Coming to Prague in mid-week seemed to be a smart move. Even by lunchtime today the city was heaving with tourists and the first tentative few hours of stag weekends. We would be home by the time these men had located the most deluxe pussies in town. Would I be tempted by a lunchtime beer before I left? Or maybe I would crack at the last minute and down ten lagers at the airport.
Nope, incredibly (and no one is more surprised than me) my temperance continues. Though I did manage a good chunk or four of giant Toblerone as we waited for the plane, so not been entirely healthy. Got to have some pleasures left in my old age.
We had been to see the Old Jewish cemetery in the morning, a fairly small walled off area where generations of the city's once thriving Jewish community had been buried literally on top of each other (the gravestones lay heaped upon each other and below the ground people were buried 12 deep over the years), but before that we had visited a small synagogue in which all the names of the Jewish people from the city killed in the Holocaust are painstakingly written on the walls. 80,000 names in black and red, covering every available space. No wonder this city seems obsessed with death. It has had a bloody history. Upstairs there was an exhibition of drawings and paintings created by Jewish children, most of whom had perished, which poignantly and effectively made those endless names seem real, rather than abstract. A child's painting, whether proficient or not, gives a real insight into their life, their personality and in this case their utter tragedy. I wish we could believe that mankind had learned it's lesson, but I fear there is much worse to come for our stupid and ridiculous species.
Strange and unsettling for this to become a tourist experience, but not necessarily a bad thing for that. In life we confront death, only occasionally aware that one day soon enough we won't be here anymore, just like the artists and sculptors and the owners of the stuff we see displayed in museums.
Then we go out and have some coffee and unpleasant overpriced pizza and life moves on.
By 10 o clock tonight we were back home in Shepherd's Bush eating our dinner, catching up on Madmen and it was hard to believe we had been away at all. Thinking of the transience of life and the fact that even the most deluxe of pussies will only be here for the blink of an eye.
