Indispensable Tool

My builder has been busy removing the dryrot in the floorboards and plaster – I am glad to say that it does not seem to have spread too far. He arrived with a huge toolbox on wheels and various electric drills and saws, but nearly all the tasks were achieved using just one tool – a handaxe. This axe was used to lever up the floor, to break through nails in the floor, to carve sections of the floorboards which were catching, to hack the plaster off the wall and of course to chop things. I was very impressed by this hugely useful Czech tool, and told my husband all about it. I was wondering whether and where to get one - this axe, lever, wedge and chisel all in one.

The next day my builder referred to it as his indispensable tool as he was using it to break some glass. I commented by how impressed I was with it. He grinned and said wasn't it primeval – the caveman's handaxe. “I got it at Lidl's” he said, “It was cheap and the last in the shop.

The Sound of Evening

As evening starts to fall and even a little while before on these balmy late summer days, the air swells with the sounds of grasshoppers and crickets singing their legs off. I find it hugely relaxing listening to their hard work, there is something almost hypnotic about the sound.

Normally you cannot see any of our thousand violinists, but the other day this large cricket (it must have been 3 centimetres long excluding its antennae and before it extended its legs) flew in through the window and continued his performance on the windowsill next to the bread. I was delighted to have him here, considering the residence of a cricket in the house to herald good luck. But his stay only lasted the evening, when I got up in the morning he had gone. I listened out for him that second evening, but all I heard was the hubbub of song from the yard.

The Swimming Pond

I have mentioned the swimming pond in passing in earlier blog posts, but this wonderful Czech institution deserves a post in its own right. At the bottom of the hill close to the local station you will find our local swimming pond. The pond is a man-made creation, which diverts water from a local stream into a large open-air pond for the summer. The water is heated only by the sun's rays, which given that the temperature here recently has been regularly around 30 degrees is quite enough to warm the water. Indeed given the heat the sight of the swimming pond as I traipse past on my way home is extremely appealing. Were it not for the fact that I am often carrying a rucksack full of “stuff” and always a handbag containing money, I would happily do a Colin Firth and leap in to cool myself down. Readers of this blog who are not acquainted with the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice will not know the reference to the scene which had the women of Great Britain joining Elizabeth Bennett in cries of “Mr Darcy!” I will now leave that to your imagination.

At the weekends there are usually families and youngsters camped on the grass by the pond for the day, playing and splashing. Teenagers, such as my two nieces, amuse themselves playing on the makeshift raft and swimming. But you share the pond with wildlife – a family of ducks have made their home there, swallows skim insects off the water's surface, blue and yellow damselflies dart around you and larger dragonflies cruise the still air at the waters' edge looking for prey. There is something wonderfully natural about the pond – there is not a lifeguard to be seen and not a whiff of chlorine. And yet the pond is managed - there are two water slides, jetties, and a rope swing to pass the time. In the Winter the pond is drained and cleaned.

It reminds me of another summer's day in my late childhood when we rode our bikes to the village of Stanton. Stanton was a real village then, before it became a preserved jewel. There we swam at the last of the Cotswold open-air swimming ponds, the water came from a spring I think and was warm with the sun, grass cuttings floated around us and I loved it. Our town of Winchcombe too had had its own swimming pond, where the Beesmoor Brook had been dammed by the local lady of the manor, but even by the time of my childhood this had fallen in to disrepair and disuse. I did explore it once with my friend Paul. Among the rubble of collapsed walls of cut Cotswold stone I ventured into the water up to my knees, but did not have the courage to do more.

It seems to me, looking at the Czech version, that the loss of the English swimming ponds is a great one. I know the health and safety bods would have a lot to say on the matter, that these Czech ponds must break every rule in the book. But still it seems to me that the Czechs have a better understanding of what makes a healthy childhood than we do and that the swimming ponds are just a good example of this.

Yet More Czech Flowers

Back in May I visited a local nature reserve and blogged about the wildflowers there. I promised at the time to return later in the summer and to report on what new flowers I saw. This time I went with my Czech friend and we spent a couple of very pleasant hours wandering the reserves paths, stopping frequently to admire our finds.



I was mostly in raptures about the wildflowers, whilst she was also taken by the berries and other wild (free) food that the reserve had in abundance. She managed to restrain herself and abided by the reserve's rules of not collecting any of them.

This summer seems to be running several weeks early so sadly we missed some of the reserves more spectacular flowers – the gentians and martagon lilies. Nevertheless there were some wonderful flowers out even in late August, whilst the berries, especially those of the wild berberis, made impressive displays.

Some of the plants I recognised like this wild monkshood (aconite) above.

This sedum.

And this mullein, more slender than the usual robust mullein you find in England.

There were plenty of wild herbs, oregano, mint and thyme in various forms, the scent from which on the late afternoon air was heady and glorious.

And then there were those flowers like this one, which I just didn't recognise nor could I find it in my book.

The Nature Reserve is in the Vysny area, just above Cesky Krumlov town and not far from the station. Although it was a glorious summer's day, we were the only visitors there – amazing seeing as we were so close to a major tourist attraction, but then tourists to Cesky Krumlov seldom allow themselves time to enjoy the natural beauty of the area.

Forced Rest

A fortnight ago I was trying to uncover such cobbles in the yard, when I sustained an injury. At the time it seemed nothing – I simply jarred my leg as my spade hit stone, it was sore that's all. I then compounded this by taking a long walk in the forest looking for mushrooms. It had been my intention to have a brief fungus foray, to gather just enough to give me something special for breakfast, but the farmer had put a bull in the field which the footpath crossed on my way to the woods and I only discovered this when the bull blocked the path behind me. I therefore had a longer trek of it than intended, meeting my friend on the road at the far end of the woods four hours later. During that time the soreness in my shin grew, aggravated by the walking boots I had on. But still I ignored it. On the Sunday I went into Cesky Krumlov by train, this required walking down the hill to the station and down another even steeper one into Cesky Krumlov. By the time I got to the old town gates I was in agony.

So I was forced to respect my injury. I had been half expecting something like this, over the last six months I have worked too hard and experienced too much stress, As I said to my Czech friend this is my body's way of telling me to put my feet up. It was as if I am being told that it is all very well thinking that working on the house, digging the garden and chopping wood, is relaxation, it is not, it is just another form of work. I was being told that dashing off to Krumlov to the internet cafe to check on whether the world out there wants me was and is folly and that even if it does, now is not the time to respond. Instead I must sit in the sun and read and write. Instead of seeking stimulus, I must let it come to me and be open to the little things that would otherwise pass unnoticed.

And so it was that I was sitting on the old sleepers in the yard, when there was a scuttling at my feet. A small lizard with a skin like jewels appeared and disappeared from under the granite flagstones next to me. He scanned the air, his head moving from side to side, tongue flicking in and out as if tasting my presence. I watched him absorbed in his hide and seek, and saw his sides moving as he breathed. When I was a little girl I had a lizard as a pet – I kept him in an old ceramic sink in the greenhouse. His name was Sidney – I can't remember why, only that it was Sidney – and I had won him as a prize for a school project. Despite my feeding him spiders and other goodies, he didn't last very long. This Czech lizard has more of a chance, with a whole garden full of prey and crevices to hide in.

PS After a week in which I have read three novels and watched four films, improved my suntan and my friend's website, my foot seemed to have recovered. I will try and learn from this lesson in listening to my body – of course I won't but one can always try.

Chopping Wood

I seem to be writing about nothing but wood at the moment. I have spent a large part of last weekend chopping up wood for the stoves. I was not alone in doing this – from all over the village came the sound of axes and chainsaws as my neighbours too set about getting the winter fuel stocks into usable sizes. Throughout the summer huge piles of logs rise stacked along the walls of Czech houses, ready for the winter cold.

Most Czechs, certainly ones in rural areas such as this, use wood-fired stoves as their main form of heating. At a time when oil, gas and electricity prices are rocketing, such an approach in this highly forested country offers a relatively cheap alternative. The stoves are very efficient and can put out a great deal of heat, one stove can heat a large room even in the depth of a Czech winter. The downside of this form of heating is the work required - for starters you have to be there to feed the hungry stove, which has meant for us that we have had to also install central heating for when we are in England. And then there is the endless chopping of wood, which is where my weekend's toil comes in.

All the wood is stored in the barn. I say stored, that suggests some order, which is definitely not true. The wood is the by-product of all our building works, there are old roof beams which have been chain-sawed into usable lengths which need splitting, and there are old floor timbers and window frames, all of which need sawing and chopping, as well as off-cuts of various sizes. There are even some thin slats which the former owner used to create some rather nasty wood cladding for the stairs, these require no work on my part to make brilliant tinder. All of these have been thrown into the barn by the builders, together with old sinks, left-over plasterboard, tiles, and the detritus of the previous owners' lives. It is hard to enter the building without climbing over some pile.

And so I have decided that I will this summer make my way through all of this and sort it out. That which I can cut up I will, and I will get someone else to wield a chainsaw on the bigger pieces. I am a coward when it comes to chainsaws, especially as I am on my own at the moment. My second reason for doing all this is of course the dryrot – I want to make sure that there is nothing nasty lurking in the barn. My aim is to get everything sorted into neat(ish) piles before winter arrives, when the light in the barn will be much less than it is now. All of this takes more energy than one might realise, my arm muscles are aching badly. Who needs expensive gym subscriptions when you can come and cut my wood for free?

Dryrot

This week I have been managing the work arising from an outbreak of dryrot in the kitchen. Inevitably in an old house, which had not had a great deal done to it for years, we had had some water penetration which had resulted in dryrot in some of the roof timbers. In turn their removal meant that spores from this blasted fungus were spread through out the house – I'm afraid the Czech builders were not overcareful about how they managed the process.

We decided on replacing all the roof timbers and some of the ceiling timbers upstairs as well. We also set about trying to prevent any sort of water penetration – digging a drainage ditch at the back (more of that at some other date) and protective soakaway around the other three walls. A well was installed in the cellar and the house's problems with damp did indeed seem to be solved.

However we did not allow for the inability of our plumber to tighten any pipe properly. Time and again we have had to call him back to a leaking joint. One such leak was unbeknownst to us dripping down the back of the kitchen sink unit and into the wooden unit and floor beneath. A month ago we left the house empty in a period of hot humid weather. The result – you've guessed it – a fine display of fungal bloom. Now as regular readers of this blog will know I am a great lover of mushrooms, but my love is limited to those you can collect and eat. I draw the line at dryrot.

My one consolation is that the kitchen unit, which will have to be burnt, also has a sorry history attached to it. It was created (beautifully I might add) by our errant carpenter, who delivered the unit half finished nearly two years ago and has never come back to finish it. I have been battling in my mind whether to give him up as a bad job (and either get another kitchen or get someone else to finish it) or keep waiting. My decision has now been made for me.

Sunset

When my brother-in-law stayed here with his family he was much taken with the way at dusk the houses on the far side of the village are bathed in the amber light of the setting sun. I know exactly what he means and regularly find myself standing at the front windows entranced. Yesterday the display was particularly impressive, the wonderful light of the setting sun was reflected not only on the buildings opposite but on the sky itself, which was dominated by rain clouds. Add to that a tail of a rainbow and it was quite magical. I rushed outside with my camera and managed only a few shots for you (of which this is the best) before nature's light display vanished.

Roots - A Love of Wood

My father loves wood and he shared that love with me. As a little girl I showed an interest in doing what daddy was doing. For probably my fifth or sixth birthday I asked for a toolkit for a present, rather than give me some toys my dad took me to an ironmongers and together we selected a set of real wood tools – a small saw, hammer etc. I can remember just being able to look over the counter at the selection. He encouraged me to use them too, one day when I was having trouble sawing a piece of wood, rather than do it for me or tell me what to do, he said to me that I should think how he would hold it still and left me to get on with it. When he returned I proudly showed the sawn wood, the other end of which had been kept firm by nailing it to the lid of a nice wooden box of my father's. Rather than be angry with me for ruining the box he was delighted, the inventor in him beamed at his little girl coming up with a workable solution to a problem. He still tells this story with pride forty five years on.

I never fulfilled my wood-filled promise. Going to a girls' grammar school we learnt domestic science not woodwork. Now all those years later I am planning to rectify this omission. I have decided to learn woodworking. I want to learn how saw and fix, to use the grain, to smooth and release shape and pattern. In the Czech Republic with its vast forests wood is plentiful. Here in our Czech home there is space to work – why I could even use the barn as a workshop. The house has need of such work, if my skill proves good enough. There are doors to be made and shelves, and even furniture. But I am getting ahead of myself, first I must relearn the basics and more besides. It is part of a need I feel at this time of life to go back to basics, to use my senses of touch, sight and smell. I have told my father of my plans and he is delighted. He wants to give me his tools, some handed down from his father, which he had thought he would be unable to pass on as no one was interested and in such a case how can I let him down.

Roots - The Shed

When I was very small my parents moved to the house that has been their home ever since. It is in the small Cotswold town of Winchcombe,a terrace house in the street that leads past the church. It is a non-descript house, but one with a long history. All the houses in the street were built on burgage plots – long thin pieces of land with a relatively small road frontage built in the late Middle Ages to house the homes and workshops in a single plot of the artisans who serviced the community that had grown up around the large Saxon abbey. Our house had until recently been a bakery. When my father built the kitchen extension, he found medieval walls of some outbuilding.

At the end of the garden stands the “shed” - a two-storey Cotswold stone stable, where my father and later my sister had their workshops, thus the tradition of craft continued to the modern day. When we moved in, my father found owl pellets and dead snakes in jars at the bottom of the garden, the former owner had kept his owls in the shed. A large lean-to greenhouse ran the length of the shed, in front of it were vegetable beds, before they succumbed to my mother's ever encroaching flower beds. At one end of the shed instead of limestone there was an old brick wall with bricks that were crumbling away, these afforded me, when I was practicing to play backstop for the school rounders team, a surface which deflected a thrown ball in all sorts of directions. At the same end an external staircase led up to the second floor.

As is so often the case the shed was my father's domain, it was where my mother did not attempt to organise his untidyness. It was the place where he invented things – he like his father before him is an inventor and one such invention paid for the kitchen. It was also the place where he kept his wood.

My father had plans for the shed, throughout my childhood he was restoring it. It was a huge adventure – he was delighted to find cobbles in the floor, which he carefully uncovered. One day he returned from the pub with a large piece of Cotswold stone which he had been given. It looked like nothing at first until you turned it round to reveal Norman or Saxon carved stone – it was part of a pillar from the old abbey. The stone was carefully installed in the stable wall. He claimed some oak beams from the demolition bonfires at a nearby flourmill and singlehandedly installed them in the ceiling, whilst my mother watched through fingers standing at the kitchen window, unable to stop him but worried stiff that something might slip and he would be injured. By the time I was at university the shed was now so restored that I was able to have my 21^st birthday party there. But somehow that was as far as it got, somehow he never did finish it. The woodturning lathes which were waiting his retirement there have stayed unused.

Why am I saying this in a log about the Czech Republic, why now? Well this morning I caught myself delightedly unearthing granite cobblestones in the yard and I was reminded of Cotswold cobbles in the shed. Looking up I gazed at the barn. As I have said in an earlier post it was the barn that had first attracted me to buy the house and yet it remains unfinished, as something prevents my continuing in its restoration. I wonder whether this is my “shed”, whether I am acting out my father's experience and whether I will complete my dream as he did not.

Czech Weather

I am back in the Czech Republic having let some friends stay in our Czech home for what should have been a couple of weeks. Unfortunately after only three days they decided to leave because it was cold. Now the thing is that at this time of year the Czech Republic is nearly always several degrees warmer than in the UK, right now it is 30 degrees and I could do with it being somewhat colder. We Czechophiles often have problems with Brits who seem to think that the Czech Republic is somewhere up north near Russia, when instead we are actually south of the UK - only marginally - we are approximately on the same latitude as Paris.

I have learnt from bitter experience however not to overegg how the Czech Republic is normally warmer and drier than the UK. If I say this to people visiting us, then the great law of sod kicks in and there is inevitably rain when they arrive, even though the day before will have had glorious weather. Instead I say it is like the UK's weather, it can rain at times but the sunny days tend to be hotter. But clearly even that doesn't work - maybe those preconceptions are just too hard to shake off.

By the way the converse also works. I daren't say to my friends that Czech winters are usually colder and have snow, because as soon as they arrive or rather the night before there will be a sudden thaw.

The Water Spirit

The Vodnik is the Czech water spirit. Similar to the Germanic Nix the Vodnik lives in the water (usually ponds and rivers in Czech folklore) and is someone you do not want to upset. He has a malicious streak - prone to drowning people and keeping their souls in a ceramic pot. If you meet him you will see a man covered with slime and sometimes scales, wearing a coat of tatters and a hat, another give away can be his hands and feet which are sometimes webbed. He often carries a fish, the porcelain pot and a pipe - as he is known to enjoy a quick smoke and so Czech fishermen make him an offering before they fish.

Our family has a particular fondness for the Vodnik despite his unfriendly ways. Our son was given a large book of European fairystories, when he was young, and his favourite story in the book was about the Vodnik or Nix. The book was one of those lovely fairytale books from the former Czechoslovakia and published in the UK by Hamlyn. Its illustrations were by a Czech artist Jan Cerny (about whom I know nothing, not helped that his name translated is John Black and so very common) and are wonderfully Czech with a quirky humour and dark undertones. Our son has grown up into an artist and film maker and we are often struck by how his work seems to have something of that Czech illustrative style. The Vodnik in our son's book is a friendly one who helps the hero get his girl and somewhat out of character with most Czech Vodniks. Our son's imagination was taken by the Vodnik, whom he sees as a sad character looking longingly through the weed at the world beyond water.

The Czechs too have an affection for the Vodnik - you will find him in stories, in music (Dvorak wrote a symphonic poem on the subject and includes him in the opera Rusalka) or hanging up for sale in puppet shops. A few years back I found this Vodnik for sale in a confectioners in Trebon. He is made of marzipan - the Czechs make all sorts of marzipan animals and figures, which make ideal gifts. I couldn't resist him, bought him and gave him as a present for my son. My son's affection for the Vodnik did not extend to refraining from eating his gift, but not before I took this photo.

More on the Castle Gardens

Many visitors to Cesky Krumlov Castle never make it into the Gardens. If they do they very seldom get beyond the formal gardens nearest the Castle. In so doing they are missing out on one of my favourite haunts. The formal gardens are very fine with formal flower beds, terraces, sculptures and fountain, but beyond these are more informal areas.

It is here that you will find both the summerhouse and the revolving auditorium featured in my last post. As you will have gathered the summerhouse is a rare rococo gem and well worth viewing, although many walk past it without a glance. Below is a photo of the summer house from outside the gardens, which show the level of decoration.


Beyond that crouched in the trees is a little pavilion - its ceiling decorated with 18th century frescos. These frescos, shown below, like the masquerade hall in the castle, betray a sense of fun and amusement so in keeping with the time in which they were created. The gardens are for walking in and giving pleasure. The walks are treelined to proffer shade in the summer leading to a pond. You will not find many tourists here, but you will find the locals - walking with their children to feed the ducks and squirrels, sitting on the grass engrossed in a book or lying asleep among the wild flowers. It is place to visit in all seasons - in spring when the first flowers appear, in summer to escape the sun's glare or in autumn when the leaves are falling. Sadly in Winter it is closed to visitors.


And as you walk you can feel the shades of the castle's former residents walking and laughing too. This is a garden of pleasure and mystery. In these modern days we have lost the ability to read the puzzles of garden design that so amused our 18th century forebears, with their references to classical mythology, masonic and alchemical symbols. What we enjoy is a shadow, but a very fine shadow at that.

The rotating theatre

Regular readers of my blog will know my views of the need for UNESCO to protect the important historic buildings of Cesky Krumlov against the pressures of commercialism. I welcomed their call for an audit of historical buildings.

One of the conditions of World Heritage site listing was the removal of the rotating auditorium from its current site in the Castle Gardens next to the Bellarie Summerhouse, which was built in the rococo style in the mid 1700's. The summerhouse is a remarkable and beautiful building and the UNESCO argument is that it should be seen in its natural setting without the intrusion of a modern open-air theatre auditorium. As someone who has specialised in rococo gardens - I formally ran a heritage centre in Vauxhall, which was built on the site of Vauxhall Spring Gardens, the most famous of all rococo gardens - I am acutely aware of the rareness of such gems.

That said there are many fans for the auditorium in its current position. I would recommend that visitors to Cesky Krumlov make a point of experiencing the magic of a performance in the gardens, before we lose the auditorium from its current site. Throughout the summer there are operas and plays staged in the gardens and whilst the performers can be of varying quality the theatre works wonderfully in the setting. You sit on the raked seating under the stars (or rain if you are unlucky) and the performance takes place around you - in the gardens and on the terrace of the summer house. The 360-degree rotation of the auditorium allows this action to take place anywhere within sight of the audience and anywhere that suits the drama. We watched Dvorak's opera Rusalka and the scene moved from the court to the lake home of the water sprite heroine and back again easily with the turn of the auditorium.

If, as they must to meet UNESCO demands, the Cesky Krumlov authorities do move the auditorium, it is hard to see where it can go and have the same magic. I do think the auditorium is in the way of seeing the summerhouse properly in its setting, although sitting in the empty auditorium does give you a great view. I also think far more could be made of the summerhouse to enable visitors to appreciate it, for starters I would love to be able to look inside. But at the end of the day I do wonder whether some compromise might not be the best solution. When I was researching the Vauxhall pleasure gardens and their rococo structures, I became aware of the theatricality of the period - rococo is nothing if not artifice. The auditorium whilst not in keeping architecturally with its historic surroundings, undoubtedly is in terms of spirit.

The Landscape of South Bohemia

As I was driving our Czech visitors to Tesco's I asked them what they thought of the Cotswolds. The response surprised me - the landscape reminded them of South Bohemia. It hadn't occurred to me, that I had managed to buy a Czech property in an area similar to my British birthplace and home. But on reflection I can see why they might say that.

Certainly the area around their home town of Holubov is similarly hilly, although it is far more forested than the rather bare Cotswolds. Both areas are very beautiful. A first glance at the hills around our house (see above) could deceive one into thinking one is in a slightly wooded part of the Cotswolds - the area around Stroud perhaps. But look again at the photograph and you will see the foothills of the Sumava mountains rising behind the hills. These are the steep hills that ring Olsina lake, beyond that there are steeper summits. South Bohemia would indeed be like the Cotswolds, if the Cotswolds were next to the Lake District.

Learning Czech

I really must learn Czech - it is getting more important for me to do so. Okay I have tried, believe me I have. It is a very difficult language for someone like me who has always found that the only way to learn a language is sheer hard graft. I have a vocabulary of several hundred words, but in Czech that is not enough. Each noun has six declensions (seven if you count vocative) and each noun has a plural form which also declines. It is this more than anything else that makes busking your way through the language so difficult. Add that to the British reticence and I find it very hard to open my mouth for anything more than a familiar phrase.

But I sometimes think that my inability to learn the language is somehow more complex than simply the fact that it is so hard. I rather like the detachment that not speaking the language gives me, it is the perfect excuse to not engage, to stand back and watch. My working life is all about communication and engagement. My job has been to help people express themselves and to negotiate peace in divided communities. And yet in that world of work I never express myself, I give and I do not get back. Here in my Czech home I am under no such obligations, I have the perfect excuse I cannot speak the language. One reason for buying here has been to allow me space for myself. Ironically in this country where the language is denied me, I find myself writing and communicating as I am doing right now.

I know I must learn the language now, if as I plan I will be working here. I know too that my failure to learn in the past has seemed to others, especially my friend, a denial of everything Czech, a refusal to commit. And I will learn, I promise, but I am afraid that it may change how I feel about my Czech homeland, that it will cease to be a release for the poet in me. We shall see.

Masopust at Cowley Road Carnival

In my post in February on Czech Carnival - Masopust I talked of our plans to bring a Czech masopust group to Oxford's Cowley Road Carnival. Well this weekend it happened. They arrived on Friday, having travelled across Europe in a van. We had managed to get them accommodation at St Hilda's College - a lovely Oxford University college near Magdalen Bridge. I took them for a meal at the Bodrum Kebab restaurant, which treated our Czech visitors to East Oxford's famous hospitality and a large mixed kebab each. Afterwards we went to a bar where they were welcomed by local artists and musicians. After a few beers and initial shyness Czechs and Brits were soon jamming and sharing each other's music.

On the Saturday the group explored Oxford and then travelled to the Cotswolds, ending up at my home for tea. They had asked me about typical English food at the Bodrum restaurant and I had said that English food was what people ate at home. And so we offered them a typical English tea - three types of cheese (of which Oxford Blue was a great success followed closely by Cheddar), pork pie and sausage rolls (I explained that food in pastry casings was very much an English speciality) and finally chutney. Remarkably the Czechs, who pickle everything as far as I can tell, do not know about chutney. Chutney is of course originally from India and a product of our imperial past which has evolved into something very British, so I suppose it isn't that surprising that the Czechs don't have it. Chutney was hugely successful. Afterwards we had scones with fresh cream and home-made strawberry jam - again a great success. This was all washed down with local apple juice and mugs of tea, drunk with milk in the English manner. After the meal I took them to the local Tesco's to buy ingredients for Czech Masopust doughnuts, English cheese, chutney and local ale, which they had sampled and enjoyed in a pub in Northleach.


On Sunday, with doughnuts in a basket and wearing their tall hats and rag coats, the Czechs joined the Carnival procession down the Cowley Road. It was wonderful to see them there. There were a whole range of carnival traditions - (as you can see) they were walking behind a Trindadian skeleton figure, in front of him was a giant puppet made with local artists, elsewhere there were samba bands from Brazil and a giant Bangladeshi tiger. When they saw me they dragged me into the road and danced round me - it is meant to be bring good luck, something I could do with right now. I spotted them several times through the day, walking through the crowds attracting a lot of attention with their top hats covered with flowers (they were surprised and delighted as people came up to them to talk and to ask to have their photo taken).

Towards the end of the day they came to my office and presented me with a special bottle of slivonic and a cd of Czech traditional music. They seemed very pleased with their reception and amazed by the size of our carnival. They have invited me to go to their town when they give a presentation to their fellow townsfolk about their trip to Oxford. As for East Oxford Action we have a wonderful record for the Heritage Lottery project we are doing on the traditions of Carnival and have a real tool to help us access the Czech community in our midst.

Chanterelles

As you will have gathered from my earlier posts I have caught the Czech mushroom collecting bug. Although you can find early boletus in the woods, my favourite at this time of year is the egg yellow chanterelle. You will find chanterelles in small troops nestled into moss on banks of dappled shade. They are good mushrooms for a beginner as they are easy to identify with their yellow cap fluted down into a yellow stem. Instead of the usual mushroom gills chanterelles have forked ridges which continue from the cap down the stem. Like all mushroom collectors of my acquaintance I have several mushroom identification books (my favourite by the way is the River Cottage Handbook No 1) and these talk about chanterelles having a scent of apricots. Well they do but only in the way that you get those white paints with a hint of apricot. Chanterelles smell of mushrooms with a hint of apricot, which you can miss if you haven't enough of them.

Today I returned home with enough of these yellow treasures to make a dinner of them for my husband and me. They have such a wonderful flavour and texture that they do not need fancy recipes, just fry them and then serve with scrambled eggs and a slice of bread (Czech rye bread if you can get it) and you will be in ecstasy. My husband was quite smitten with them.

PS Chanterelles were not the only thing harvested in the forest today, there were wild raspberries and strawberries too. However those small atom bombs of flavour somehow didn't make it to the basket. Don't tell my old man.

Finding the House 4 - The Old Man

After we left the barn we stood on the terrace and looked at the house. Through the orchard's high grass came an old man in a train guard's cap carrying a large crate of plums, which had been harvested from the hugely prolific trees. He was introduced to us as the father of the family. He enthusiastically greeted us. We asked if he had worked on the railways for long, "Oh no," we were told, "He just likes the hat!"

We were then invited up to his little cottage in the woods. I took one of the family - the daughter's husband - to go fishing on the lake at Lipno and then drove back along the main road and turned right up a barely tarmacked road and across the railway line. The old man's cottage was small and new - built, he said proudly, by his son. The son looked none too pleased by this, the old man appeared to be angling for me to employ the son to work on the house restoration and the son knew all too well just how big those repairs would be, although throughout the viewing he had assured me that there was very little to do and I believed him because I wanted to.

We sat outside next to the smoking oven and the slivovice began to flow. I was fortunate that I was driving and so had the perfect excuse for refusing the highly alcoholic home-made brew. The man in our party was not so lucky, the old man plied him with glass upon glass, and it rapidly became a matter of British masculine pride to accept and despite his partner's protestations he became happily mellow. The slivovice was accompanied by home-made Czech chocolate and courgette cakes, which sound weird but if you think about it are no weirder than carrot cake, and were very tasty.

The old man was missing a finger on one of his hands and emboldened by the alcohol our friend asked about its loss. The old man explained that he lost it in an accident when chopping firewood. We asked if he could have saved it - warming to his audience the old man explained that the finger had lain twitching on the floor and before he could grab it the cat had dashed out and disappeared off with it in his mouth. His daughter raised her eyes, clearly she had heard the story many times before and probably in a number of versions, and we all laughed.

An hour or so later we piled into the car and drove back to Cesky Krumlov. I had agreed to buy a Czech property, which was totally at variance with my wants list. The sun was shining, we were smiling after the family's hospitality, all seemed well with the world.

Looking back.

It is interesting this retrospective blogging, that I have been doing over these last few posts. It allows me to look again at my feelings and motivation for buying my Czech home, why this house, why then. So much has happened in the two and half years since I first stood in the farm's courtyard and looked up at the barn. It has distorted my view of things - the work, the times of despair and doubt, the discovery of one problem after another, and now the pleasure of the house transformed - all have in some way pulled a veil over those first emotions. I thought I knew them, but now through these blogs I find I did not.

In particular I had forgotten that it was not the house that really made my heart pace at that first encounter but the barn. It therefore strikes me as strange that whilst I have restored the house, pouring in far more money than I had calculated, the barn remains as it was then, with the exception of a new roof, which was forced on me by the heavy snow of the first winter. I am still in awe of its potential (so much more than that of the house) and it is that potential that perhaps stayed my hand. One could argue quite reasonably that I have not done work on the barn because of simple finances or lack thereof, but I am not entirely convinced by such a rational argument. I suspect, as is the case in my entire Czech property adventure, that the subconscious was playing its part too.

The truth is I still don't quite know what I am doing here. I feel like some hero in a Czech fairy story - I have followed the path into the dark forest and after some adventure have arrived in a large bright clearing. Here I rest and recover, but now I begin to make out another trail leading away and into a darker section of the forest. There things move in the shadows and I know that at some time I must leave the warm grass and go on. But now I wait for a sign - a deer or dove perhaps. In investing in the house I invested in a home, the barn however is for another purpose and I have no doubt that it is connected with my future work whatever that may be.

A first look at the barn

The most impressive building in many ways was not the house but the barn that ran at right angles to the house. It was typical of the barns of this area in South Bohemia - two storeys with a balcony. Originally the barn would have formed one side of a courtyard, but the barn that would have been opposite the house had been removed at some time. This had the effect of opening the courtyard out to the sun and offering lovely views from the house into the orchard.

The back of the barn, like the house, was built into a hillside and so the upper floor had two doors opening onto the hillside . This meant that the sheep and other animals could walk straight into the top floor. This was not an unadulterated success as we discovered when we entered the barn.

Inside the barn was a tumbledown collection of tat - much as the attic had been. But this did not disguise the fact that the barn was remarkable. The ceiling consisted of a series of brick vaults springing from the granite walls. The animal stalls were made of huge blocks of granite with carved finials to tie the beasts to. However at one point the ceiling had given way and straw hung down from upstairs. "What happened?" we asked the owners. "Oh the sheep fell through the ceiling," they replied. The urine from the animals which had overwintered in the barn had destroyed the bricks. Concerned we asked whether the sheep were hurt - "Oh no," they shrugged, "They had a soft landing." I could not help thinking that that might not have been the case for the ones that fell through first.

Upstairs there was an open space with large exposed beams, however in places it did seem as though timbers were missing - taken perhaps to prop something up or feed the winter stoves. Crowded higgledy piggledy into the barn were chicken coups, unidentifiable structures, old beds, and even a couple of wild boar skins, discarded probably where the animal had been carved up. The roof was made of concrete tiles, which no doubt had fallen off the back of a lorry. These were far heavier than the traditional Czech ceramic tiles and were placing quite a strain on the remaining timbers. I didn't notice this in my first flush of enthusiasm for the house. Suddenly instead of a simple retreat in this lovely country, I could see potential, so much potential.

Finding the House

I am trying very hard to remember what my first impressions were of the house I now know as home. Well, for starters, it was a lot bigger property than I had ever imagined I could afford, much bigger than the Cotswold cottage we had at home in the UK. But that said it was packed to the gunnels with a hotchpotch of furniture, all of it old and rather tatty, which actually reduced my appreciation of the size of the place. On that furniture lounged various members of the owners' family.

I was shown around by the daughter and son of the old woman, whose house this had been and who had died some seven years earlier. Since her death the house had been used as a chalupa by her children and grandchildren. Nothing much had been done to maintain the place in those seven years and one suspected not much had been done for many years before. Indeed everything had that make-do-and-mend look that I had come to recognise in many Czech properties, where an absence of money and access to DIY materials under the communists had led to sometimes brilliant inventiveness and more often to some very weird contraptions. This tradition has continued as a visit to the local DIY stores will vouch. Fortunately in the case of my house this seemed to have been combined with a degree of laziness that meant that the damage was limited, with the exception of an abandoned attempt at creating a shower (on the landing of all places).

In the large front room downstairs there was a sitting area with huge television and a kitchen made of punched metal (see above). Such a kitchen in the UK would have been a collectors' item, and would probably have been at a high specification of design, this cheap Czech version merited no such interest. Next to the stove was a door into the bathroom where there were two boilers (heated by wood), as the family had installed a new one and not bothered to remove the old. At the back of the ground floor were two cellars which were built into the hill behind and the door to the lower cellar.Upstairs were five rooms, one of which was being used as another sitting room. From the landing an open stair led into an enormous loftspace, so large that it could accommodate a reasonable-sized flat, but when I saw it first was a general dumping ground for broken furniture, old carpets etc. From the roof beams hung old duvets, which thanks to mice or martins were emptying their contents on to the floor. My friend told me that traditionally in Winter the roof space was used for drying the washing - it was as if the old lady had left her bedding up there to dry and never returned. The roof beams were huge compared to British ones and there were lots of them. The roof was covered with grey tiles which were beginning to fry and I noted would need replacing.

Despite the fact that I had said I didn't want to do any work on my Czech property purchase the potential of the place really appealed. Despite the tat and clutter the house spoke to me and it said "Take care of me!" and I listened in a way I had not done in any of the other places I had looked at.

The Search for The House 2

That summer we looked at quite a number of chata (forest huts) which were on estate agents books. Most were pretty basic and in need of work, and quite rightly the prices were much influenced by the chata's situation - the Czechs put a premium on idyllic locations. The trouble with idyllic locations was that they are often very difficult to get to. One lovely little cottage we saw, with the most brilliant views of the Sumava, was an extreme example of this - it was up a winding and narrow gravel track, which eventually petered out at the brow of a hill. Rather than slide the hire car down across the grassy meadow we parked up and walked the remaining section. It was a wonderful location and the female owner was keen to point out ideally suited for mushroom picking, but the thought of negotiating the lane in the winter snow was too much for us English wimps.

Having exhausted the choice of chata to be found on the estate agent website, my friend started to use her network. The carpenter, who had been creating quirky furniture for her, took on the job of looking out for me. He found three properties - one was a derelict cottage by Lake Olsina, he wasn't sure who owned it but it was in a lovely setting. As I suspected it was owned by the Czech Army as it was in the Boletice miltary zone and so unavailable. The second he had heard of via the grapevine but couldn't find when we went out looking for it. And the third was a farmhouse on the edge of a small village near Horice na Sumave, opposite the home of one of his friends. The house looked enormous - this couldn't be it, I thought, it must be the cottage next door. He went up to the door but it was locked, the owner was not there. So convinced was I that it was the cottage next door, that I took a photo of it to send to my husband and then we went back to my friend's house. Our carpenter friend agreed to talk to the owner and arrange a visit.

That Sunday we were back. Duvets hung from the windows of the large house airing. Our carpenter friend rang the doorbell and the gate swung open and the owner came out beaming - I was wrong it was the big house that we were to view. We went in.

The search for the house

I had been visiting the Czech Republic for some time when I decided to buy here. I am often asked what led me to make that decision. I often joke that it was my mid-life crisis - and as is so often the case with a joke there is some truth at the heart of it. I needed somewhere I could relax and allow the poet in me come to the fore, work was increasingly pressured and I was finding it hard to stop doing "stuff" even at my Cotswold home. So I decided I needed a Czech chata - a hut in the woods, somewhere beautiful to go and be amongst nature.

Looking back I recognise now that it was more complex than that. I rather suspect I wanted more even then, but did not admit it. I am pretty sure I was looking for a way out of my frantic lifestyle. There were certainly other more obvious motives, the most important of which was simply one of friendship.

And so it was that, after convincing my husband that I was serious and gaining his agreement to the purchase of a chata for a modest and affordable sum, I asked my friend to advise me how to go about buying such a thing. She sent me a link to a website which brings together properties from a variety of estate agents, less for me to find the property but more to get a feel about what was out there and at what cost. What it did tell me was that it was impossible to tell anything much from a website. This was partly because everything was in Czech, and partly because Czech estate agents have no idea how to photograph properties they are selling - it was amazingly common to find a property advertised by a rather bad photo of a badly decorated bathroom.

In the summer of 2005 I arrived in Cesky Krumlov, armed with some properties I was interested in and proceeded to look. My friend advised me rightly that often a good-looking property would be spoilt by the context in which it was sited - so many Czech villages and towns have their communist eyesore blocks of flats or factory farms which really spoil the feeling of the place. It helps therefore to have someone who knows the area and who can prevent a wasted journey. She also advised me that some of the best houses would never make it onto the estate agents' and would come via someone who knew the owner. How right she was!

If you are looking for a house or cottage to buy in the Czech Republic, may I suggest you visit Czech Property Search

Trainspotters

I had rather thought that this anorakish pursuit of trainspotting would be restricted to Britain or America. I was wrong. Here I am in the Czech Republic and there they are, two huge cameras with long lenses in-hand, they even have a small stepladder on which they stand to take their photos. They have clearly been delighted at the arrival of my little train (it's the one to be seen exiting the above photograph), as they are still photographing it as I walk up the path. They have just started to pack up when a train whistle from the opposite direction stops them in their tracks. Oh the joy of it! They rush towards the station in order to get photographs on the second train.

I take a photo of them and walk on. I pass their car on my home, in their excitement they have left a door open. On the dashboard is a list with the first six items crossed off, on the seat a fat timetable book. I glance back, the car has a German number plate. I cannot see the attraction of chasing around the Czech countryside to cross numbers off a list. Obsessively picking mushrooms or spotting wildflowers on the other hand make absolute sense.

Squirrels

If you visit Cesky Krumlov Castle grounds you might see this little fellow or some of his family. As you can see from photo he has the ear tufts of a red squirrel, which is what he is - a black mutant of the red squirrel (the American black squirrel is a mutant of the grey squirrel).

This one ran up a tree in the walk beside the castle gardens and chattered and clattered at me - very angry that I had disturbed his foraging in the flower beds. I first saw a Czech black squirrel (there are lots of them) in the park that covers the slopes of Petrin Hill in Prague. The black squirrels there were far more cautious than the Krumlov ones and certainly wouldn't have entered into the exchange this one did.

I have a soft spot for squirrels, even though the grey ones in England are little better than rats with tails. When I was a small child (under three) I lived in a flat in the mill house near to a large pond and we often had squirrels come to the bird-table in our garden. I can remember the thrill I felt when my mum pointed them out to me. There were no black squirrels, though, but there was something better than that - a white one, an albino squirrel. It was a beauty.

Then we moved to the local small town. I was very sorry to leave behind the squirrels and the swans that I fed every morning. My mother tried to console me. On my third birthday I was standing at the window of my new bedroom, when I saw them - three or four squirrels playing in the garden. I called for my mother, who told me that the squirrels had come to wish me happy birthday. I was delighted, although sad that the white squirrel hadn't come. The squirrels did not come again.

A Run-in with the Czech Police

A few days ago I got pulled over for speeding. I have no idea whether I was or not, I was in the middle of a stream of cars all going at the same speed and I was concentrating on what was happening around me. However of all those cars I was pulled over.

Having paid my 1000 crowns fixed fine, I waited in the car for a receipt with my sisters. We watched as the Police pulled over another car - again from the middle of a queue of vehicles. My sister, fresh from England, was puzzled - why that car and not the car in front which was presumably setting the speed and moreover had only one working headlamp, why had they pulled me over and not one of the others? I pointed out that both mine and the second car were nice expensive looking new cars, that 1000 crowns was a significant chunk out of many Czechs' monthly wage and so the Police appeared to be targeting drivers they thought would be able to pay the on-the-spot fine.

"That's not fair!" my sister said. "Oh, I don't know," I said. Cars on Czech roads, I explained, tended to divide into two types - newish ones owned by people who had flourished in the world of capitalism, and the old bangers owned by everyone else. These old cars have their bumpers held on with bits of wire, bonnets that are a different colour from the roof, windscreen wipers that fall off at the first sign of rain and, if you are unlucky to drive behind them, smoke-belching exhausts whenever they change gear. If the Czech police were to apply the law evenly, undoubtedly a large chunk of the population would be without transport and the economy would grind to a halt. My sister was unimpressed by this argument for social justice - "I still think it's unfair," she said.

More Czech flowers

Given the positive response to my last post, here are simply more photographs of lovely Czech flowers, which I have taken on my various walks over the last few weeks. The first (above) was found near the Schwarzenberg Canal in the Sumava mountains - it's an Alpine Snow bell.


And this one is another flower from the Nature Reserve - I am afraid I don't have the name, but it was to be found in the woodland areas


along with Solomon's seal.



The woods around Divci Kamen castle were carpeted by masses of stitchwort, much as the woods in England are carpeted by bluebells.


All along the road from our village to the station the ditches are full of the jewel-like flowers of the common comfrey. I have been known to allow an extra 10 minutes for the walk to the train, so that I can be distracted on my way there.

For more Czech flowers visit my August flowers post

May Flowers on Vysenske Kopce

I had been meaning to visit the Vysenske (Vyšenské) Kopce Nature Reserve, to be found just to the north of Cesky Krumlov below the Klet Mountain for several years. I had even bought a book about it in the Information Centre. But it wasn't until yesterday that I actually made it. And how I kicked myself about missing out on this lovely oasis for all those months.


I took the little train to Cesky Krumlov, then I walked up the road that leads to Vysny, and at the crossroads I followed the signs to the Headquarters of the Blansky Les Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, outside of which was a large board about the reserve and the signposted walk that takes you through it. The couple of hours that followed were ones of sheer delight. The sun shone, the views were fantastic and the may flowers were out in profusion.


The Nature Reserve encloses a number of very different habitats - conditioned partly by the fact that it sits on a change in the geology and so has plants suited to limestone, granite, and loam in a relatively small area. The walk takes you through all these areas and has information boards at key points to help you identify what you are seeing. For the wildflower lover, such as yours truly, there is even an area at the beginning with the flowers in a bed labelled to show you what to look for.


So what flowers did I find? Well too many to detail here - the anemone at the top of this post is rare in the Czech Republic and is not seen in the UK and yet in the reserve you can see crowds of them waving their white heads on tall stems in the grassland and at the wood's edge. The spring pea also is not to be found in England and has as you can see the most vibrant colours. There were bushes covered with blossom - bird cherry, wild privet, hawthorn and the wild berberis (shown above) - and which so hummed and vibrated with bees collecting nectar that they sounded like small electric substations. There was so much more to see and hear.

I shall return to Vysenske Kopce in the summer and blog again about the summer flowers. Suffice it to say that if you visit Cesky Krumlov, do make the trip here and enjoy this area's natural treasures as well as its historical ones.

For more Czech flowers in May visit my next post

And for August flowers

Sunset at Lake Lipno

This evening I dragged my sisters away from supper to chase the sunset at Lake Lipno. Lipno sunsets are one of my great pleasures in the Czech Republic – they are always in some way different but have yet to disappoint.

There are two spots where I watch the sunset and I took my sisters to enjoy the view from both. The first is near the ferry dock at Horni Plana, which is where this photo was taken. The second is from the headland near Cerna v Posumavi where you can view of the lake in both directions – there are information boards which tell you about the views.

The lake at first burned with the setting sun's rays, then turned a darker orange and red, then to steel and finally a deep slate grey. A silence fell on the water. The shadows lengthened and deepened until all became dark, the fishermen packed up their rods, and we returned to the car and went home. The light show was over.

Some Czech animals and a present.

The other evening my sisters and I were barbequing some sausages over an open fire in the warm May evening air, when we realised we were being scrutinised. From the dandelions in the orchard a small farm cat was watching us and the sausages. The little cat was a lovely combination of white, ginger and black with only its head to be seen above the leaves. My sister made the usual cat attraction noises but nothing happened. We therefore ignored it, and slowly it came nearer drawn by the smell. Eventually its confidence raised it was rubbing its head against the table legs and even tried to jump up on my lap. My Czech friend arrived and being a cat owner and lover was soon making a fuss of the little one, including feeding it some leftover sausage pieces, which were pounced on and devoured – better than the cat's usual fare to to be sure.

In the morning at breakfast we discovered there was a present lying for us on the patio – a slow worm neatly bitten in two. The orchard is full of wildlife, a reason for the presence of a hunting cat in the first place. The ground is pockmarked with the holes of voles and mice, and the grass is also the haunt of their hunters – cats, grass snakes and adders. The orchard backs on to farmland and a wooded hillside and as I have said in a previous post it is visited by deer, here to scrump the fruit. Another animal in these parts is the beech marten which I have yet to see alive – I have seen several as roadkill – and which I look forward to meeting, although I am told they are a menace as they will chew through cables. The slow worm is another hunter in the grass and hibernates in the wood piles and heaps of grass cuttings. But this one thanks to our furry friend will hunt no more.

Czech Folk Dance

The sisters and I decided to go to Ceske Budejovice yesterday. The main purpose of the visit was to look for presents for my nieces, brother-in-law and parents, and as I have said in a previous post I prefer Ceske Budejovice for shopping to its more touristy neighbour Cesky Krumlov. Another purpose was to share with my sisters some of the architectural discoveries I have made in Budejovice. This is a town that bears exploration, it can offer everything from medieval to art deco and nearly everything in between - more perhaps of that in another blog.


Towards the end of our visit I took my guests to the Church of the Sacrifice of Our Lady. Outside on the square all was activity - market stalls were being erected, people scurried around with boxes of craft goods for sale. In front of the church a large stage was in the process of rising, whilst in front of it men were setting up trestle tables and benches. Interested to see what was going on, we sat down at a table of the pizzeria on the Square and watched, whilst very slowly eating our lunch and drinking several drinks. After a short while the square started to fill with children dressed in traditional dress, doting mothers taking snapshots and dance teachers also in costume. It was becoming apparent that we had stumbled into a folk dance festival.


More and more dancers arrived. Some were adult teams, and as would be the case with any British morris side they set about buying beers from the Budwar tent. There were men in black, with black boots and ornately worked leather belts and older women in their thick gathered skirts. Musicians arrived with a range of traditional instruments, some beautifully carved. Eventually after much faffing around with the sound system and the children becoming bored and disappearing off, the dance teachers gathered their teams and processed in to the square. A master of ceremonies announced the first troupe from his clipboard - a group of small children sidled on to the stage - and the festival began in earnest.

I was interested to see the different dance forms - most of which seemed pretty tame to me after my interest in the pagan roots of English morris (for more on this do visit the Independent's excellent article on the subject ) But equally this was not the rather embarrassing folkdance that I learnt at school - the guy with the Mohican haircut showed no self consciousness - there was a degree of national pride in it. There seemed to be several influences at play in the dance and music. One I assumed to be a more lyrical Czech one, and another more in the German Austrian oompah style, (it even had calf slapping.) But then what was this? Here was something I recognised - a hobby horse was working its way through the crowds. This was part of the English tradition or is it that Celtic tradition that both the Czechs and Brits lay claim to?

We spent most of the afternoon watching the dance and browsing the craft stalls for unusual presents. We seemed to be the only foreigners there - this festival was for the locals and not sited where tourists would find it. The benches were full of beer-drinking Czechs clapping enthusiastically, children ran around in the sunshine and proud grandparents beamed.