Just consider some of the events that happened during previous Augusts, like the death of Princess Diana in Paris in 1997 - if
you’re in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, it’s worth going to see the entrance to the Pont d’Alma underpass. There’s a memorial in place to the flame of liberty, even though most people think it commemorates Diana; it doesn’t. you can’t go and explore the Ritz Hotel because it’s in the middle of a big renovation programme.
Something else that happened one August was the outbreak of serious trouble in Derry in Northern Ireland, in 1969 which saw the arrival of British troops to try and quell the unrest, the precursor of
decades of the "troubles". As always in these situations, the politicians promised it was temporary (a bit like the imposition of income tax over 200 years ago), but the arrival of the troops was anything but temporary and their coming did little except make matters a whole lot worse. It took nearly 30 more
years for the 1998 peace agreement to be concluded and even today, matters are far from settled.
On a lighter note, the Woodstock Festival took place in the US during August, 1969, and this too was a groundbreaker, but in a much more endearing way - peace loving joint smoking hippies, free love and all that.
But what really strikes a personal chord is the 45th anniversary today of the arrival of Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia, in August, 1968. I happened to have been in Prague for a week that month, leaving just a day or two before the invasion. I was working for a business magazine in Dublin and the unlikely idea had come up of doing a supplement on trade between Ireland and Czechoslovakia. My job was to go to Prague, organise all the editorial and bring back all the material for the State advertising that was to go into the supplement. The work part of the trip was easy enough and
fortunately, I found that for most of the week I was there, I could be a plain oldfashioned tourist.
All the sights of this wonderful city were waiting to be explored, the Charles Bridge over the River Vltava, Hradcany Castle on the heights above the city and next to it, St Vitus Cathedral. Then not
too far away from the cathedral, the church with the Child of Prague statue. At one time, practically every Catholic home in Ireland had a miniature replica of this statue, but these days, that notion has disappeared into the mists of time. Prague has such an unbelievable abundance of fine buildings and sights; to name a few more, the astronomical clock in the Old Town, the Mozart museum in the
Bertramka, the Rudolfinum concert hall, home of the national symphony orchestra.
Typically me, I nearly managed to miss my flight there, from Heathrow, but despite being last to board the plane, I settled down, only to find that since the plane was a Soviet built jet, all the signs in
the passenger cabin were in Russian. The announcements from the cockpit were in Czech, so I was little the wiser as to what was going on. But eventually, the plane touched down at Prague’s main airport, now renamed in honour of former president Vaclav Havel. I took a taxi into the town centre and before long, the taxi driver confided that he had once been a university professor whose political views didn’t coincide with those of the Communist regime. Subsequently I met up with a journalist working on the economic newspaper, still going today, Hospodárské Noviny. He told me that during the 1950s, which was after all, only the previous decade, the government had a unique way of dealing with journalists who didn’t toe the party line - they were sent to work down the coal mines. A spell underground soon softened their cough. Let's hope the present Coalition government in London doesn't hear about this little ruse when it thinks of how it’s going to deal with Guardian journalists!Czechs, I soon found, have a very sardonic view of life, which I found most appealing; they are
great at seeing behind facades.
The place I stayed in was amazing, a b and b place on Narodni, which is the main street in the centre of Prague. The woman who ran the place spoke not a word of English and my knowledge of Czech was minimal to say the least, but we got on fine, and once she had organised breakfast early morning, I was free to wander round the city. I met many strange characters, including a guy who was a nightclub artist after dark, but who during daylight hours, would stand at a particular street corner juggling a whole series of balls, whispering to anyone who was interested that he would change money for a very good rate. I’d taken US dollars with me and the exchange rate was such that day-to-day expenses in Prague were practically nothing.
This was all long before Prague got a very efficient Metro system, but even then, the trams were excellent for getting around. However, one really irritating feature of that trip was the length of
time it took to get service in a restaurant. In one particular restaurant, one night, dinner took a full two hours for a very modest meal, simply because the waiters took so long to deliver the courses. The banks were the same - vast slow moving queues and huge amounts of paperwork, typical of an old style Communist state. These days of course, now that the Czech Republic is a EU member and a
fully paid up member of the European free market, things work a lot more efficiently, but at a price - plenty of corruption.
One place I was in that trip was a jazz club just off Wenceslas Square. They had a radio set there tuned in to one of the long wave stations in France and it was clear from listening to the news bulletins that a huge build-up of Warsaw Pact troops, with some exceptions, like Romania, which had opted out of the invasion, was going on close to the borders of Czechoslovakia. No-one knew how imminent the invasion was; all that was clear was that there was no way that the Soviet Union was going to tolerate the mild reforms that Alexander Dubcek has initiated only the previous April.
I was booked to travel back to Dublin a few days before it all happened, so I took the Pan Am flight from Prague to Brussels, a flight which went through a tremendous storm en route. The last night I was in Prague I had gone to the National Theatre, just across the street from where I was staying, to see a performance of the Janacek opera, The Cunning Little Vixen. The curtain came down on a memorable performance, since all in the cast were obviously hyped up over the dramatic situation. Then the invasion happened. You’ll be interested to know that the supplement, while postponed, did
eventually appear. The following year, I managed to get a visa to go back to a very sullen city with Warsaw Pact troops everywhere; an uneasy calm reigned. But after that one return visit, it became impossible to get a visa.
But eventually, as always, history changes and within 20 years, Communism had started to crumble in eastern Europe. The invasion of Czechoslovakia 45 years ago was really the beginning of the end of the USSR and of its Communist satellite states in eastern Europe. An amazing experience, never to be forgotten!
Everything goes in waves, even religion. I was struck by that on August 15th. This is the Feast of the Assumption and years ago in Ireland, it was a big religious holiday, when the seaside towns would be
absolutely packed with trippers. These days of course, I’d be surprised if many younger people even knew about the feast day.
This August is of course living up to its name, with all the dramatic and tragic events in Egypt. The Egyptian Embassy in Dublin is just down the road from where we live and normally, it’s a very sedate place in a very sedate suburban road. But over the past few days, crowds of pro-Morsi protesters have gathered outside and the other afternoon when I drove past, the crowds seemed so angry that if there
hadn’t been lines of police in the front garden of the embassy, the crowd would have been of a mind to burn the place down.
It all reminded me, obliquely, of the time we were having an excellent vinous open air lunch in one of the restaurants close to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. We glanced around at some of our neighbours, only to see the Egyptian actor, Omar Sharif, there, almost beside us, enjoying the same lunchtime pleasures. He made his name in the Dr Zhivago film way back in 1965 and I see that this year, and now in his 81st year, he has been working on his latest film, Rock the Casbah. He lives most of
the time now in Cairo, so I hope that he’s OK there - a great character and what’s more a fantastic contract bridge player!
I’ve also had a good illustration in the past few days, in a very small way, of the differences in
European efficiencies. For a book I’m working on at the moment, I wanted to find out when the first diplomatic missions opened in Dublin after the Irish Free State came into existence, in the early 1920s. I got on to the German embassy and with typical thoroughness, they sent my request through to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. Within a short time, they came back to me with the exact date on which
their mission to Dublin opened, and where, with its exact location.
I tried the same exercise with the French embassy and I’m still waiting; I even got on to the Quai d’Orsay, the headquarters of the French Foreign Ministry, only to be sent a mass of material that was completely irrelevant to my query. All I can say is that no wonder the Germans are top dog in the EU - they really are running the whole show, while the French slip steadily down the scale.
Another amusing tale of French official incompetence came up the other day. A civil servant in the prime minister’s office in the Matignon was keying in some details to an official website of a
new French plan to combat Al-Qaida. What happened? Twitter followers were instead given the directions to a sexy clothing website called Forplay!
So given all this, how much credibility should be given to the predictions for 2025 that President Hollande ordered all the members of his cabinet to make. Le Point magazine managed to get hold of the predictions and of course, the tame French media (no Guardian equivalent among French
national newspapers!) made a meal out of it. Good quality housing for everyone and full employment were just two of the predictions for the year 2025, but such predictions always turn out to be absolutely useless.
In the meantime, consumers in France are putting up with some dramatic rises in the price of fruit and vegetables, thanks to the awful weather last spring. It seems that fruit prices have gone up by 14 per cent, while vegetable prices have soared 17 per cent. Courgettes have gone up in price by 32.6 per
cent, while pears have increased by nearly as much. Only one item of fruit fell in price, cherries, down by 12.42 per cent. And like everywhere else, organic fruit and veg - one of the great luxury items in any shopping basket - are much dearer in France, where consumers can expect to pay about 70 per cent more for organic compared to conventionally grown fruit and veg.
But at least you can now find out where to get the cheapest cup of coffee in Paris. A new
map, available on the Parisdata website, shows 164 cafés in the city and their coffee prices. The cheapest cup turns out to be in the 17th arrondissement, where the Petits Freres des Pauvres (Little Brothers of the Poor) café is selling cups of coffee for 45 cent each.
So at least some good news for travellers in Paris, in the midst of a month that sees dramatic news from around the world, not least in Egypt. But if you think back, how much media coverage the
1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia generated at the time and how little coverage there is in today’s media, August 21st, 2013, of what was after all, a world-shaking event.