Letter from Prague | All stories

Some goofs are so bad you just want the earth to swallow you up and if you happen to be a cabinet minister, constantly surrounded by the media, things are even worse. You are asked to explain the goof over and over again and made to look like a complete fool on the prime time news that night.

Chimney sweeps here in the Czech Republic dress all in black except for thin white caps that somewhat resemble baker’s hats, though they are smaller and fit more closely to the head. In Czech the word for sweep is kominík, which is related to the word for chimney, komín.

After years and years of holding out, and scrounging lifts from my parents, I finally took the plunge and decided to learn how to drive. This was something I had already flirted with in my native Scotland. But alas, I had made no more progress than locating where my mirrors were and stalling my way slowly around a country cul-de-sac or two. My mother has a conspiracy theory that British driving instructors can at times be somewhat ponderous when it comes to actually teaching their students how to drive. My experiences at the hands of my full-throttle

In recent years, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoy going to the bank, and not just because I have developed a rapport with the clerk who one day announced she was my “personal banker”. After a move of flat, I simply transferred my accounts to the most convenient branch – and, what do you know, that branch is housed in a masterpiece of inter-war Czech architecture with a fascinating history.

The Czech Republic is currently going through a baby boom, a fact you can hardly fail to notice when you walk the streets of Prague these days. While in the past, you would rarely bump into a mother with a pram, now they are simply everywhere. Maternity hospitals are bursting at the seams and mothers have to register six months in advance to secure a place. The last baby boom was in the 1970s and the 70s kids are now in their 30s. As a result, 2008 saw the biggest number of newborns in 15 years.

A couple of bags of rich-roasted Hawaiian coffee beans recently led me to re-discover a small family relic, which lay forgotten for years in a back cupboard, until it was needed: a small, cast-metal coffee bean grinder, produced sometime in the 1930s, a grinder, it turns out, once manufactured by my family. I had been looking for a means of grinding up beans we had received as a gift last Christmas, when my father dug up the object, still bearing my grandmother's family name and logo.

One summer day in 1994, a van stopped outside my aunt and uncle’s house in a village near Třebíč, in western Moravia. Four men got out, knocked on the door, and addressed my relatives “Ahoj, jak se máš”, in Czech without an accent. They were the Vrbka brothers, with a cousin, from Nebraska, looking for their roots in the old country. This summer, I got to repay the visit and see the long-lost part of the family for myself.

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.