Letter from Prague | All stories

Last week I spent a few days in England with my mother. She was invited to a class reunion at St Hilda’s College in Oxford, marking 40 years since matriculation and I went along to give her moral support, in case none of her former classmates recognized her (a worry which of course proved to be pointless). On the way from London to Oxford, I realized that the two of us, plus my older brother, travelled along the same road more than twenty years ago, when Czechoslovakia was still under communist rule.

Many Czechs are fed up with the corruption scandals that constantly fill the evening news and morning papers and look elsewhere for diversion. And, as always, Prague’s zoo is happy to provide it. Its reality show Unmasking launched in 2005 made its troupe of gorillas overnight celebrities and household names and did much to highlight the plight of gorillas in the wild.

One of the highlights of my week was a visit to Třeboň, South Bohemia, in pursuit of carp on Monday. I had high hopes for the town itself, with all of my colleagues gasping on a monthly basis at the fact that I still hadn’t been there, and pressing upon me that I really must. I had less high hopes for the carp, which my grandfather pulls a face at each time I mention, before unfailingly grumbling how this traditional Czech food tastes like mud.

So, the heller is no more. Last Monday, five years after the disappearance of 10- and 20-heller pieces, the 50-heller coin ceased to be legal tender. I have to say it was rather hard to take hellers seriously, given that they were worth almost nothing, were as light as a feather, and made of aluminium.

I always found it quite funny that the main verse of the Czech national anthem, Kde domov můj is not a statement – where my home is, but rather a question, where is my home? It seemed a perfect question for a son of Czech parents who immigrated to Britain before I was born. When I was small, I knew that my parents had come from another country to the one where we lived and where all my friends were from, but often found it difficult to understand. “We can’t be there, because some bad things have happened” was the simplistic answer given to an inquisitive

This week no topic in the Czech Republic was more dominant than the 40th anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia. On August 21st, tanks and soldiers moved in, and forever changed the course of the country, crushing reforms that had made life in Czechoslovakia tolerable compared to the Stalinist 1950s. But all too soon, the reforms came to an end. In the weeks which followed, many Czechs and Slovaks opted to escape, among them my parents – only a few years married. They were among the first to leave: that same night of the 21st crossing

If the Czech Radio building in Prague Vinohrady were ever to be bombed again, like it was in 1945 by the Germans and in 1968 by the Russians, the employees are to meet in front of the church at the nearby Náměstí Míru, presumably to launch guerrilla broadcasting against whoever happens to be the country’s current occupier. I was told this vital piece of information when I started working for the English service of the Czech public broadcaster, Český rozhlas, just a year ago, as part of the official emergency drill. But besides getting ready for

Nový Smíchov (New Smíchov) bills itself as “the five-star shopping centre”. The “new” in its name isn’t perhaps so hyperbolic, given that it really has played a large role in the last decade’s gentrification of Smíchov, which was traditionally a rather grimy, working class part of Prague.

Ever heard of pedro, céčka or jarmilky? Apparently, they are some of the most successful products of the socialist regime – at least according to a survey recently carried out among the users of the Novinky website. I myself did not take part in the voting, but I followed the process closely. Just like many other people of my generation, I too enjoy endless debates on what we used to eat or wear or play with in the long-gone communist days.

It was a long time coming, my first trip to the dentist in this country. Indeed it had been many years since I had visited a dentist at all. They say that one in six Britons now performs their own home dentistry – so expensive is the upkeep of one’s teeth. And as someone who has long since adhered to the paracetamol and bag of frozen peas school of tooth care while living in the UK, this statistic doesn’t surprise me at all.