Letter from Prague | All stories

Though my flat is wonderful – bright, cosy and quiet – my building is another story entirely. I swear I invariably get a huge pang of envy on visits to friends who live nearby, specifically in the Žizkov-Vinohrady-Vršovice area.

Winter came early this year, with piles of snow yet again taking Bohemia and Moravia by surprise. The guidebook Lonely Planet has even placed Prague’s Christmas market in Old Town Square among the top five in Europe, calling it a Gothic midwinter fairy tale. But the reality in the Czech capital over the last couple of weeks has been rather different.

Chimney sweeps do not usually occupy the front pages of Czech newspapers. But over the last week or so chimney sweeps and do-it-yourself tips on how to care for your chimney have been all the rage. The cause is a new law next year calling for annual safety checks on chimneys amid dire warnings that there are not enough sweeps to meet the expected demand. Apparently, sweeps became a rare species in the last decade with only one school giving lessons but they now seem to be on a comeback.

Next month thousands of Prague residents, myself included, will be paying in advance for a year’s travel on the city’s very reliable, easy-to-navigate integrated public transport network.

It’s something that happens every once in a while to all of us: you’re waiting to pay for items at the supermarket or grocery store and at the very last second you notice the underside of your egg plant is covered in mold. Or the ends of the cucumber are soggy. Or something in your cart is just plain off. It happened to me most recently at a supermarket after racing through overcrowded aisles I noticed only at the check-out that an expensive pack of peppers was thoroughly rotted. It’s the kind of moment that you vow you’ll never go back to the place

A Czech, and American and a Russian are stuck on a desert island, lost to the world, and one day they catch a golden fish. “Put me back in the water,” says the fish, “and I will fulfil a wish for each of you...”

The Czech Ministry of Education called recently for the country’s public service TV station Česká Televize to show more films with subtitles. The suggestion is that the language skills of Czechs will improve if fewer of the movies they watch are dubbed.

Statistics about Czechs often seem to me to come from some other country I don’t know. But there are two popular ones that I can vouch for: that Czechs drink more beer than anyone in the universe, and that 81% of them are atheists, agnostics or non-believers. The rationale behind either of those is a question for a longer discussion, but both of them seem like rather obvious positions to me. I like living in a place where there is lots of beer and no god.

In my new status as an almost fulltime pedestrian and part time public transport user it is clear that that the upcoming elections in Prague are unavoidable above or below ground.

The Czechs are one of the world’s tallest nations. In fact when I first came here I found it slightly disconcerting. On a good day I’m 5 feet 10 inches, and I was used to feeling I was of average height in Ireland.