It really has been a fine run of weather over the last two months and still shows no real signs of becoming unpleasant. My train to Manchester this morning was 15 minutes late and I cared not at all, just 15 minutes longer to hang out in the sunshine and take pictures.
Look what’s been ripening away beautifully on my bedroom window sill while I was away in Prague. This house is now self-sufficient in habaneros. You want some wicked fresh chili peppers, this is the place to come.
Rochdale FC’s manager Keith Hill takes questions from representatives of the local media, who, for some unfathomable reason, included me amongst their ranks this afternoon. His team had just beaten Bury FC 2-0, but that didn’t necessarily make him the jolliest of interviewees.
This shot is taken not twenty yards from my house, but I think it sustains a suitably Eastern European feeling. Particularly with the bats — or whatever — circling ominously above.
My six days in Prague come to an end. It’s a very beautiful city, if you’ve never been, you should visit. I know the sign on this shot looks wonky: it’s funny how the camera can distort perspective quite easily sometimes.
Dina is from Greece but works in Scotland. Ellie is from Iran and works in Australia (she helped look after me when I went to Brisbane back in 2013). Both are here presenting in the Czech Republic at the same conference session as me (from the UK) and other delegates from Croatia and Belgium, helping, in our small ways, to advance knowledge worldwide.
This is why Brexit and the isolationist, racist mentality it provokes is so utterly stupid. I don’t just mean that as a random insult. I mean vicious, ridiculous stupidity of the most damaging kind.
The conference here in Prague has been in full swing since Sunday lunchtime, but we were given this afternoon off, so I went to Prague castle, reputed to be the world’s largest castle (though it seems to me that the Kremlin in Moscow would give it a run for its money). It remains the home of the Czech president as well as being a huge tourist attraction, and judging by the pomp and circumstance in evidence today, he was in residence. It’s a good way of getting people employed, by the looks of things.
“U malého glena” apparently means “the little glen” and is the name of this bar in Prague. Well, this is one of the world’s great beer-drinking countries, so I was inevitably going to end up in a bar or two while here…
Quick walking tour of Prague this morning although as you can see it was a rather gloomy day. This picture is taken from around the Charles Bridge, a lovely piece of medieval engineering art, and these days heaving with people, possibly the selfie centre of Europe. I pointed my camera at the river instead. The Vltava has its source at the southern edge of the Czech Republic and runs north into the Elbe, and eventually the North Sea.
So here we are in this blog’s 26th featured country, the Czech Republic, for a few days. I am here to attend the same conference that got me to Estonia last year and Croatia the year before that. There will be more interesting regions of it to depict between now and Thursday I am sure, but once I arrived at the airport this afternoon I just trundled through suburbia until I got to my hotel then went out with a couple of colleagues and had dinner; so this suburban bus stop is all you get for now. I do like the twenty-feet-high woman on the advertising mural, however. I wonder if I can get one just like her on my house.
