people were writing songs and making videos along the principles set out by Lucerna, that a club was principally an extension of real life, and not an antidote to it. We were the only ones smoking dope there. Harsher drugs were unknown. Beer was simple - not "marketed especially for..." there was no faux biere Irlandoise , nothing pumped full of chemicals for you to punish your body with (Dexy's Midnight Runners, Until I Believe In My Soul ; God bless Kevin Rowland), and they let anyone in with minimum security. This was a place you learned things, like the forest in Midsummer Night's Dream, or more importantly, As You Like It . Waitresses and waiters, in tee-shirts and jeans, collected up the plastic cups of Gambrinus, returning them to the counter where people milled and queued (yes!! there was a definable queue - definable to the extent that I recognised it only after I'd missed it the first time and felt ashamed for having pushed in). This is the essence of a sound foreign policy; the traveller returned home at first betrays his friends in that other country in the name of a gentle kick up the backside to their home culture. So people in Prague, while they are there, become completely different; perhaps much nicer people. Because you can bet your bottom dollar that all the things they really like about their own country aren't there. But when they return, they are no longer part of the same community. They have a take on events and people that they never had before, and this is where diplomacy starts; trying to convince your homeland that in some respects, yes, the grass is greener on the other side, that, yes, there are better ways of doing things. This is why a culture should respect its travellers and explorers come home, why executing Walter Raleigh was an inevitable consequence of the time in which he lived and the type of person he became. Think of the airs and graces which they prided themselves so much on which he had lost among the ancient tribes of the new world. A traveller is a diplomat. This is recognised in the strange title of two of the main, upmarket hotels, the Hotel Diplomat and the Hotel Tourist, the latter with its nice blue carpets, showers that jetted streams of water from all kinds of places, formica so badly chipped you felt you were back at boarding school or Oxford University (good for you - if you're arrogant about the place, the first year it really knocks the stuffing out of all your pretensions and makes for a happy change. The more reverent among you will have noticed from my almost impeccable command of English, philosophy, music and foreign languages that I went to Oxford. Where my roof leaked and I complained once to the amused Bursar, who had far better things to do with his time than listen to my complaints of water seepage, and summarily dismissed me with a "Well if nothing's been damaged, we're not going to do anything about it", which was fair enough but I still wish he'd been a little bit more sympathetic to the plight of my self-concept)...

By this time Should I Stay or Should I Go had finished. I turned to Ted. "Good song."

"Yeah. Excuse me. I have to go find Maureen."

"One more thing. Why did I have to take my glasses off?"

"Oh you didn't have to. I was just going to explain that I think it's just healthy to rest your eyes once in a while, and I had this dumb idea of campaigning against them as a social evil."

XIV

As I say, Should I Stay Or Should I Go? had finished. Everyone had stayed, and the dance floor had grown in population. Everything was just floating, shifting in and out of focus, melding with its surroundings, like a Turkish carpet stared-at, as I later discovered as I sat pensively watching an England batting collapse and staring at the Turkish carpet in between wickets. Beds are Burning started up. What a wonderful evening it was. I like Beds are Burning. I didn't when I went to Prague, but the club experience changed everything. I learned to like everything I had learned to hate. For all the shite music in amongst all the good music was accompanied by a video - I Wanna Dance With Somebody is a point in case. I fancied Whitney when she did Saving All My Love - a song so suited to her voice (and the only song on which sang effectively). But she was made to look a tart in the later song. Just like I fancied Sandy in Grease (I must say here, of all the shortened forms of Alexandra, I don't mind it, but there are much lovelier ones than Sandy) . It took me a while to acknowledge Olivia Neutron-Bomb's beauty when it was dressed up for someone who'd acted like an arsehole all film and hadn't even had the courtesy to acknowledge her when she looked the way she did before. John Travolta let us down when he wouldn't acknowledge the girl he loved in front of his friends after Summer Loving, let us down because he was faced with a decision to acknowledge truth and lose face in the name of honesty, or to renege on his promise to love her more than anything else in the world (which he had given flippantly at the beginning of the film, but which he had given honestly), and he chose not to acknowledge it directly, maybe because he thought that's what she wanted, whereas actually, she just wanted it to be known how madly in love with each other they were. Unfortunately, she got the wrong impression with this dangerous tactic; she thought he wasn't interested in her and refused to ask him the simple question which would let her know the answer; "are you interested?" Now the problem with the ending of the film is that it doesn't actually make itself clear. Does he come back to Sandy just because she's changed her clothes and styled her hair in a bonecrunchingly sexy manner or does he just see the willingness to do that as more evidence of her love for him, the same love that he possesses for her, the love described by Level 42 in To Be With You Again. For in that song the vocalist is faced with a choice - "America was calling me / You said I must choose / Between a life of love / Or visions that will fade". Which choice would constitute 'visions that will fade'?

And is this life of love a life of puppy love, or a real love that wouldn't forsake but which respects the Truth that bread has to be won and love is more than infatuation? Will he trade his love today for greater love tomorrow (Billy Bragg - The Home Front ) - the greater love having sprung from the extra fondness sprung from absence from the loved one? Still with me? There's a point there somewhere. The Hunter-Gatherer hunts and gathers, and returns to his homely duties, but unless the Hunter-Gatherer steps through that door with the express intention of doing whatever his wife asks him to do in her domain, the home, she will not forgive him ('Which of you to gain me, tell, Will risk uncertain pains of hell? I will not forgive you, if you will not take the chance' asks the lady after she has thrown her fan into the lino's den (sic). And, gentlemen, she has every right to expect that you will make an effort. Have you not understood the import of the message which Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus is trying to hammer home to the deluded? It is essentially the same message that Pope shocked the world with in his immensely subtle poetry, which was so open to bad misogynistic readings, but which, like Chaucer, is actually the most generous of its time. Life is more than beauty. It is beauty and duty) [ That last bit is from Yogananda - Ed.]. Every generation makes a sacrifice for the next - every generation makes mistakes on a large scale...

Now I was beginning to sound to myself like The Living Years (Mike and The Mechanics). So I decided to go and dance.


XV

As we have seen, that wasn't a common decision for me to make. I wandered out in the usual fashion on to the dance floor. Clad in tasteful green shirt inexplicably adorned with bleach-spot between the shoulder-blades, the result of collision with Mexican washing powder and by now an inseparable part of the shirt itself, as if it had been sold in that fashion, underneath which a mauve and gold 'Hall' tee-shirt, culled when I was still naively proud of my College's achievement in Being Part of Oxford, before I came to realise that the principal value in the College's brilliant English department is how it managed not to be Part of Oxford, I wandered out onto the dance floor. To shake off, as it happens, so much emotional dead skin as to render me capable, for the first time, of sustaining what you on your planet call "self-esteem" under pressure. But more of that later. There were of course other teachers there, but the girl I loved was not among them. She, the receptionist at Manna-Cortés, the one who fixed me in her gaze the first time I entered the Stepanska office, looking out from behind her colleague. She , the one I looked at but never spoke to - how could I? Word would have got round the office quicker than the Germans or the Russians had ever managed in Praha. (Which in the case of the Czech Republic as a whole wasn't that quickly since the Czechs used their natural skills to change all the signposts and streetnames). With my contract worth zilch and me not exactly willing to give much more than I was paid for, I wasn't a natural candidate for retention in the event of controversy. It was only when I figured out that she had been secretly clasping my coat to her chest when I accidentally had to leave a lesson one day and saw her terrified and my coat all bedraggled that I noticed anything at all. And anyway I couldn't do anything. Not for the first three years I was there. It would have been a shocking breach of Czech etiquette, resulting in more controversy than you could shake a stick at, and by the time that was up, I wasn't working at Stepanska. My link, necessary while I thought of something, anything, to say, had been broken and it hadn't crossed my mind even then. Two plus two was not yet perfect. I had made about 3.8 by this time, and my subconscious was screaming "4!" (non-mathematical exclamation mark). So when Honza dropped her name a couple of times, it all fit into a nicely-prepared wish. Too nicely for me to believe. Now I could, if I wanted to, ask her out; all I had to do was find a way that was watertight, because I didn't trust myself not to go to pieces and end up like Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam , desperately trying to emphasise his truth while not demonstrating it. And even then I hadn't fused two and two into four. Three point eight five was about all I'd managed. She wasn't among the teachers. Teachers teachers everywhere, behind the kitchen sink, teachers teachers everywhere nor any drop to... my thought process was interrupted by the fanfare. The fanfare. Things were about to get very manic.

XVI

The fanfare in question occurs at the beginning of The Final Countdown by Europe, a song which Czechs revere in the context of clubs. It puts me in mind though of the fanfare in the middle of Leonore III , the one that occurs twice - firstly; to announce the presence of Blucher's Cavalry (metaphorically speaking, of course - maybe someone pointed that out whilst they were poring over the map of Waterloo in the next day's paper which carried a report and ten pages of in-depth summary and it gave him the impetus to write Wellington's Victory. A purely metaphysical concept as I've never heard Wellington's Victory and Blucher's presence on the field may be as irrelevant to the musical concept as Love's Great Adventure would have been on Ha! Ha! Ha! ) and secondly, and more loudly, as an emphatic gesture - and Beethoven's ability to meld this moment to the music just when it is needed is surpassed only by his ability to repeat it and make the modulation suggest not something as false as a change from "despair" to "hope" as a change from hope to certainty.

At the beginning of The Final Countdown , groups of friends are drawn cosmically together on the dancefloor, impelled towards each other by divine Guru to meet and dance the very peculiar movements that Czechs save for this song. It's an easy dance to learn; it's called Joy. Lucerna takes off like nothing else - not even the roar of the crowd when Bohemka get goalless to half-time. And joy saves. For three foot-stamping minutes, everything is forgotten. Music is made, people jump up and down, singing 'de-de-de-duhh-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-duhh-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-dedede-dedede-de-de-de-de-de-duhhhhhhh'. Those who came to scoff remained to pray. The Czech Republic has the biggest resistance of any nation I know to organized religion. Their joy is unfettered by taint of unworthiness. Human, sinners all of them, they forget their desires-to-cast-the-first-stone, so evident on their transport and in their public faces, the product of Austro-Hungarian, Nazi and "Communist" repression and a cultural trait that is seeping away as it proves irrelevant, and for three whole minutes in the middle of that club, to a song we have all been taught to sneer at, they cleanse themselves in unadulterated bliss and relaxation in the name of their bloodless revolution that continues apace in this marvellous country. In this country children forgive their parents quicker than in the pampered West. And it is the forgiveness of one's parents that is the cornerstone of any successful life, far more so than material reward. The amount of beer I can afford to drink, what quality marijuana you can afford to smoke, how many cars he has, how much prestige one has (Iago's fallacy), what our GDP is, how many people you know, what books they've written. All - all of it becomes as nothing beside what Pope called 'divine' - the forgiveness of sins - "To err is human" - the parents. All parents are human, all parents do the best they can in whatever circumstances they have. "To forgive, divine" - 'nuff said. "Make me a channel of Your peace" said St Francis of Assisi, and the Czechs responded by channeling peace through a Swedish rock group every Saturday night.

In that moment was cleansed not only my evening, but my life, in ways that I know of only by experience since. It was ego-death of the first water. Things were bright, colourful, dark, shadowy, didn't matter - they just *were*. Why not celebrate a room full of people jumping up and down to a cheesy pop-song? And I realised that the Czech Republic was just as worthy a culture as ours, that the Báná family weren't out to get me, that given the right circumstances they would be ideal party-guests, and I realised the sheer arrogance of Jim, but what made it ok was the fact that he laughed, that he'd be there in any sort of crisis. In the memory of that moment have I tried to live my life since, as you will find out.

XXII
i have ululated ohhh i have sung along oh oh my god what a night this is i look around me and all these czechs look so amazingly happy it just makes me want to return to this time and place again and again and again and again like some kind of bach fugue or a favourite tree that i may sit again under its brightness and beauty just as when i was green and under the apple boughs with my love and oh my god this is strong stuff and now here i am truly on the other side of myself where the discerning voice can be discerned. look, it tells me, look at these people. look at their lives. look at the way they conduct themselves in daily business. now you may have your conclusion, now you may know. these are lovely lovely people. and then she makes a re-appearance, she returns and is with you once again and your life changes and oh my giddy aunt i'm coming down and i never say that and the last chord melts away and we are back in Lucerna and life goes on.

XXI

and you are transported to the cafe and your 13th birthday this is when you are on the steps outside the dance-floor with people shuffling past you respectfully (you didn't deserve that cake) and the time you first worked the gears on a car and you tried to change gear without telling the driver to use the clutch - the problem being the person in question was your driving instructor and knew that that would be the one thing that would put his car beyond control and the one person who showed any sort of faith in you throughout this was the deputy head of your prep school which wasn't really surprising since you were both just chuckling amusedly. and she, she, she makes a re-appearance, putting away your geography file for you while you sat there like an absolute idiot and suddenly for the first time in your life it doesn't matter because there now is this secretary and by the laws of womanhood she must be able to give so readily when approached right - and you burst into, well, into something, because suddenly all those unhappy memories of love are no longer unhappy memories of unrequited love, but memories of  unrecognised human love and tom jones comes to mind and you burst into, well, something more definite this time, something infinitely more definite yet not definite enough there is still an effect somewhere for which you haven't found a cause and you're by the rugby pitch and bursting through the defence and there she, she, she is again, watching you betray her trust as you feign an injury because that was your moment of opportunity and you really couldn't be arsed to get through the rest of the game and you've done it everywhere. that is the spiritual hurdle which you couldn't face that day the hurdles appeared larger. It was sheer bloody boredom. No, not boredom. It was you. It was evasion. Don't put me in difficult situations. Let me fail!! Let all success turn rotten!!! Don't let me do this, Lord. Let him tackle me. Let her say no. Let me cheapen the memory. Let me cheapen it Lord so I don't have to remember it and think about success - and this is all the time - and this is all you have done and this is now and you must change it - you must change it - you must change it - you must understand that the touch of your...

and that is heavy so you have to go and sit down for a few minutes. in ten minutes of bliss, the energy you have just radiated has blasted away large portions of your karmic myopia, and you see things clearly. don't feel the pain. don't feel the joy. just let bill withers take you where you want to go. and she is there again, and you realise that she is a conglomerate of all your girlfriends you haven't dared be with, all the ones who then were bullied into asking you out just so you could prove to them that you were as good as your word and you thought you were being cruel but actually so it turned out you were being very kind to them because you were teaching them a lesson about being wary "of love and of dark-eyed men" (almond again - the river, complete with wonderful key changes and you remember the bloke who came up to you in the shop "take a walk down a side road - i know you want to - a shock in the dark can be good for your heart - oh yeah" (ultravox. ultravox. ultravox dropped the immature exclamation mark after making their farewell-to-punk album, and transferred it to the title of the album in question) and suddenly she is there no, no, no - she. She. She is there. She is across the dancefloor. The girl of your dreams is standing there on the other side of the dancefloor; on the other side, looking out at you with sorrowful eyes. She can't know it's you, for by this time you are in the balcony above. "I made a break, I ran out yesterday" Duran Duran in a club with a video and you are pitched back into your memories, and this time it's private - not for the ears of your interviewers on Desert Island Discs - "Friday I'm in Love" well, I suppose "The Kiss" would be too much to hope for. The girl you played at badminton and won and lost in roughly equal measure. the girl you know you would never betray, because she never betrayed you and she had the chance had she read your glance correctly (another sad omission from Lucerna, the world's most peaceful album - In Mysterious Ways - to which you were guided by the fact that your brother, who helped set up a local record store for a massive re-fit and re-jig of its buying policies , had read your record collection correctly and had pushed them to include this bizarre title on their shelves. They only ever sold one copy that mattered to you). And suddenly you have to prepare yourself for failure, for what if she doesn't want you, and you are transported back to the pool table all those years ago and you are taken back to all the times you ended up crying for something you couldn't have instead of just knowing you already had it and it was all a fallacy in a note you wrote - no - you didn't even write - someone else wrote it for you, the same someone who brought you together in a disco and she looked up at you and said 'you do understand this doesn't mean i like you, don't you' and did you misinterpret it as 'no.' and break her heart when all she had done was predate the question and you ask where she is now, in your hour of need and the secretary is across the room and you are faced with a choice - go up to the secretary and ask her to dance, and you must do it humbly, or live in the past and every time you play that scene over now you ask her to dance but it's too late it's too late it's too late . Dancing with Tears in My Eyes is dancing alone, something the best people sometimes do, and the worst people do meanly, with their feet tapping under the boardroom table. and it's a fortunate fall. no wonder she was upset with you the day after. Fucking livid, I'll bet. But all is right now. And you have to ask her to dance. You have to. You have to. And you look up at the board and all they can come up with for you to funkily get down to now is "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston, which is sung as if someone is desperate for it to be a hit. Poor Whitney. Rick Astley. Terence Trent D'Arby. They all fell by the wayside, turned pro when they should never have done so. And The Lady in Red is beginning, and suddenly you know where it all sprang from; you know her name; you know who she is because up on the screen "He's searching... She's showing... See him held in a deep deep spell, he knows she's glowing" and it's all irrelevant here we go again "Cos you are the only one who can break these chai-ai-ai-ains and I would go anywhere" and she looked at you as you sang that. SHE LOOKED AT YOU. WHAT MORE PROOF DO YOU WANT? WHAT MORE MUST YOU DO TO REALISE THAT SHE NOT ONLY LOOKED AT YOU, SHE HELD YOUR HAND ONCE, SHE HUMMED WHILE YOU SAT AND CHATTED ah she betrayed you though, no, no, not betrayed. she handed you over to the chief priests; the one who i dance with and you danced to pay the price and she laughed at you, so she's out. the sheer arrogance. and you;ve found someone much lo - "excuse me, would you marry me please?" you say the only sentence that means anything and then step out onto the dance floor for four minutes - this is what i just called to say. "dance with me we dance forever all i want are your favourites" and the secretary falls into your arms and trembles like a flower - Bowie at his most powerful. And it's almost like a romance at an office christmas party, but what you don't know and she does know is that you have been recommended by the very girl that betrayed you when you wouldn't touch her up over the pool table. because for her pains she was made to swear blind to the truth of her story and so she's been frantically working to disabuse everyone of her necessary lie about you. And she can't tell you cos you don't recognise that she lied. And you can't complain, cos you deserved everything you got

It was at this point that I realised a coke would just go down nicely.

XXIII

I looked at my watch. 2:15am. Forty five minutes left. I wanted to go back and dance, but not until I had taken five seconds or half an hour off or whatever it took just to work through this thought process. The barman half-listened, half lip read my "coke, prosim" and dim images of the quantity of sugar I must have consumed by this point flashed across my brain. I must remember to clean my teeth more often. Then I have my coke brought, and I take it off the counter with a swift "Díky". I have just realised who it is I love more than anybody else in the world and I have many miles to go before I sleep with her. And I see the secretary and she's still perched against the tables on the side of the dancefloor looking, well, perhaps for me, and perhaps for someone else. but she's czech, and i don't speak czech. how could we converse? it's all just a dream, we're all looking for a dance with someone - even here, in this club, everyone is looking to make a statement to a pretty girl or a pretty boy. It's the way of the club. It's what happens. But at least it happens here that a girl can just say no and walk away from a situation without feeling harassed. there's some energy on the street. i remember the time Monica, one of the old teachers, slipped and fell on the ice, and it wasn't the second or the third or the fourth car that stopped to help. it was the fifth, and it contained this generation of czechs. cool. tough. hip. euro-conscious without losing their national pride. yet not wantonly violent. the social spirit passed through decades, centuries of repression by one or other foreign people have left this country adept at this extreme of helpfulness, but this is the country of the Random Act of Kindness. It's the most atheistic and the most pantheistic. It's like doing your National Service. I take a sip of coke. Infandum, regina...  memories of schoolboy Latin - I think atqve is the next word but I'm not sure, and then Virgil strikes me as brilliant, because he eschews the typical epic ending. Any more would have spoiled the poem. Dulce et decorum est pro poema mori. And although I know who it is, my subconscious has to work in its mysterious way. To get to C it is sometimes necessary to go via B. So in the absence of anyone else I think it's the secretary I love, and I walk back out to dance and I begin singing. "No New Year's Day, To Celebrate" but I can't do more than look at her and smile. It's not her. I'm not going to worry about it. Automatically I decide to humiliate myself as a means of escape. "You were working as a waitress in a cocktail bar" - so convincing was I that Bufty came up to me and said "Probably be more effective if you spoke to her rather than trying to impress her with your dancing" and even Bufty had misunderstood which I suppose is inevitable. This is my statement of "I love you"; to make it so as you could never take me seriously enough to love me. Because deep down, I know who it is I love, and the Universe is guiding us together, helping us "perfect the art of common ground" (the last incarnation of Ultravox, rather like Doctor Who, retained only a little of the panache and subtlety of the original, but a lot of the original message. It was aggressively "No. This is what we sound like when we don't try. Now get over your octogenaphobia and go out and recognise what we did in that decade as well as what we did in the seventies." Billie Currie's no fool). And Bufty goes away and I continue to point at her and give my best serious look while banging out lyrics such as "and I can put you back down too". And she laughs and I'm going to feel humiliated in the morning but I don't care because for now it feels like the right thing to do. And I ask Bufty what's happened to everyone else, and he says "Morína left with Ted."

"Blimey - did she have a bust-up with Barry?"

"Nah - you know Barry - he's used to this sort of thing. Anyway I saw him talking to a very gorgeous young thing a few minutes ago. I doubt they're still here."

"Jim and Basil?"

Just then Jim taps you on the back and says "Hey Ern. Isn't this fucking cosmic. This is bloody marvellous. 'Ave you seen Basil?"

and you reply "not recently, no" and you envy him because he's found his soulmate and though you still Know where yours is, you don't yet know it. But unlike with Morína or Jana or other examples, this envy is o.k. because it isn't leashed to the question of "how happy are you?" because it's leashed to "how are you happy?" (a piece of philosophy I have to attribute to M.Maxwell, the guru of all things teaching).

"Well I'm off cos there's a bit over there and I'm getting tremendous visuals from it." And he is off.

And, knowing I was about to humiliate myself, I went and I sat next to the secretary and I asked her to dance and she looked and looked away. I wasn't good enough for her. What a blessed relief. And I'm conscious that there are people I forgot to ask Bufty about, people like, people like, oh! it doesn't matter, because you Know that they have found what they wanted from the evening and the last song starts up and you sing along in tears, "Here beside the news of holy war, unholy need, / Ours is just a little sorrowed talk." and you walk up one of the four flights of stairs you can see and they're swaying and you step out into the open air to head for a klobasa and the 58 night tram and your conversation rings through the night air and it doesn't matter what you're saying or who you're with because somewhere in all of this was your ego, battered, beaten, torn, and made to buck its ideas up, and somewhere among all those fragments of memory is the way your future will be decided. Oh, and what did Fred do for me?

He taught me to write.


About the Text


Tales from Praha was composed as an exercise in self-discipline during Advent 2001. The original project was to have several monkeys chained to typewriters and an overseeing editor culling the resulting texts together and publishing a version on this page, much as recent scholarship has divined the works of William Shakespeare to have been written. However, extensive advertising for an obergruppenfuhrer for the project resulted in only one application from Mrs Donald Carmichael-Wallace of 43 Shrewsbury Avenue, Epsom. At an editorial meeting about the project on 31st November 2001, objections were raised about the suitability of this applicant as she had been dead for twenty years. It was therefore decided that Mr Urquhart , a person from Porlock, should step in. At the same meeting the idea of the monkeys was scrapped on economic grounds.

The project then consisted of attempts to update daily while remembering the time of year, Advent, and also bearing in mind the medium. Internet prose makes many different demands from printed prose; I leave that statement to the intellectual dissection of those more interested in the differences than the similarities; pedants and Oxford Undergraduates. The story, as it unfolded, unfolded along the loosest lines possible, and remains with the most minor of editing, in its original format. 


HALL OF SHAME (hic): A list of recognised or imagined breaches of Natural Copyright:

Author's Note: I saw an interesting new advert on the tv this evening (December 2001). Barely a few days after I wrote the section in question, it seems that some advertising exec took inspiration from this site. What a compliment, and what a cowardly act that whoever it was couldn't acknowledge, to me, if to no-one else, where he got it from. Or I could be wrong and it could be a coincidence...  




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Jarrow

"Come with me to Jarrow."

When he said this to me I looked at him.

"I'm serious. You must know it's a great spiritual centre."

Of course I knew. My unsaid questions had been more knowledgeable and at the same time more banal. What would I tell people? How could I justify it? Surely I was meant to be looking for a job? And the journey...

John finished his latest piece. It didn't go down too well, and though I clapped him through them, the impolite mutterings of a discontented audience were all too easy to interpret.. I turned to Fr Mark. "I'll think about it and let you know."

And that was how it happened. That was the resolution done and dusted in that one moment. My old school priest and mentor, the one in front of whom I had had to confess my greatest sins and who had been faced with the moments of decision both as a priest and as a housemaster, had made this suggestion at a concert I'd wandered into at the Evening Star. John Drent had been playing. John had been one of my greatest friends at school. Probably an idol of mine, unwilling and hero-ized in those days when I had trouble realising that other people didn't exist in the same world as me. How are the mighty fallen. After school, and then university, he had flown straight to the top of the charts, duetting with Jane Schiller in the best-composed, most classic single of 1997, "Territories". She had gone on to films. He, meanwhile, had bombed out into playing pubs in Brighton, and it was clear his inspiration had faded somewhat. All a far cry from my post-Oxbridge career as an office temp-cum-exotic traveller. Lonely and malarial in Peru, though, I had finally and inextricably been re-united with Him upstairs, and even as I had been tearfully and presumably finally removed from Juanita, who tended me through that time and had ministered to just about my every earthly need ("Take a look at my shuttlecock, darling" had been my line that day we had stood in the blazing sun throwing ourselves about and barely noticing the inhibitions leaking out with the sweat. I subsequently had to explain to her the concept of shuttlecock, but mime and concept-checking had found their apotheoses...), the plane had invited me with the knowledge that flies and wasps would never bother me again, and that one day I would write to her. Who knows, she might eventually come to England.

To cut a long story short, the year 2002 found me permanently back in Brighton. I'd found a cheap bedsit where I could think about my future. I had found meditative calm had become an addiction, and there wasn't a day I could remember in recent past when I hadn't sat for at least half an hour breathing and calming my mind as much as possible. Sometimes I even managed to do it twice a day, and the day I broke off watching the football to go and meditate was a strange and significant one. For the rest of the time? Spiritual reading, a bit of writing, hoping against hope that someone will notice and employ my genius. As I say, I had popped into the Star, and bumped into Fr Mark. It's awkward meeting priests off-duty; what does one say?

"So what are you doing now, Trevor?"

"Oh this and that, father, not a lot. Got into God, a bit actually." At saying this, I felt simultaneously pride and inferiority. Surely he would be impressed that I had validated his chosen career path? But at the same time, surely he had heard all this before? I must have impressed him. He bought me a drink, and then invited me up to Jarrow.

Wednesday 2nd April saw me waiting at 6am for Fr Mark's Volkswagen Golf. I wasn't in a particularly great mood. Packing had taken longer than I thought. What little savings I had in the bank had seemed almost certainly too little - all my hypothetical calculations left me foodless on the last day. (We were to visit for a week). Then there was the long journey. Bound to be six or seven hours, and with only Fr Mark for company, there was bound to be a lot of stiltedness to overcome; sooner or later, when conversation stalled, there would be recollections to trawl through; things to discuss, and, though it was a necessary process, it wouldn't be easy.

So when he pulled up at the bottom of the road and I saw John Drent in the back, it was a relief.

First attempts at conversation were particularly banal;

"Long journey ahead of us, father."

"Call me Mark, please. What I thought we'd do is stop over round about," he took the map and pointed to Leicestershire, "there, and have some lunch."

John at this point looked dead to the world. It wasn't until Pease Pottage that he woke up, so until then, Mark and myself chatted about the weather. As the A23 turned M23, however, John made his first sound.

"Where are we?" came a struggling voice.

"Morning John. Crawley."

Fr Mark's driving was assured. "This is a Parish car," he explained. "I've been using it so long I could drive it in my sleep. Won't win any grands prix."

I turned back to John.

"Didn't expect to see you here."

"What - no. No, no, no, I wasn't originally going to come." He looked out of the window, grimacing at something - maybe the black cloud that masked the day, but whatever it was, he wasn't going to be more responsive.

Those who have taken a long journey will recognise the familiar course of events over the next few hours. Conversation was mostly of the unmemorable kind, with a few snippets of information in-between. For instance, I learned that Mark was not particularly happy with his role in the Community, and that John was gradually piecing things together. He had resigned apparently. "She was a bitch. I could have gone on and made a real go of things, but she wanted to record populist stuff." Still not clear whether he meant she wanted to record political rants or Spice-like dance, I asked for clarification. He was still grimacing, still staring out of the window. "Dance music."

"When we get to Jarrow," Mark said deliberately at one point, "we'll have to find the hotel. At that point I will be just about at the end of my tether what with the driving and everything, so I'd appreciate help from both of you." A polite enough request, readily assented to, but really necessary to rub it in just north of Chalfont St Peter? I smiled at the studied arrogance of the priest, who knows that nothing comes between him and God. Not always an easy thing, but the laity have no choice but to assent.

It was a remarkable experience already. I hadn't seen Mark for ten years. I remembered him as a stern, slightly dark and mysterious figure, quiet yet capable of bursting out into fits of laughter, reasonable if not amused by everything. Not much seemed to have changed except that he had grown darker and more mysterious. I wanted to try football to lighten the conversation, but I needed that conversational arrow in the bag. John on the other hand had had the national exposure for those couple of months back in 97. I had learned by this time to keep quiet about what had been a fairly embarrassing case of hero-worship, and now his attitude was amusing me. The week was shaping up nicely. John was lost in his own problems, which still included the loss of his fame. I meanwhile was lost in my own thought. Perhaps he hadn't been such a nice bloke after all. Perhaps he had been a complete dickhead. He would learn a lot on this trip, if not from the spiritual vibrations, from me.

The other factor which always sets in in a long journey, irritation, was beginning to set in by Rugby, but its roots had set in as far back as Hemel Hempstead. Showing the true devotion of a cleric, though, Mark had us drive on past Leicester before he considered pulling over. We drove off the motorway at last though, and found a layby on the B585.

"Copt Oak. Nice name." John.

By the side of the layby was a pub. The collective thanks of the car flew up to God. The Shepherd and Flock. I'll remember that name for a long time. Mark stopped, John and I got out. While Mark parked up, John and I went in.

"What do you want?"

"You buying me a drink?" John's tone was puzzling to say the least.

"If you want me to, I will."

He hummed for a bit, then brightened. "O.k. Thanks. I'll have a pint of Eclipse. Better get one in for Mark as well."

The second remark was, I felt, unwarranted. "Hi. Three pints of Eclipse, and do you do food?" Minutes later, we were furnished with menus to pore over.

I remember the food was quite heavy. Excellent, but quite heavy, and by this time I needed a break from everything, so I went and sat on a bar-stool. John went to play the fruit machine. Mark went over with John, which suited me. I got chatting to some local, Fred, about Leicester City and David Gower. It was quite good. He was telling me about how he used to work for the Mercury, and how they always wanted writers. Minutes after that, Mark interrupted. "Do you want another pint?"

"Er, well I suppose I'll have a coffee." I think I was trying to remind him we must be going, but also, I just fancied a coffee. He laughed at me. "Go on, have a pint."

"No, no, I mean it, just a coffee, thanks."

He ordered another pint for himself - Old Speckled Hen. I didn't question him openly; his choice. I went back to my conversation. I couldn't keep my mind fully on the conversation though. Mark had just ordered a second pint. There were still hours to go. To blot this anomaly out of my mind, after wolfing down my coffee, I accepted Fred's offer of another pint. I must have been about forty minutes with that pint, and then after that I went to the loo. It was when I came back from the loo that all hell broke loose. They'd left! They'd actually left the pub and driven off. Left me in the middle of Leicestershire, with a few quid to my name but nothing special, and continued on their way to Jarrow.

I ran out into the car-park. No sign of them. The car had gone. I ran back into the pub to ask the barman. "Those two I came in with. Where are they?"

"What, the tall dark fellow? and the other one? Gone mate. ‘Bout twenty minutes ago." There was no reply from Mark's answerphone.

In my confusion I ordered another half. Time to think. They wouldn't have gone off to Jarrow. Why would they do something like that. Bastards. No - not bastards. Rule that out. Whatever else happens, they are not bastards. They wouldn't have invited you to leave you halfway up the M1. I haven't paid for the hotel yet. They can't have gone. Shit. They have my cards. They could have gone. Maybe they'll be back. The newsagents. A paper perhaps. Twenty minutes? It was worth a try.

"There a newsagents round here?" I asked Fred.

"Go down the road, take the second left and about forty yards down on your right hand side. Can't miss it."

By this time it was 4pm and spots of rain were falling. I raced down the road and turned the corner. I was nearly killed by a Citroen and as I stood shaking my fist, an ambulance passed me, all lights blazing. The "Arsehole" I had directed at the Citroen driver found its target in the ambulance driver and he gave me the one-finger out the window. Just out of sight, down the road, was a great commotion. The ambulance had stopped. Two stretchers were wheeled out, and I got there just as they were being wheeled back in, covered. Just beyond that, there was a white volkswagen Golf wrapped round a truck. That's as much as I know officer. Do you want me to sign? 

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Dominus vobiscum, to which the response is, et tu brute.

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