AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE EVENTS IN THIS SECTION ALL TOOK PLACE IN 1986
THINGS ARE DIFFERENT NOW
THE BULK OF THE TEXT IS AS I WROTE IT THEN – SLIGHT ADJUSTMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN THE AID OF CLARITY NOW.

Saturday, August 2nd, 1986

Distance travelled 0 kilometres

If you have read all of this stuff, you will not be too surprised to learn that, when I woke up, I had some difficulty remembering where I was. The bed was soft and comfortable and I found it unusually difficult to get out of. I had a shower, I have to say it was glorious and ventured downstairs. Of course, it was close to noon and I had missed breakfast and I realised that I was quite ferociously hungry.

Outside, the streets were amazingly deserted. Considering that I was in a Capital city, at the weekend, the number of people about seemed tiny.

There were a few folks that were obviously tourists, but they seemed to be Germans, I supposed from the eastern side of that (then) divided country.

There was a rudimentary city map in my somewhat bulky AA Road Atlas of Europe, but I deemed that tome too heavy to carry so I had to make do with my memory. I located the river again, possibly by luck, some distance upstream from the Charles’ Bridge. To my left, there was some kind of bombed out building on a corner. To my right, I could see the castle grandly sitting on the top of a hill. Trams crossed the bridges beneath it and, if you did not look too close at the buildings. It all seemed very cute. It seems an odd concept now, but I was almost out of film and had no idea where I could get another one. These days, when our mere mobile telephone (something from Science Fiction in those time !) can hold thousands of digital images, idea of having to husband one’s picture taking seems very strange.

I crossed the river and ambled along the bank. There was a big green hill to my left, so I walked part of the way up and took a view.

Then I walked on until I was below the castle, This was obviously an area where “official” stuff went on and there were a lot of police. To avoid any possibility of contact with them I turned around, crossed the Charles’ Bridge again and easily located the Old Town Square.

I got myself a lunch at an outside table in a restaurant near the famous astronomical clock. The Czech language seemed to have no rhyme or reason to it but, luckily, the menu was also in German which I could read a bit of. I chose a dish that I could tell was pork of some kind and was rewarded with a baked pig’s leg on a board with a few slices of brown bread and a lot of mustard and horse-radish. It was a vast amount of meat – far more than I could usually have eaten – but such was my hunger, all that I left was the bone – and I suspect I may have licked that ! Ordering in German had obviously marked me out as a tourist, the beers were six crowns and the pork about fifty.

I already felt sleepy and, by my estimation, I had seen all of Prague that I was likely to. I supposed that, if I went to bed early and got up early, I might be able to make it all the way home to England in one hit.

So, it was back to the Palace hotel – where I did just that.