It's Sunday and very late night so close your eyes.

The blessed Dudley with the marvellously smoky-voiced Marian Montgomery. So close them.

Late Night Final

Well, it was a match that gradually improved as it went along until it finally attained mediocrity. By the end I didn't care who won providing the Netherlands lost. Spain tried and failed to play much football, the Dutch generally tried and succeeded at assault. Why Mark Van Bommel plays football rather than kick boxing is a mystery to me, as is the question why he stayed on the pitch in this game and in every other game he has played in the World Cup.

Of course the Dutch should have had a corner just before Spain broke away and scored so the general tenor of dissatisfaction was fully maintained. Howard Webb has given out twenty-eight yellow cards and made the best conspicuous mistake of the knock-out stages. England's reputation for competence was thereby upheld. In fact, to tell the truth, I was inwardly chanting, 'It's just like watching England' in the middle of the first half. See, we could have been there.

In my special capacity as God of the Alternative Universe, I have awarded the cup to Uruguay with Spain and Germany equal second. I have relegated the Netherlands to another planet altogether. There they are doomed to play England every Saturday for the next two years

Here endeth today's lesson. Now for a stiff drink for the fortieth. Other reflections tomorrow.

Intercession on a fortieth anniversary

Since it is our fortieth anniversary, here are forty lines...

Intercession

Creatures of the excited imagination,
Lovers dream themselves into being,
Arriving at places they themselves invented,
Ready for whatever consummation
Involvement demands of them. Self-centred,
Selfless, they are the great unseeing,
So they move from desire to act,
Action being the desired fact.

Under the skin their hearts beat on
Precisely as before but somehow frailer.
Cramped inside a ribcage all too tight,
Heavy and buoyant at once, undone,
Unbalanced, drawn deeply to the night,
Rocked in the arms of hope and failure,
Calling each other’s names as if calling
Home from a height, on the point of falling.

Give them the years. Give them each other. Let
Everything be done for their delight.
Offer them gifts of chocolate and praise.
Regard them as something peculiarly apposite.
Get real for them. Admire their swelling days.
Extend below them a proper safety net.

Stay them and save them. Let them not be absolute
Zero when temperatures fall. Let them remain warm
In the Ice Age of the world. When fires
Roast the planet let them preserve their form.
Though branches are lopped let them nibble at the root,
Existing not entirely on their desires,
Sustaining life however the body tires.

In the calendar and in their chromosomes,
Nest them down with children to note their aging.
Tethered to their lives like sheep or goats,
Employed about survival, let them run
Rings around fortune as it goes on its way raging.
Turn from them terror and tragedy, hot moon, cold sun,
Wild gales that break the glass in broken homes,
Ill winds that blow from plague lands or from wars.
Nurture them. Let them avoid whatever the world promotes.
Ease them through mortality with its list of chores.
Dare love to sustain them. Guide them to love’s shores.

A description and an intercession.

Baroque: bling and blinger

Yesterday a walk over the Charles Bridge into the Mala Strana, about which I had read years before in Jan Neruda's Prague Tales, though that was back in the days when it was published by Quartet (for whom, as well as for Corvina, I translated Dezső Kosztolányi's Anna Édes (that's my cover drawing on the front, and the whole, or much of it is readable online at Google, including the introduction).

It feels like a very long, very hot walk across the bridge in the blazing sun of 10:00 am Prague and as we are walking up the Mostecka or Bridge Street, there is a cafe in the arcade selling iced coffee. Because C's knee hurts - she had twisted it on the second day here probably because of the undulating, unpredictable road surfaces - we sit down. The other arcade tables are taken mostly by young people in their twenties or so, Czechs, one of them particularly loud. There are as many girls as men, and the girls wear bling, quite a lot of it. They are sexy young things in the full flower of their sexiness. One beautiful dark haired girl sits separately, a little sulkily, at the table next to ours with a handsome young man. Her gold chain hangs almost down to bottom of ribcage level. Since no-one comes out I go in and order the coffees, which are served with a smile. A red Ferrari is attempting what looks like a complex maneouvre in the street, possibly an incompetent three-point turn. In the end it parks in a bay next to another expensive car. We drink the coffees. The conversation among the young goes on. One blonde, looking rather like Paris Hilton, is wearing more bling. Cheap tartiness, I think. Central Europe's own inimitable vulgarity. Nouveaux and nouvelles riches.

Yes, but how rich? As we finish and rise we see a whole line of Porsches and Ferraris and BMWs parked next to them. Nouveaux and nouvelles ultra-riches? Something about the look of the porn-rich, I think, and then it strikes me that it is probably precisely that. The bling isn't cheap. It's proper gold. And those cheap looking dresses are probably very expensive cheap-looking dresses. The gloss of the girls is porn gloss, the hearty self-confident laughter of the men is Let's give the suckers what they want, the full bling laughter.

*



Right across the street is the grand church of St Nicholas, Chrám Sv. Mikuláše na Malé Stranê, which is, as the pamphlet guide has it, 'one of the most sought after Prague churches'. Well, we have sought it and found it. Outside it is just grand, but inside, to quote the pamphlet again, the grandeur is emphasised 'with the aid of illusive frescos and sophisticated games played by light and its shadows', in language so delicately lovely I wouldn't dare invent it.

The details are in the link so I won't rehash. The word plasticity occurs in the pamphlet, appropriately enough. It is like being inside God's body, the curved walls everywhere are resilient and elastic: they bulge and flex like a series of muscles. The ceiling fresco in the nave vault is a fine piece of illusionistic painting - the terms quadratura and quadri riportato fly back to me from over the years of teaching A Level History of Art and Architecture. Plenty of quadratura, no sign of quadri riportato.

No shortage of saints though - there is St Ignatius Loyola mercifully spearing a heretic with a double lightning forked prong. A nearby archbishop has already beheaded and speared another hapless recalcitrant. Bodies wreathe and writhe. A more benign set of allegorical virtues supports the dome over the crossing. This is the church on its back foot being militant against the Protestant hordes. And one mustn't forget the bling of course, the gilding that is as immaculate as the conception, the gold that is the glory of God on earth. All this inside that pulsing, heaving body declaring its allegiance to the most muscular, most theatrical and, to be frank, most cinematic of Gods. Any moment now Charlton Heston will burst through the altar dragging Cecil B De Mille behind him, with girls in expensive bling, a clutch of Mary Magdalens, repentantly swaying alongside.

The church transcends this somehow. I do not say it transcends this benignly. The cardinals are waiting outside in their Porsches and Ferraris, but there is a real muscle-bound God inside. Unlike Elvis, he hasn't yet left the building.

Uruguay v. Germany

Wasn't this the most wonderful game! The 'sophisticated' view is that no one cares who comes third and fourth. Second is nowhere so why bother.

Both these teams bothered, the Germans because they are young, the Uruguayans because they are a country the size of Wales and were not expected to come anywhere close. And what gorgeous, skillful attacking play from both teams, from start to finish. Both teams bothered and both were excellent.

I am sorry Uruguay lost in the end. The best player throughout the tournament has been Diego Forlan who never made it at Manchester United when he was younger though the fans loved him. His goal today, and that very last free kick were things of beauty, but his performances generally, running the high midfield rather than as centre-forward were constantly masterful.

We watched it on German television because Czech television isn't free. The BBC online commentary was properly enthusiastic. I glance at The Guardian minute-by-minute. Now those are sophisticated people, you understand. Always superior to the game. 'Very decent' is the best Scott Murray can manage at half time. It's only a bunch of working-class oiks out there, you see. Not really ejjucated. Inarticulate yobs, really. Amazing they can run and think at the same time.

The Guardian sports pages - the smart ejjucated man's view. Sport as litterachewer. Nothing good enough for those kids.

Don Giovanni on a shoestring

Mozart's Don Giovanni was first performed in Prague in 1787, so why not see it in Prague in 2010 in the Black Light Marionette Theatre version just a few doors down from the Black Theatre that is doing Aspects of Alice? It is just that we had stumbled across the marionette theatre first. Prague is expensive. Perhaps we just can't afford real people.

There is something about puppets that hovers between the magical, the trapped and the sinister. It is Louis Simpson's lines from My Father in the Night Commanding No that come to mind first:

.......They will not change
There, on the stage of terror and of love.

The actors in that playhouse always sit
In fixed positions—father, mother, child
With painted eyes.
How sad it is to be a little puppet!...

The adult Simpson is remembering his childhood, where his mother and father are stuck in time; fellow puppets with terrifying painted eyes.

And there is Pinocchio, of course, the wooden boy who wants to be a real boy. There was a long floppy rag doll at home that was referred to as Pinocchio, and my mother said it was me. When my father died this year I inherited it.

And then Arthur Miller's The Crucible, where the poppet with the bodkin stuck in it is used as evidence of black magic in the witch hunt.

About twenty years ago in Budapest we took the children to the National Puppet Theatre to see a puppet version of The Tempest in which only Prospero was a full sized human being, played by the great character actor Dezső Garas.

Further back still, when I myself was a young child, my parents took me to the same theatre, and I have some memory of watching an adult puppet version of The Good Soldier Svejk.

Never mind sadistic Mr Punch, the policeman and the hangman. And diabolical Dr Coppelius in Coppelia.

Fragments.

*

But it is not all sinister. The primitive world of the puppeteer has always seemed more purely theatrical to me than the legitimate theatre where the apparatus of realism invites you to forget the stage. In puppet theatre the stage is firmly the stage, the actors firmly set in the world of that stage. Something in me prefers circus, magic show, masque and masks - the full acknowledgement of artifice - to the endless sitting rooms with one side removed. I suspect that's part of the poetry kit one is provided with at an early stage of childhood.

For five or six years I was actually chair of the board of Norwich Puppet Theatre under the artistic directorship of the brilliant Luis Boy. Luis improvised, changed the show from performance to performance and was never content with one format alone. It was a surreal form of childsplay to him and the shows were small works of art. Luis was a sculptor at heart, a proper inventor.

*

So Don Giovanni was tempting. An attic theatre up several flights of winding stairs, ten or so steeply tiered rows. The stage set shows the front of a grand house with a balcony and windows above, and a vaulted arch below with cut-out trees and, under it all, an orchestra of ten players to perform the overture. As the violinist's elbow saws at the strings it knocks audibly against the front of the cellist behind him. The trumpeters raise their trumpets to their lips. The drummer beats at the kettle drum. All this is more or less in time with the music.

Donna Anna's silhouette appears at the window. Giovanni and Leporello plot in the foreground. They wave their arms and scuttle here and there before Leporello gets Giovanni in and he has his way with her, only to be discovered by Il Commandatore, whom he then kills in the duel.

Meanwhile the recorded singers sing and the wooden orchestra play without moving ('...how sad it is to be a little puppet..'). Confusions and seductions and betrayals, wonderful solos and arias. Batti, batti, o bel Masetto! sings Zerlina and my mind immediately switches to Winthrop Mackworth Praed's lines from his gorgeous 'Goodnight to the Season', one of the great soufflés of light verse. This verse:

Good night to the Season! - the rages
Led off by the chiefs of the throng,
The Lady Matilda's new pages,
The Lady Eliza's new song;
Miss Fennel's macaw, which at Boodle's
Was held to have something to say;
Mrs Splenetic's musical poodles,
Which bark 'Batti Batti' all day;
The pony Sir Araby sported,
As hot and as black as a coal,
And the Lion his mother imported,
In bearskins and grease, from the role.

But events gallop to the finish. The statue of the Commandatore - a human puppeteer in a grim silvery mask - is invited to supper and duly appears dragging the unrepentant Don down into the earth with him. A good thundering ending.

The production had charm and humour but was not a work of genius. In fact, there were patches of tedium in it because, after all (you might say) they were only puppets. But invention starts there and this went only some of the way.

*

Outside there are more people in the narrow street than you could shake a million sticks at. A hot close evening. A living statue still stands there, a sweet girl in a faintly grotesque seventeenth century nun's costume, every inch of it, and her, in white. We saw her earlier hurrying to this spot stopping briefly to chat to a fully bronze cardinal. We are tourists so we deserve what we pay for and all we get. The visitor sweeps up the silver glitter. The trick is to remain when the glitter is gone.

The haunting thing about Pinocchio, I suspect, is that we all know what it is to be wooden and long for life as though life were somewhere other than the stage-set we wander over, this whole miraculous caboodle which for now we can call Prague, that is made up of painted flats, marionette rods and strings, and people everywhere gaping, gawping, grinning and breathing the same air as I am, writing this. Stage air. Stage food. Stage drunks. Living on a shoestring and not completely in charge of anything.

All You Can Eat in Prague

Town Hall Astronomical Clock


Some of the afternoon sleeping. The sheer beauty and exuberance is - and I feel like a worn-out aesthete in the Des Esseintes (that's not Des as in Desmond) mode saying this - a little exhausting. The fact we had to rise at 3.30 in the morning at Stansted has something to do with it too.

But early evening we are out again and soon enough we are looking to eat. Walking out of the Old Square with its famous town hall clock and its famous hordes photographing each other under arches, in front of gateways, pointing to landmarks, grinning all the while because, I suppose, they must be happy (and here I sound like a hypocritical misanthrope, because I too am happy), not to mention the famous heaving, yelling cafes and restaurants, we find ourselves in a less rabidly beautiful street, almost a dull street, and there's a quiet restaurant with just two tables outside.

The menu looks good. If you're vegetarian and don't want to know the result, look away now.

There's duck: one roast leg dish and one duck breast dish in a sauce flavoured with slivovic, but also six other fascinating sounding main courses including the various fleshly viands - incidentally I use the term viands to spare your feelings - in richly dense settings, not to mention tempting hors'doeuvres and soups of potentially the highest order.

What it also says is (I translate loosely out of the restaurant's own loose English translation): Take the special menu and try a taster of everything, and come back for seconds or thirds, frankly we don't care. Eat all you can. We practically dare you to. Drinks extra, sweets extra. Cost roughly £20 the lot, bar the extras. That's £20 give or take a bit (well, add a bit, actually.)

Tasters, sounds possible - it must mean a mouthful each - and gorgeous. We are, after all, hungry. We do think hard about it, but this is a celebration so let's gamble.

The first course is an amalgam of four starters, the whole adding up to an all-but-full meal. Very nice. I will not go into Krudyesque detail here, but imagine duck pâté, pork pâté, several slivers of tongue together with a sauce of horse-radish and cranberry, as well as some warm red onion marmalade. That is your starter.

The second course is a choice of two soups. C chooses potato soup, I choose the venison. It's not a vast bowl of soup, but it is a perfectly reasonable bowl, about the size of a cereal bowl. I am not Falstaff nor was meant to be, so I am now full.

But there are eight courses of main dishes to follow, and the establishment's idea of a taster does not seem to correspond with ours. An American couple, from New York I'd guess from his accent not from hers because she hardly does any speaking and when she speaks it's a a whisper, has just been served knee of pork. That's a pig's knee to you. True, they are having it as the single main course, but it's so huge it's practically the pig. The pig's knees! I reckon it's a large boar.

The first duck arrives. Roasted, delicious. Red cabbage, white cabbage either side like a royal escort. I'd say it was about two-thirds of a normal full meal - a full meal nouvelle cuisine style. Still, granted a little curiosity, it is just about manageable. I just about manage, but in managing I realise I am not cut out for this. C who is as slim now as she was when I met her, indeed slimmer and lither still, seems more engaged in this act than I am.

Second duck. Oh, that slivovic sauce! It's worth busting a gut for, and frankly it is on the point of busting. Some people take years to become obese. Why waste all that time? Why not achieve it in a single night? Six courses still to go!

I summon all my manly courage and chicken out. I tell the waiter not to bring the next five courses. In about twenty minutes he might bring the sixth, which is a sweet. The waiter looks at me patiently but, I imagine, with an inner contempt. You a girl or something? I imagine the chef working his way up to the full John Cleese, all sweat and cleavers, screaming: What's wrong with my food!? What's wrong with them!? Thirty years in this kitchen, and now this!

C does the extraordinary thing. She takes one more main course, the trout. I watch her eat the fish but without touching the potatoes, for assuredly there are potatoes and other side dishes. I can hardly bear to look.

Eventually it comes to an end. We order two espressos, which are properly dense, almost Turkish style. A spoonful of the necessary sugar just about manages to penetrate it.

The maître d' is a gentlemanly looking gentleman with a kind silver beard. He looks discreet. We assure him the food was very good, just a little too much. I put my hand on his sleeve as I say this. I don't want him to worry. I ask him if anyone has ever gone the entire mixed hors d'oeuvre, soup and eight main courses. He frowns in a truly beautiful way. He remembers one man, some weeks ago, who not only managed the lot but came back for two more duck courses. He Ate All He Could.

I feel we have almost forged a friendship and, as a last throw, ask him if he himself could manage the lot. He gives a sad, understanding smile and says, no. We are friends for life now. He is an honorary good uncle.

I consider Szindbad, as in the post below. This is pure Szindbad territory. But Szindbad is radiantly handsome, on the slender side of normal, and remains irresistible to women. He can work his way through not ten but twenty courses, each bigger than any of these. On the other hand he is over three-hundred years old and - occasionally - dead. Such meals might be possible under those circumstances.

And I think of that Hungarian short story about a plum-dumpling eating contest where the winner eats forty then drops dead.

It is not the way I want to go. Some say the world will end in fire, writes Robert Frost, Some say in ice.

It will not end in pig's knee, not if I can help it.