That first evening in Prague we are in a restaurant 10 minutes walk away through some dark back streets – Budvarska. Leafing through the menu I started to come to terms with the extent to which the eating of meat would come to dominate our eating time over the course of the next few hours. The only concession to the vegetarian amongst us was a dish of deep fried cheese with tartare sauce. There were a couple of fish dishes (but we were a long way from the sea) and otherwise it was all variations of pork, beef or duck with various combinations of white or red sauerkraut and dumplings. All was well with my world and I started with a plate of Old Prague Ham and butter followed by half a buckling with red and white sauerkraut and dumplings washed down with a few pints of very good beer.

We went to bed early with the intention of getting up early to walk the city. I slept peacefully.

In the event out anticipated leaving early was disrupted by the early return of the smiling man with a moustache. He arrived whilst we were still in pyjamas with a mate intent on fixing the boiler. The apartment was so small that we were stuck there in our pyjamas for the forty-five minutes or so they spent banging at the reluctant boiler with hammers and various other noisy implements. They left with more smiles and ‘Good-bye Mister’ and reassurances that all was working.

The apartment was situated in the north of the city a 30 minute walk up to the back of the castle. We set off avoiding avoiding trams and segways bumping into a couple of lost Italians. The streets were quiet at the start but as the buildings got older and the streets more cobbled  you could feel the slow gathering pace of tourists until we turned a corner and they seemed to be everywhere holding up their phones and ipads to take pictures.

On the segways the closer we got to the castle the more of them there were. They travelled in groups. A cheerful Czech leader heading up charges who followed behind in various degrees of nervousness. At the back there were always a couple muttering under their breathe ‘I look a twat I look a twat.’ Another unsuccessful element of the weekend was my failure to crash into one of them.

Having walked through the crowds in the castle and admired the Sturbucks with the best view out of all other Starbucks we came down the hill into the city proper. We carried on walking admiring some vaguely homoerotic statues until we found another bar for lunch. In between It was opposite a grand looking cafe were we had thought about going but it had white table-clothes and we weren’t sure if that was for us. In the event we did the table-clothes in the evening.

The bar for lunch was more wood and waiters anxious to refill my glass of beer. They appeared as if by magic to ask if I wanted another just as I was slurping up the last sip. The sort of behaviour can enamour one to a city.

There was more meat to be had on the menu along with a section headed ‘Meals to Accompany Beer’!!

Some of the dishes on the meat menu are worth repeating:-

– 1/2 roast duck, served with bread dumplings and potato dumplings, white and red sauerkraut

– roast leg of wild boar with rosehip sauce and Carlsbad dumpling

-beef sirloin stuffed with good things you know

– roast leg of young goose , served with apple-flavoured red sauekraut and potato dumplings

– turkey schnitzel coated in cornflakes

– succulent rabbit in garlic and shallot sauce with home made spatzle

There was enough variety to justify a visit each day of the week. I had the rabbit and it went down very well with dark beer they kept serving me.

After lunch we watched a family boating on the river.

Late afternoon on Friday and I started the first of forty-eight hours in Prague.

I had arrived by myself and being a big boy now had managed to get where I needed to go to and find our apartment for the weekend. Having said that it took half an hour of waiting outside for someone to turn up to let me in before I realised that all I had to do was ring the doorbell to be let in by a smiling man with a moustache who spoke little English apart from being able to call me ‘Mister’. Inside the apartment he was putting a small electric boiler back together. He shook his head sadly at it to explain that we would be having no hot water for the weekend before smiling again, handing me some keys and saying ‘Good-bye Mister’ as he eased himself out. I felt like I had lost an old friend.

It took me about 30 seconds to settle into the apartment after which I thought it was time to find myself some Czech beer.

A walk down the hill took me past some blue buildings that looked like they might be part of a university, a glass bookcase in the street, an interesting looking pant shop and a painted cow. There did not appear to much nearby that would do in the selling beer stakes.

Heading back to the apartment I walked past a large grey building the lower floors of which  housed a couple of Chinese restaurants, a shop selling Middle-Eastern food and then at the end of the block what looked like a small bar.

I loitered for a moment before walking in. The front room was definitely a bar. There were a couple of taps for beer and behind that a large glass case with bottles of unlikely looking spirits. There was a man behind the bar wearing a red shirt who looked at me expectantly. I pointed to one of the taps and apologised for being English. He poured me my half litre of beer and I handed over my money and sat myself down at one of the tall curved tables.

The bar ran along one side of the room and there were three of the tall curved tables directly opposite it. There was an opening through to another larger room where there were low tables and benches, coat hooks ran along the wall made up of wood panelling and there were people sat down ready to eat. Every so often one of the men behind the bar wearing a red shirt would pick up a plastic coated menu and take it through.

There were four or five pictures on the wall. All of them black and white photographs of women in various states on undress.

On the other side of the road there was a bright modern office block at the base of which there were two showrooms for Marerati and Ferrari which I had not expected to see in Prague.

If I have a regret for the weekend it is that we did not go back to eat in that bar.

We must still be in an Indian Summer. It has not rained since we came we came back from Ireland more than a month ago and outside the soil is dry and dust like as it would be in mid-summer.

On our last trip to Bantry Market I bought myself some bags of garlic to plant in the garden from West Cork Garlic. Last year I had planted some from a garlic farm on the Isle of wight and amidst the disaster of the the tomatoes and every thing else I tried to grow they came up okay. This afternoon I sorted out last years crop and then set about separating the cloves from the bulbs I had bought from Bantry before grubbing up some lines in the veg patch and planting them out.

We had a very good Shepherd’s Pie for tea listening to Woods and a little bit of Goat.

Walking down Church Street yesterday morning I was grumpy. Part of the grump was brought on by knowing that I did not have enough time and money to allow myself to be diverted into a bar and record shop and would have to concentrate on the matter at hand, which was the buying of a suit. The rest of the grump came from the sheer noise and cacophony that came from the street performers who were situated every hundred yards along the street.

Each of them had their own mini-generator that made a racket on its own and then interwoven through that noise was whatever music the performer or performers were playing be it an electric guitar or a full blown band or a drummer who seemed to be playing just one elongated drum solo which was then meshed in with the noise coming from the performer a hundred yards either side of the one you were stood closest to. Even the man performing tricks with a football seemed to be making too much noise.

All this noise was thrown into to sharp relief later that evening as I walked up Jamaica Street towards The Liverpool Festival of Psychedelia 2014 that was taking place in Camp & Furnace. A quarter of a mile away I could hear the rumble of bass loud enough to rattle windows and a guitar solo that started as it meant to go on – forever.

I stop off in The Mad Hatter’s Brewery for a fortifying pint and resolved, one day, to make a proper evening of it in there. Having finished that pint I ventured the final few hundred yards to the festival and into Greenland Street.

Walking into the venue I could feel the floor shudder under my feet with the noise. I bought myself a drink and the whole transaction was conducted in sign language. There was no point trying to say anything. Anything that could be said was swallowed up in the maelstrom of pure noise that was coning from the stage. I moved closer to see what was going on.

In Spinal Tap they doctor the lettering on the amplifiers so the volume knob goes up to 11. Saturday night in Camp & Furnace and they had been a bit more methodical about it. Someone had obviously taken the amplifiers apart and had a go with their insides with a spanner and screwdriver and rewired them so the volume had nowhere else to go but be a little a bit louder and then loud some more when a guitar was hit with sufficient force. So far as I could tell the floor was solid concrete but every so often it would shake as another wall of noise crashed through the room and I could feel the crease in my trousers vibrate.

There were three bands I wanted to see and leading up to them and in-between times I watch a half dozen or so other bands who all seemed intent on seeing how far they could push the “How loud can I go” experiment.

Five years ago I was taken to see a band called God is an Astronaut.  There were three of them on stage with a video behind. Each song started quiet for a minute or two before getting louder and louder and then louder some more. All the while the video behind the band showed pictures of bigger and bigger bombs going off. There were parts of Saturday night that took me back to that gig.

Fortunately there was a bar selling real ale so as I moved from stage to stage watching different bands see how loud they could go I was able to keep myself fuelled with pints of Liverpool Summer Ale until the first of the three bands I wanted to see came on.

Any band that calls itself September Girls is selling itself to me even if they can’t spell Gurls right. When they are five women from Dublin playing spiky guitars and songs that seem to crash into each other then all is alright. Mix into that the added bonus of songs that last for three minutes or less then we almost have the highlight of the evening. John Peel would have liked them.

After that it was Woods.  I have managed to pick up three of their albums over the last couple of years. They are difficult to put into a pigeonhole but they could be heading towards being one of the best American bands. They shook things up on Saturday night by turning the volume down and taking out an acoustic guitar for a while. They were the best band of the night for me.

After Woods the volume went up again and there were a couple more bands to be got through before we got to Goat who came on stage about 1.30am. They played a shamanistic blend of funk, hi-life, Jimi Hendrix guitar which every so often had the potential to shift into some sort Grateful Dead like gear into the cosmos and all the time wearing masks. The volume went up and at times it felt as if my ears had shredded but then they went a little bit louder and I could still hear so all was okay. It all got very hot and sweaty and I found myself wondering how many other lawyers there were down the front jerking around to to the music. I should really be doing something else with my life.

After that there was a happy 45 minutes spent trying to find a taxi home and all the time marvelling over the people in Liverpool at 3.00 in the morning.

Tea before I went out was fish’n’chips. They were very good.