At lunchtime a couple of Fridays ago I did my now-customary furtive change into cycling gear in the disabled toilet before heading off for North Berwick. The Social (Engineering) Committee’s semi-annual Beach Party was kicking off over at Seacliff Beach, and I decided to cycle there rather than take the shaky old coach they’d booked for the occasion.

It was not exactly a great journey, it must be said. The constant headwind wore me down and the traffic along the coastal road kept me on edge for almost the entirety of the 40-kilometre journey. For the last couple of kilometres, though, out east of North Berwick where no-one seems to want to go, the road emptied of cars, the wind dropped and the sun broke through the clouds. I rolled down the private road to the beach, pulled a pair of baggies over my indecent cycling shorts and grabbed a beer. It was a great afternoon spent milling between the beach and the marquee laid on for the day, quaffing booze on the company dollar and eating barbequed meat until my sides groaned from the strain.

I slung the bike in a luggage compartment under the bus for the return journey and would have happily called it a day, but it wasn’t over yet. Once I’d sobered up to a degree and put on some long trousers, I was off out again to meet Doug and some of his London workmates to see Mark Watson at the Church of Scotland on the Mound, or the “Assembly Hall” as it’s rebranded for the Fringe. Maybe knowing that you’re watching a comedy gig in the house of God would otherwise take the edge off — the Almighty’s watching too, and he kills a kitten whenever you laugh at a masturbation joke.

The show was solid if not quite stellar, but the three hours of increasingly sozzled conversation in the Wash which succeeded it amused us admirably. Doug, the newly arrived Davis and I got stuck into self-referential and obscure band chat with ease, while Doug’s friend Rob looked on and feigned interest with remarkable success. I rolled home at 3 am, tired, as they say, but happy.

…and then met up with Doug and co. again the next evening for more festival boozing. Bolstered by the attendance of Fat Pete and the Captain, we saw Henning Wehn perform “My Struggle” in a dank vault under North Bridge. (He’s German, and the title of the show is nothing if not bold.) I was in two minds about the gig; for the most part it was observational humour with a fairly cutting edge to it, but it was let down by some don’t-mention-the-war stereotyping that I think a 2010 Fringe audience doesn’t have much use for.

After the show we decamped to the temporary beer garden in the still-vacant hole where La Belle Angele and the Gilded Balloon used to stand, sank a few pints and chatted amiably for a while. Alright; we played drinking games. I begged off around 1am (so I could get up early the next day for a bike ride with Edinburgh RC, but that’s a post for another time), shook hands/man-hugged everyone in attendance as appropriate and walked home through the chilly, clear night. It had been an excellent couple of days, and I now find I’m hankering for another London trip to try for another weekend of carefree culture+drinks.

* * *

In other news, Jeff, Devon, Neil, Vanessa, Jez and I won the Cumberland pub quiz the Monday after the abovementioned Fringe action; Jez, Ally, Row and I came a valiant second this following week, and finally last night Jez, Row, Tom and I got thoroughly wrecked in honour of Jez’s birthday after gorging ourselves on Row’s expertly prepared dinner. I walked home at 2 am with War of the Worlds playing on my headphones. Need I say more?

Earlier tonight I did my first cycle race, the Edinburgh 48 in Craigmillar Country Park. My shins are covered in nettle rash, my hands are midge-bitten and my muscles are utterly void of energy. My brain, however, is fizzing with nervous energy — this racing business is a lot of fun — and it demands to be occupied, and so I stick on some headphones and plug myself into some sprawling Glaswegian post-rock.

Also, I’ve joined Facebook. This is less exciting.

(A real post is in the works!)

On Sunday I’d gone on a ride out to Haddington and back, organised by Edinburgh Road Club, and one of the more serious road cyclists shepherding the rest of us along was in recruiting mode. “You should come along to the Kirky 10 time trial on Wednesday nights. It’s easy to get into, and you’re really only racing yourself.”

Excellent, I thought — I’m an inherently lazy bastard, so I should be easy to beat. So it was that last Wednesday night I arrived sweaty and breathless at Kirkliston sports centre at 6.45pm. I signed on the dotted line as directed by one of the marshals, who explained what I had to do.

“You’re number 17, so you’ll be starting at 17 minutes past seven. The numbers are in that box down there — find your one and pin it to the back of your jersey. The start is out by the roundabout; it’s five miles straight out, a U-turn in the road (make sure you check for cars first) and then five miles straight back. You’ll see a marshal at the turn. Shout out your number as you cross the line so the timekeeper hears you.”

Ten miles as fast as you can, and don’t get run over: this is the essence of a time trial.

Having sorted myself out, I headed down to the start with a couple of other new faces from the Sunday ride. The knot of cyclists hanging around the start were a mixed bunch: granted, the demographics of the group didn’t veer far from ‘white male ABC1’, but the bikes themselves (and the associated levels of seriousness) ranged from sleek carbon time trial machines through normal road bikes to an elongated cargo bike whose rack was laden with bungee-corded barbell weights.

“Are you having a laugh?” I asked its rider.

“Training bike,” he replied jovially. “Makes a normal bike feel fast!”

The minutes ticked down, with a rider being sent off each minute until I was next. I rolled up to the spray-painted start line and steadied myself as the fitness instructor-alike starter reeled off more instructions, smoothly punctuating them with a countdown read off his stopwatch.

“Okay, are you twenty seconds ready to go? Remember, go hard on the way out but keep something for the way back and fifteen seconds call out your number as you pass the ten seconds timekeeper.”

Another marshal, this time a curious older chap wearing a three-piece tweed suit and a flat cap (I never found out the story there — he was utterly incongruous in amongst all the lycra and tracksuits), held my bike steady as I clipped in my free foot. I wobbled a bit. Only now was I starting to get nervous. The starter counted down from ten seconds.

“…one. Go!”

The old chap gave me a rather feeble shove and I wobbled slowly off the line. Not quite the blistering acceleration I would have liked. Both he and the starter seemed concerned that I was going to fall off.

“Are you okay? Go! Go now!” barked the starter.

“Pedal!” the old guy added.

“I’m fine, I’m going,” I muttered back petulantly, steering unsteadily away from the kerb then standing up and getting some power into the pedals. I wound up to what I thought was a reasonable cruising speed, got into the drops and put my head down with my eyes flicking between the heart rate monitor on the handlebars and the road ahead.

Turns out it’s a disingenuous to talk about ‘tactics’ for a time trial. It’s just you versus the course and the elements, and other than moderating your effort to varying degrees there’s little else to do other than to keep grinding away at it. Even should you find yourself in the fortunate position of overtaking another rider, the rules preclude you from drafting behind them to gain any advantage.

My vague plan had been to stay within a particular range of effort for the first two miles, then move up a gear for the next three and finally blitz the return leg in an all-out blaze of glory to shoot speedily over the finish line with fists punching the air. Unfortunately, I’d failed to take into account the two-mile climb and unrelenting headwind that confronted me as soon as I’d started. My heart rate immediately shot through the roof and my legs were burning within minutes. My three-part strategy degenerated into just keep going and the next eight miles were an exercise in gritted teeth, running nose and streaming eyes.

I crossed the line in 29 minutes and 53 seconds, having averaged almost exactly 20 mph over the ten miles: my first time trial had been a deeply meh performance, but I’d enjoyed it nonetheless. And like I said, I’m going to be very easy to beat next time round.

Bikes: Back at the start of the July I headed into town to watch the Edinburgh Nocturne, a cycle race running in a closed loop along the Grassmarket, up the cobbles of Victoria Street and back down Candlemaker Row. A mini Paris-Roubaix, I thought, and cycled up there to meet Andy and Thomas (late of Proxy) just before the main race.

It was, sadly, slightly anticlimactic. The start was exciting enough: the competitors milled around awkwardly in slippery cycling shoes and warmed up on turbo trainers, forming up purposefully on the line with a couple of minutes to go; finally, the starting gun went off and after the briefest of lulls as twenty left feet clipped into twenty pedals the bunch charged off up the Grassmarket. Andy, Thomas and I precessed around the course to watch the action at different points, and after about 45 minutes we were back in the Grassmarket.

“Pint?” someone suggested.

We got a drink at the Blue Blazer, and by the time we got back to the race it was all over. No-one seemed to mind. Cycling — at least for the three of us, with only a fairly vague notion of the tactics and skills to watch out for in a road race — is probably more of a sport to get involved in than to spectate at.*

Dogs: Maisie has been enjoying the weather too, although admittedly she enjoys being outside in more or less any weather short of an apocalyptic thunderstorm. There must be something in the air at the moment, though, because she has taken to barking at inanimate objects such as tents and telephone boxes. This is difficult to explain to passers-by.

Drinks: I haven’t been doing a lot of boozing of late, but when I have roused myself from the sofa the results have been epic.

One Saturday night a few weeks ago Jeff and I went out for “a couple”, and ended up unsteady and bleary-eyed Hawke & Hunter around five hours later, having taken in Pivo en route and declaring it not a patch on the real thing.

Then, last Thurday night Davis and I met up, ostensibly to discuss what needs to happen to the Coba Fynn website before we launch the album, but having cracked open one beer we felt compelled to crack open a whole host more. Friday morning was unproductive a living hell.

Finally, this last weekend I went out for a Jez-by-proxy evening, meeting up with his ex-flatmate Beryl and and his sister Rowe at 99 Hanover Street (don’t worry, I’d tucked my shirt in and buttoned my cardigan in preparation), and was surprised to find myself in the sticky-floored cavern of doom that is Finger’s Piano Bar at 3 am after a night of excellent chat and ropey beer. The cocktails at 99 Hanover Street may be “sex in a glass”, but the Guinness was closer to “the unfulfilled promise of a lost lover”, or “a kick in the balls”. Still, a great night!

So far, so entertaining. It was to my great chagrin, then, that I found the other morning that some criminally negligent moron had driven into the side of the car, leaving the driver’s side door rather more concave that it’s supposed to be. My month’s worth of good humour evaporated.

I fumed; I prodded the dent experimentally to see how bad the damage was; I glared around at nearby cars looking for matching scrapes, and then I saw a note under the windscreen wiper. Mr. Crashy the hit-and-run-bastard may have driven off without so much as a by your leave, but some crafty onlooker had seen fit to write down the offending registration number and leave it for me. I called the police and then the insurance company, and my mood brightened considerably as a result.

* As an aside, Rowe was on holiday in France during the Tour, and managed to watch Contador and Schleck battle it out on the Col du Tourmalet more or less by accident. Now that is a cycle race I’d have liked to watch in person.

We looked through the door of his room to see him lying utterly motionless. He may have been groaning slightly, but if so I couldn’t hear it over our laughter.

“Are you hungover?” we asked.

“Yes.” he replied.

We discussed what to do — wait for Josh to get up? Go for a wander and meet up with him later? — but as we talked he emerged from his room and shuffled painfully to the couch. He was in no fit state to face the outside world, so we decided to leave him to recuperate and meet him later.

Before we left though, Jeff and I both felt the need to relieve ourselves. Urgently. We two might have dodged the hangover bullet, but five pork-based meals in two days was wreaking its own particular form of havoc with our digestive systems.

“I wouldn’t go in there for a bit,” Jeff said as he emerged from the bathroom. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any choice. My need was pressing.

Christ, it smelled bad. It smelled even worse when I’d finished. There was a little mains-powered air freshener in the hall, but I’d found the scent so overpowering that I’d turned it off the night before when we’d arrived back from the club. Without Airwick’s finest to mask the smell, the eye-watering fumes from the toilet were in full noxious bloom. I was glad to be getting out of there.

Just as we were leaving, Josh stood up unsteadily. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, walking hurriedly down the hall and into the pestilential bathroom.

Poor guy. Jeff and I left to the sounds of retching, and I shudder to think of what Josh must have experienced in that thrice-curséd bathroom.

We ate lunch at a place called café café*, sitting outside and watching a variety of rich people come and go. As we waited for our tardy but tasty mains to arrive, a Ferrari pulled up and then growled off; a chopped VW rat rod driven by an extremely tattooed chap did the same, and to cap it all, a convoy of three Rolls Royce Phantom coupés rolled up together and parked across the street. The people sitting at the tables either side of us were expensively dressed and well coiffed, and the whole scene had a not-so-quietly-rich air about it. In Britain it might all have been considered a tad vulgar, but Praguers clearly have no problems showing off their wealth!

After lunch we walked over to the Old Square again to climb the tower of the old town hall and looked out over the city. The view is amazing, really; Prague could double as the Vienna of The Third Man or the Venice of Casino Royale (or, indeed, the Prague of Casino Royale), and the almost mundane baroque buildings are punctuated by gothic eye-poppers like Our Lady before Týn and sci-fi monuments like the TV tower. I’m not a great fan of heights, but I could have stayed up there for hours. We pottered around the old town taking a few more pictures and then headed back to retrieve Josh, who’d gotten as far as the pizza restaurant immediately outside the apartment building before stopping for lunch. We joined him for a Coke before we had to leave.

“I’m just waiting for Jaroslav to come out of the front door, stony-faced, with his eyes streaming,” I said.

Like a Buck Rogers freeze-frame ending, we laughed.

* Turns out café café is a sort-of gay hang-out which is also “straight-friendly”. It’s a shame Josh wasn’t with us – he’d have been right at home.

The castle is an odd place. It’s more of a walled town than a castle, at least compared to a typical British example, and the diversity of the architecture inside is mind-boggling. The main square has Romanesque colonnades, the none-more-Gothic bulk of St. Vitus’ Cathedral, and pastel baroque facades all over the place. We ordered thimble-sized coffees at a café in the shadow of the cathedral and flicked through the guidebook to work out what to do that day.

After a stroll around the castle square, we decided to head onwards to Letná Park, a tram ride away to the east and apparently home to the best beer garden in Prague. Until 1962, Letná also boasted (if that’s the right word) the largest statue of Stalin in the world, standing 15m high and weighing 17,000 tonnes. Completed in 1955, it was dynamited seven years later as Khruschev tried to erase Stalin’s imprint from the Soviet Union and its satellite states.

The marble plaza where the statue once stood is a pretty decrepit place these days. In the statue’s place there’s a giant, industrial-strength metronome which hums back and forth to symbolise the passing of time, but in aesthetic terms it’s a bit of a disaster, looking and sounding more like a chairlift than a work of art. The marble blocks were graffiti-covered and broken, and their edges had been worn down by the trucks of the skateboarders who have colonised the place. Here and there, discarded needles lay in the cracks between paving slabs.

It should have been depressing, but I was caught up in a weird sort of appreciation for the history of it all: the Stalinist mania of the giant statue and its hasty destruction only a few years later, and now the feeling that the city has turned its back on this particular corner of Letná Park as an unwelcome reminder of unhappier times.

We found the beer garden at the other end of the park, looking a little run down and almost devoid of people. We decided instead to eat at a swish little bistro opposite before heading onward to Petřín Hill.

Jez had suggested Petřín to us, telling us we should “walk up Petrin Hill, next to the castle, beautiful part of Prague,” adding into the bargain that it was “good for girl watching.” I’d love to make a fruity comment at this point about the laydeez, but the truth is that I was far more excited about not walking up the hill but rather taking the funicular railway to the top. And the funicular was covered by our three-day travel passes to boot — bonus!

Yup, I’m a dork.

There was a minor drama on the way there (read: Jeff and I laughed like drains, Josh frowned resignedly) when I mistakenly decided to get off the tram one stop too early. Jeff and I leapt nimbly through the closing doors, only to turn around and see the tram moving off with Josh still on board. We caught up with him at the bottom of the hill, took the funicular up and walked back down, stopping at a café on a terrace overlooking the city. We ordered three beers and the waiter came by a few minutes later to deliver them.

“Ah, great. Thanks. Děkuji!” I said to him.

Looking blankly back at me for a second, he replied, “You’re welcome. Prosim.”

I turned to Jeff and Josh. “You know, every time I try to say ‘thank you,’ whoever I’m talking to looks at me like I’m mental. Then I ask them how to say ‘thank you’, and everyone pronounces it a little differently.”

“Maybe you have the pronunciation wrong,” Jeff replied. “Maybe instead of ‘thank you’ you’re actually saying ‘suck my balls’.”

We walked back to the flat, crossing Charles Bridge and clutching our wallets and passports as we did so. Every single guidebook mention of the bridge screams “pickpockets! Pickpockets!” in a hysterical tone and so we crossed it in military fashion, each man covering the next and staying vigilant against this criminal scourge. We were, of course, perfectly fine.

After stopping off in the flat to put on our party pants we headed out for the night, watching that night’s game over dinner (sadly, we managed only a double-porker on this, our second day in Prague) and then wandering out of our Old Town comfort zone to try out a few bars at Jez’s recommendation.

This did not go according to plan.

We decided to start with Pivnice U Rudolfina over by the Rudolfinum concert hall. In his pre-holiday pep talk, Jez had characterised this pub as “a trad Czech beer hall, filthy cheap (like 30p a pint), great beer, you get thrown out if you drink at less than a pint every 15 mins. You will be the only non-Czechs there.”

“Sounds like a challenge,” we thought, and set off to find it. And find it we did, shuttered and dark, having closed half an hour earlier. On our way there we’d passed Tretter’s, another of Jez’s suggestions, but it had been quiet and intimidatingly flashy looking. With no real idea of where to go, we chose a nearby middle-of-the-road bar for a couple of consolatory pints and then headed back out.

Finding ourselves just south of Charles Bridge, we came across the queue for what was clearly a very popular club. This was the line for Karlovy Lázně, a multi-floored, super-sized European version of Espionage and by some accounts the biggest dance club in Europe. My kryptonite, in other words.

The queue was long enough to make us go next door instead, to a place called Klub Lávka set in an old building overlooking a weir running across the Vltava. We wandered inside and spent fifteen minutes being ignored at the first bar we came to, before realising that we’d somehow managed to walk straight past the door staff without paying the cover charge. Not that it seemed to make a blind bit of difference; the staff at the next bar further into the club served us without a second glance at our armband-less wrists.

We cleaved to the bar for a bit, spent a while watching a latin dance competition in one of the rooms upstairs, with Josh cutting a mean rug between competitive dances, and then moved downstairs to the main area for…more dancing. I am a categorically awful dancer, but if the music is acceptable then I’ll get drunk and make a half-hearted effort to avoid being a complete party pooper. For a while at least the music in Lávka was reasonable, and the bar provided us with a steady stream of sickly sweet Desperados to satisfy the other half of the equation: Jeff and Josh danced; I “danced”, and everyone was more or less happy. We even started chatting to a Russian girl in Prague on holiday who enthusiastically encouraged me to shake my hips.

God, it makes me shudder even to think about it.

Anyway, we danced/”danced” some more, and with his masterful dancefloor skillz, Josh actually seemed to be getting on rather well with this young lady. Jeff and I raised our eyebrows significantly at each other.

Then she said, “Excuse me, I must be going,” and left. Just like that. Shortly afterwards, the bar ran out of Desperados. It was a sign to leave, and we took it.

“Děkuji,” I said to the waiter as he brought the bill. He looked nonplussed.

After lunch we headed back to the square for the USA-Slovenia game, where the normal tourist attractions — a centuries-old astronomical clock and the black Gothic spires of the Church of Our Lady before Týn — were temporarily playing second fiddle to a big screen suspended on a frame of scaffolding and flanked by a pair of cars on raised stands. This was the marketing gut-punch of the ‘Hyundai Fan Park’, where Hyundai’s sponsorship of the World Cup was emblazoned loud and proud across every flat surface.

We grabbed pints in plastic cups, found a reasonable place to watch, and settled in for the game. First though, we had to sit through the ads. In place of the usual pre-game punditry was a constant stream of car adverts: it was very much like that sequence in The Shining in which a crazed Jack Nicolson methodically smashes his way through the bathroom door with a fire axe, only this time the axe is a Hyundai commercial and the bathroom door is your sanity.

But I digress.

When the whistle blew for half time the temporary bars set up around the square became instantly clogged with people. We decided to head elsewhere for the second half.

The Golden Tiger was a smoky, wood-panelled bar a few streets away from the square. Our guidebook (a newly purchased replacement for one Jeff had left on the plane) told us that Václav Havel entertained Bill Clinton here sometime back in the ’90s, and that it was very much a traditional Czech drinking den. We were shown curtly to a table in the corner, whereupon Josh held up his hand showing two fingers and a thumb and the barman nodded his head in understanding.

“The book has a bit about Czech pub etiquette,” Josh explained. In short, the rules are:

• Hold up a thumb for one drink, a thumb and a finger for two, and so on;
• Your drink will be replaced once you there’s an inch or so left;
• Place your beer mat on the top of your glass once you’re finished and ready to pay up.

This is a country in which beer-drinking has been optimised.

We settled in for the afternoon. It was nice to see a bit of the traditional Prague, for better or for worse: the beer was great, the atmosphere was genuine and the company was racist, although to be fair it wasn’t a native Praguer but a Serbian who served up that particular slice of authenticity. Jeff turned to our neighbours at the next table to make a comment on the game, and got chatting to this one chap who at first claimed his home country to be “part of the old Yugoslavia,” and who seemed to have some difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the YR was indeed F.

“Which part of the old Yugoslavia?” we asked.

“Serbia,” he told us. “Oh dear,” I thought.

Shortly after that he made a horrifically offensive remark about African footballers. We drank up and left after the game finished.

We rounded off the day with a pig-derived sausage from a stand in the Old Square and watched the last game of day (England-Algeria) under a threatening sky. A few drinks in an Irish bar finished us off and we called it a night, stopping only for another pig-based sausage at a stand in Wenceslas Square. Groaning like sausages about to split, we rolled home.

Jeff and I had flown out of Edinburgh, arriving half an hour before Josh’s Heathrow flight, and with some time to kill I fished out the Czech pronunciation guide I’d printed out the previous night. It seemed prudent to memorise a few useful phrases before we attempted to make our way in a Czech-speaking city. Some phrases seemed easy enough: ano for ‘yes’, ne for ‘no’, and prosim (pronounced “pro-seem”) for ‘please’, for example. ‘Thank you’, though, was a bit trickier.

“‘Thank you’ is…well, according to this, it’s pronounced ‘dye-koo-yi’. ‘D’, ‘e’ with a sort of inverted circumflex, ‘k’, ‘u’, ‘j’, ‘i’. I tried it out. “Děkuji. Děkuji. Okay then.”

“What is it?” asked Jeff. “Děkuji?”

“Yup, sounds about right.”

We were interrupted by Josh’s arrival from baggage collection, tottering under the weight of an enormous backpack, and after we’d finished mocking him for it we bought a three-day travel pass each and headed for the bus into town. After finding the right bus stop, the journey was fairly straightforward: the bus took us to the western terminus of an underground line, and from there we took the metro all the way to Můstek station on Wenceslas Square, right in the centre of Prague. We took the escalator up into a warm but overcast day. The square was more of a rectangle, a bustling and slightly down-at-heel avenue that sloped downwards from the grandiose National Museum at the south end towards the Old Town at the north.

“We have to call Jaroslav [the flat's agent] to let him know we’re here,” said Josh. We waited as he made a quick phone call and then set off to find the apartment.

“Where’s the flat?” we asked him.

“Number 47, Wenceslas Square,” he replied.

It might be worth mentioning at this point that Jez, whose work brings him to Prague many times each year, had given us some suggestions for things to do and places to avoid in the city. He said, for instance:

Wenceslas Sq is unpleasant, try to avoid in general.

Huh.

We found the flat over on the west side of the square, through an arcade and in a little courtyard off the square itself. There was no-one there to meet us, so Josh called Jaroslav again and we waited for him to arrive. We looked around: there was a pizza restaurant with an open-air deck at the back of the courtyard and an internet café across the way.

“This doesn’t seem so bad,” I thought.

As we waited, a shaven-headed, hook-nosed guy came through the arcade and made a bee-line for us. He looked like the kind of guy who broke legs for a living.

“Hello,” he said. “I am Jaroslav.”

We introduced ourselves and followed him into the building where he called the lift. The lift arrived, and it was tiny: Josh and his massive backpack alone could have filled it, but Jaroslav encouraged the three of us inside and then slid in beside us. We were squashed against the walls and each other like three sardines sharing a tin with a piranha. And an enormous rucksack.

“The lift,” Jaroslav said jocularly, swivelling his head as if to draw our attention to its size. Perhaps he thought we hadn’t noticed. He pressed the button for the fourth floor, but instead of moving smoothly upwards the lift started to oscillate up and down as if on a straining piece of elastic.

Josh looked unhappy.

Eventually the lift started to ascend, the slipping clutch or stretching cable or whatever finally gaining some purchase, and slowly climbed to the fourth floor. It stopped, hopped up a few inches, and stopped again. The doors slid open and we exited as quickly as was seemly.

The flat itself was fairly nice, in a wipe-clean sort of way, and after signing the rental agreement and being shown around by Jaroslav, he asked us what were doing in Prague.

“Are you on stag do?” (I am not exaggerating the lack of the indefinite article.)

“No, not really; it’s more of a boys’ holiday,” we told him. A ‘mancation’, as Josh later put it.

“Okay, you need anything — taxi, food, or anything else — you call me.” The emphasis, however slight, was all Jaroslav’s. “Anything”? What the hell did he mean? Strippers? Hookers? Drugs? Broken legs?

“Er, thank you. We’ll let you know.”

He took his leave and we all breathed out. We flipped coins for the choice of beds, unpacked our stuff, and wandered off out for the day.

(To be continued.)

A couple of weekends ago now, I had a Proper Weekend. For the first time in ages, a Saturday and Sunday were blighted neither by an excessive hangover nor unreasonably crappy weather and were filled just so with pleasantly engaging activities. If it didn’t feel pompous to do so, I’d have gone right ahead and called it ‘beatific’.

Ash had been invited to a barbeque on the Saturday in a small village called Dirleton, a few miles west of North Berwick, for her boss’s birthday. It was taking place at a nearby beach called Yellowcraigs, and it seemed cruel to leave Maisie the Dog behind in the flat while were off gallivanting in the dunes and munching on barbequed burgers, so we decided to take her with us in the car.

The only snag, of course, was that Maisie gets motion sick. Voluminously so. On the very first car journey we took with her, driving back to Edinburgh from the dog rescue centre in Dumfries, she lurched around the back seat like a seasick muppet and glumly yakked her way through a series of technicolour yawns. We stopped each time to clean up the mess, and as soon as we pulled away again she would start panting, then drooling, then perform another stripey laugh.

We tried her in the car again a few months ago with similar results, although by then we knew the signs and hastily pulled over each time it looked like things might go awry. I was not overly optimistic, then, about the forty-five minute drive out to Dirleton, and it was with some trepidation that we coaxed Maisie into the car on Saturday afternoon, whereupon she curled up in a pathetic ball on Ash’s lap and gazed mournfully around at nothing in particular. We opened both windows, set the fan to blow a cool stream of air over her, and set off.

And miraculously, Maisie was fine. She fairly bounded out of the car as soon as we’d arrived and fixed us with an accusatory stare from a safe distance, but within seconds she was back to normal and bounding off after her tennis ball. We found the barbeque in a hollow between the woods and the sea, said hello to the various archeologists and heritage types in attendance, and settled in for a couple of hours of random chat+burgers. It was a relaxing afternoon: Jeff and Devon arrived a while later, guests of Ash’s boss’s husband; we overdosed on burgers; we blethered about nothing in particular, and, to Maisie’s great consternation, we wandered over to the beach to throw the ball into the water for her.

We were getting ready to leave when a boy of maybe 5 or 6 came over to us and held out his hand for Maisie’s ball-chucker thing.

“You want to throw the ball for her? Sure, okay.”

He took the launcher in two hands and walloped the ball off the ground. It bounced away in the direction of the barbeque with Maisie charging after it.

“Er, you might want to not throw it quite so hard…”

Maise came trotting back and after a bit of persuasion, dropped the ball at his feet.

“Sit!” the kid bellowed at Maisie, who was a little taken aback.

“And you don’t need to shout,” I tried to tell him. “She’ll sit down if you just—”

“Sit!” he bawled again, for good measure. Maisie sat.

And so, for the next little while we tried to curb Connor’s (for that was his name) enthusiasm and minimise the psychological damage meted out to Maisie in the process. Eventually the ball was getting just a bit too wild and Connor’s demeanour was heading towards that staring-eyed, foot-stampy enthusiasm that immediately precedes someone getting hurt.

I knelt down to call time.

“We’re going to go now. Can I please have the ball launcher back?”

Connor conveniently forgot how to speak, and evaded my eyes. The adults in attendance looked at each other, foreseeing a tantrum. Not wanting to be seen to be wrestling a five-year-old for control of a plastic stick, I tried a different tack.

“Okay, how about we take turns? You’ve just had a go — can I have a turn?”

Connor fixed me with a cold, dead stare and said:

“It’s. My. Turn.”

His Mum arrived shortly after that and tutted him into handing over the ball launcher, thank God. We collected Maisie and bolted for the car.

* * *

The rest of the weekend was a genial amble through a series of untaxing but enjoyable activities. On Saturday night I watched the England-USA game over at Jeff and Devon’s, complete with Bud, snacks and snarky Eurovision-style commentary, and on Sunday I took Maisie out for a walk in the glorious sunshine before a leisurely cycle and finally collapsing in front of the box for the Canadian GP. Good times.

The reason for this sudden profligacy — after all, ITTET £2k is still a fair old wedge — is that for the past few months, Ash, Jez and Devon have been knitting together the threads of an autumn road trip down to Provence. With echoes of our pan-European 2006 trip still ‘Ringing in my ears, I decided I needed a suitable car for this year’s edition.

As ever, I started off looking at completely impractical vehicles and gradually homed in on a model which split the difference between zOMG11!! awesomeness and sober practicality. I tried and failed to organise a test-drive in an Renault-Alpine GTA, a rear-engined, plastic-bodied sports car (or “death trap” as they say in France); I quizzed my Dad about having a garage-owning friend of his build me a refurbished Mark II Escort; and I gazed longingly at aged ’70s Toyota Celicas on classic car websites.

In the end, though, it was an episode on our 2006 trip to the Nürburgring that got me onto the straight and narrow. On my lap around the track, we’d been overtaken by a pair of Alfa Romeo 75s, square-edged 1980s saloons with suitably Italian/off-the-wall design features like inboard rear brakes and complicated de Dion suspension. These Alfas shot past the Saab and proceeded to drift round the next corner before disappearing off into the leafy distance. Fast forward to earlier this year, and I happened to come across a bright red 75 for sale at a dealership in Edinburgh. Not only that, but it was going for the paltry sum of £1,300. Intrigued, I arranged a test drive and cycled over to the garage on a Friday morning off work. With the garage owner riding shotgun, I took it out for a jaunt round the bypass.

My word.

This was a proper old sports car, even though it looked like a horrible joke from the late ’70s. The throttle response was incredibly eager; just a touch on the pedal and it snarled and popped away, and I liberally but accidentally spun the wheels the first time I pulled away from a stop. It felt lively and balanced. This thing would be a monster on A- and B-roads up north.

It was brilliant, and I didn’t buy it.

There were problems. The gear shift was incredibly vague (the ’box is mounted at the back, so the linkage is longer than usual), it had a tendency to wander at motorway speeds, and the dashboard sported some ultra-tacky faux wood trim that had been glued on by the previous owner. I chatted to the garage owner after we’d returned to the forecourt. “It’s really a £2,300 car,” he explained. “£1,300 for the car itself and about £1,000 to fix all the problems.”

So, I passed on the 75 that day, but the Alfa bug had bitten and after a couple more test drives (one of a ratty green GTV with missing dashboard trim and a wobbly driver’s seat, and one of my eventual purchase), on a rainy night last month I took the train over to Bellshill to pick up my dark blue GTV Twin Spark.

Both my previous cars had a certain element of built-in self-effacement about them. The Cappuccino, for instance, was so diminutive that it deflected the inevitable “mid-life crisis car, eh?” sneers that a sporty two-seater convertible would otherwise have drawn. The Saab was so self-consciously quirky that it attracted bemusement more than it attracted praise or derision. It also helped that parts kept seizing up or falling off.

Not so the GTV: It’s an unapologetically sharp-suited Italian sports car with leather seats and a 7,000 rpm wail, and I almost feel guilty owning it. I want to put a sign in the quarterlight saying, “For sale: Bought for £2,000. Please don’t hate me.” It looks like a million dollars and it probably makes me look like an attention-seeking yuppie. “Surely Jez, as a BMW driver, knows my pain,” I thought, so at his suggestion we went for a drive down a familiar country lane out beyond Penicuik. I wound down the windows, wound up the engine, pointed the car down the winding road and let ’er rip.

“It’s faster than I thought it would be,” Jez said mildly as we came to a hurried halt at an unexpected T-junction a few miles later. High praise!

Later that day we went down to Jeff & Devon’s place to eat barbeque, play cricket and drank beer, and sat lethargic and stunned in the evening as the sun set in the west. All is right with the world.