Letter from Prague | All stories

Magic, mysterious or surreal: many have attributed these qualities to Prague, notably the Italian author Angelo Maria Ripellino, who devotes a whole book to the enigmas of the city. A sense of the unreal seems to be as much part of the Czech capital's identity as spiky medieval buildings or highly quirky metro station designs.

Winter in Prague has all sorts of charms: snow-dusted roofs in the Minor Town, an almost-magical carpet of the white stuff covering the ancient Charles Bridge that takes you across the river to the Old Town, and I can't forget the mulled wine sold on nearly every street-corner. When the cold-spell arrived from the east with added gusto a couple of weeks ago, even the Vltava River froze, creating a beautiful outdoor ice-rink underneath Vysehrad, the original seat of Czech kings. If the setting sounds like something out of a fairytale, it could have

I first came to the Czech Republic in 1990 when I was seven years old. It was my mother's first return to her native country since 1968, and my first visit to a foreign country of which I knew nothing.

In the summer of 2004 an explosion ripped through a busy shopping thoroughfare in the centre of Prague. The blast took place outside a casino and was a failed attempt to kill the casino's owner. News of the explosion, which injured some 20 people including foreign tourists, made headlines around the world.

Take a look at my feet and you'll find ten fairly normal-looking toes. Take a better, closer look and you'll discover that both big toes have been operated on. Thanks to my father - a tall and well built African - I have big feet and was plagued with ingrown toenails on both big toes for years; not because I was too lazy to get it taken care off but simply because I was unable to find a hospital with doctors able to win the battle with the nails once and for all.

I'd never heard of one until I met a girl who brought one back from the US: a sock monkey - literally a little monkey made from a long woolen-like (actually polyester) sock - not to be mistaken with the sock puppet you stretch over your hand. I ended up marrying - not the monkey, but his pretty owner, and when she came along, well, so did he, soon becoming a presence around the house. Each Christmas, we've stuck a little Czech wool hat on his head. That's right, it's Christmas again, he has it on right now. Over there on the couch. Other than wearing

Nearly fifteen years have gone by since I made my first programme for Radio Prague. It was about Czech Cubist architecture, and I interviewed the rector of Prague's architecture faculty, lugging my huge, heavy recording equipment to the fourteenth floor. If you'd asked me about digital recording at the time, in my mind I would probably have conjured up a pianola reel.

A popular Czech reality show came to grips with reality very unexpectedly indeed last Sunday when the cast and crew were evicted from their Prague villa at dawn by 40 security guards and dogs sent in by the landowner following a disagreement over rental payments.

"That's where the new Uvaly by-pass will be," said the Mayor. I'd gone to see her to find out who owned the charming little woodland, stream and giant oak tree that the road to my village goes by - just so I could visit it - when there on the map were these ominous dotted lines. "But Uvaly already has a by-pass," was all I could say - built about 30 years ago. And here is this new thing, dotted lines for the moment, snaking through empty fields like some heat-seeking missile to destroy this precious bit of natural landscape. The quiet coppiced

Now that it's autumn in Prague and gradually, inevitably the winter will come, I remembered a curious incident that had happened to me the last time the Czech lands were covered in deep snow, in March of this year.