IkoStar

It was the heatwave of 2006 - not the 2003 one which killed about 35,000 people in Europe, but the one which… well, I don’t know how many people it killed but Greece was on fire, Australia was on fire and England was dissolving, congealing, melting and running down the gutters. It was hot.

So I got on a plane, and went to Prague.

And Prague was even hotter than England. Holy fuck. Tourists were everywhere, too blinded and disorientated to seek shade, wandering instead in aimless circles until they fell over and died. I kept my wits about me… first seeking shade, and then a high place where there would at least be some sort of breeze - up the tower of St Nicholas’s Cathedral (which was probably named after me). At the bottom of the tower is a roof-garden which is kindof designed like a giant solar oven, and an utter death trap.


if you click on it you get a massive one

Here it is on Paul Neave’s flashearth thing (which is cool) if you think I’m making it up or hallucinating etc. If you could zoom in a bit closer you’d see that it’s filled with the corpses of birds, cats and old people who have strayed there by mistake etc.

Anyway, it was at this point that I noticed that loads of the religious encrustments in Prague don’t have crosses like normal churches but have instead the eye in the pyramid thing that’s on American money.

See - this one’s on the top of St Nick’s Cathedral (which is the vague equiv of St Paul’s in London)… and inside there’s this massive baroque/manga statue of St Nick himself who’s got a great big Gandalf staff with one on as well.

There are others dotted about the place….

This isn’t actually the one I meant, but you get the idea.

So obviously the only thing left for any reasonable person to do was to get as drunk as possible. So I did.

Apparently 20% of weekend crime in Prague is committed by drunk English people… but I alas am not possessed of a suitably criminal disposition so my participation in the week-endly crime-wave was limited to filling the wee hours with song… this one in fact:

Under the arches under Kafka’s Castle… “on and on and on…”, only the bit that does go “on and on and on…” is made up of notes too high for me to hit, which must have been frustrating for everyone listening because that’s like, the best bit.

Everything calmed down after that. The heatwave passed. I returned to England. Older. Wiser.