Monday meeting, prefaced by half an English lesson from Svatopluck Malec. I managed to escape at 11:30. Went up to the winecellar. Taxi arrived. Waited for Charles. He arrived. Loaded the taxi up and went with it to Anděl. Home. Now reading Proust as my Metro book, though it is a bit weighty. Just finished the Dinner Party, into the strange interview with [Baron] Charlus.
Notes:
It was today that prices went up 25%. A lot of the food packaging hasn’t been redesigned and the new prices have to be written on. There was panic buying last week1.
When you buy a bottled drink you buy it in a refundable bottle. There are no aluminium cans. This is more ecologically-friendly. Also, the same mechanism to reseal the bottle fits on every bottle in the country. One buys milk in a polythene tube, shaped a bit like a long pillow.
When you buy the commonest type of coffee you have to grind it yourself in one of the machines they have after the checkout desks in the supermarket.
8:00 went to Kimberley’s (now Misty’s, Karl’s, Fred’s etc) and at 9:00 Charles turned up — in the middle of an epic asthma attack that made him sound like a cross between Brando’s Godfather and a heavy-breather. Totalled up the money. I got back my 2150 kčs investment plus another 2,000 kčs or so. I would have paid that much to be free of the stress. Walking to the bus Charles started a conversation on literature — perhaps just to help himself through the attack. He had some very interesting ideas, more interesting than mine. He likes the parochiality of the Modern British novel, reads in series books on the same subject, has read mostly non-fiction. Recommended Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage and also a book called Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition (which may or may not exist2).
At the MMMeeting3 Milena told us that Angličtina Expres had been mentioned in the papers twice — once, favourably, in an interview with Tim and Ezra and once, unfavourably, in an advertisement placed anonymously in Annonce, the Czech Exchange & Mart.
This is part of the arrival of neoliberal economics. Young-Toby notes the effects, but doesn’t see the larger significance. Many of the things he likes most about Praha are in the process of being priced out of existence.
It exists. Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition: English sea rovers in the seventeenth-century Caribbean, B. R. Burg, 1983. Perhaps it was this that later caused young-Toby to note that the Pirate equivalent of wine, women and song was rum, bum and tiddly-um-pum-pum.
Milena Monday Meeting.