Before I get back to blogging about truly ‘spiritual matters’, (please forgive the obvious pun 🙂 ), I thought I’d better explain the current situation regarding the ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks exceeding 20% proof which has been the subject of my two most recent posts. As can be seen in this photograph, the ban was partially lifted on Thursday 27th September, much to the pleasure our nearby whisky bar.
Since Thursday 27th September, the Czech Ministry of Health has allowed the sale of any liquor that can be shown to have been produced before 31st December 2011. As far as liquor produced this year is concerned, retailers must get a certificate of the alcohol’s origin within 60 days. Otherwise these bottles must be destroyed.
The death toll from the current outbreak of methanol poisoning now stands at twenty-seven with more than seventy others being hospitalised. However, there is quite a consensus amongst health professionals, that some earlier deaths may also have been due or partly due to methanol poisoning, prior to the problem being identified at the beginning of September. This is the reason that 31st December 2011 has been chosen as the cut-off point rather than a date sometime into 2012.
Whilst the police have arrested several people, confiscated thousands of litres of contaminated liquor and found supplies of fake labels, they still haven’t located the exact source of the methanol poisoning. In particular, they haven’t identified and arrested those who masterminded this deadly crime. They just seem to have caught a few of the ‘indians’ but none of the ‘chiefs’.
The Czech government is promising that in future, there will be regular checks by Health Inspectors of bottles of liquor on sale in both bars and shops, together with a crackdown on illegal production and illicit sales. Whether these words will be turned into positive actions we wait to see 😉
The photograph on the left is of some of the empty shelves in our local Kaufland supermarket following the implementation of the ban. In the middle of the shelves, is a notice on a yellow piece of paper, giving details of the banning order issued by the Czech Ministry of Health.
Whilst the reasoning behind this draconian measure is understandable, not least because the death toll from drinking spirits contaminated with methanol here in the Czech Republic, has risen to twenty three with nearly fifty others hospitalised, it is inevitably having major economic effects too. One particular casualty, as mentioned in response to a comment on my previous post, is our nearby whisky bar.
Whilst I don’t drink anything stronger than wine, Sybille is quite partial to an occasional single malt. So over the past year or so, a few months after the whisky bar opened, we have paid it a visit from time-to-time. Whilst Sybille has enjoyed her ‘wee dram’, I have quaffed a glass of their white wine. This past week, we have paid it a couple of visits to have a glass or two of wine, as a small way of showing our support for their business, as the ban is currently reducing turnover by 90%!
Last night when we visited, there were several Czechs there drinking either wine or cider, we suspect with similar motives to ours. But there was also a man sitting on his own at a table, who clearly wasn’t Czech, enjoying his glass of red wine and holding onto to the 75cl bottle he had purchased, in order to regularly refill his glass. “Where are you from?” we asked in English. The most surprising reply was, “Saudi Arabia” – he was a junior diplomat at the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Prague on his first overseas assignment!
The corrupting influence of the West or sheer hypocrisy? I’ll leave you to decide!
But it is quite clear what the owners of the Whisky Bar think of the current situation. The photo is of their shop front window.
Earlier this evening, I saw something I never ever expected to see – the shelves of our local Kaufland supermarket being completely cleared of every bottle of alcoholic drink that is more than 20% proof. The reason for this drastic action is to try and prevent further deaths and injuries from rum and vodka, contaminated by poisonous methanol, which have already claimed the lives of nineteen people in the Czech Republic and two more in Poland. It has also put up to thirty others into hospital, several of whom have lost their sight.
Whilst the contaminated liquor that is responsible for these deaths and injuries is bootlegged/illegal in origin, some of it has been sold in bottles bearing a legitimate manufacturer’s name. Initially, the Czech government just banned sales by street vendors and market stalls. But with the increasing number of deaths and with no definite identification of the source of the contaminated spirits, the Czech government today has taken the somewhat drastic step of banning all sales of of liquor with more than 20 percent alcohol.
As someone who never ever drinks anything stronger than port wine, I’m not in anyway going to be affected by this understandable but somewhat drastic decision of the Czech government. But this ban does affect two of the Czech Republic’s most famous products –Becherovka and Slivovice. Keeping the balance between protecting public health and not damaging the country’s economy, is going to be a considerable problem in the coming days and weeks.
At the end of August, I spent a busy but most enjoyable four days in the UK – only my third visit back to my home country in nearly four years since moving to Prague.
The trip started early, in fact very early, on the morning of Monday 27th August. My flight with the Hungarian low-cost airline Wizz Air from Prague to Luton Airport, (officially ‘London Luton Airport’, but as far as I am concerned, ‘Luton Airport’ as it is located adjacent to Luton and not London ), was scheduled to depart at 06.00 CEST that morning. Whilst I am a great believer in using public transport and two night buses would have got me to the airport, I eventually chose the easier option and booked a taxi which was waiting for me outside our apartment block at 04.30. The flight was uneventful and we landed at Luton on time, just before 07.00 BST.
Just over an hour later, having collected my bag, got through passport control remembering to say “Good morning” rather than “Dobrý den”, found the free bus service to take me to Slip End and collected my pre-booked hire car, I was heading up the relatively quiet M1 motorway, bound for Derby. The motorway was quiet, partly due to the relatively early hour, but also because it was the August Bank Holiday Monday (public holiday for all non-Brits reading this) meaning very few trucks were on the move.
The main purpose of my trip was to spend time with each of my two adult children, my son Phillip and my daughter Christa. Phillip has recently moved to a flat right in the centre of Derby, very convenient for the shops but with no free parking facilities nearby. Thus he suggested that I park at a location about ten minutes walk from where he lives, where he met me and helped carry my bag back to the flat he now shares with his friend Sam.
Monday 27th August was a typical British bank/public holiday – it was cold and it rained most of the afternoon and evening 🙁 But I enjoyed seeing Phillip play for his indoor five-a-side football team where they posted a convincing 4 – 1 victory. Afterwards, we enjoyed a fish and chips supper from a nearby takeaway.
Phillip had been able to take the next day off as part of his annual leave and in contrast to the previous day, Tuesday 28th August dawned fine and sunny. We spent a good part the day on a leisurely drive north up through the Derbyshire and South Yorkshire countryside, stopping off for lunch at this typical English village pub in Wortley, located directly opposite the village Church 🙂
We were headed for Leeds where that evening, Oxford United FC were playing Leeds United FC in the second round of the League Cup competition.
Back in 1986, Oxford United famously won the League Cup so, as you can see, Phillip wore his replica retro Oxford shirt dating from that occasion. Unfortunately, it didn’t bring any good fortune this time as the match ended in a 3 – 0 victory for Leeds United.
Despite the result, it was still an enjoyable day out together and allowed Phillip to add Elland Road to the list of football grounds he has been to. We also had a relatively quick return journey to Derby after the match, back down the M1 and the A38.
The next day, after a leisurely breakfast, I set off and drove south, initially to the outskirts of Coventry where I visited two large Tesco supermarkets in search of a small number of things Sybille had asked me to try and purchase whilst in the UK. With one exception, I was successful! I had intended to then spend a few hours exploring the centre of the city where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, but unfortunately it was once more pouring down with rain. So instead, I drove along a relatively newly-constructed road, (which follows the route of what I remember as being a railway line 🙂 ), out of Coventry and on to the village of Braunston, situated on the Warwickshire-Northamptonshire border, where I had booked to stay the night at ‘The Old Workshop‘, a canal-side Bed and Breakfast establishment.
Within an hour of my arrival, the weather decided to improve markedly. I was therefore able to enjoy a walk up the canal towpath alongside the Braunston flight of locks, first crossing this splendid cast iron bridge over the entrance to the adjacent marina.
That evening, I met up with my daughter Christa and my new son-in-law Ian, at the Boat House Pub and Restaurant in Braunston where we enjoyed a meal together. Then the next day, I visited them in their new home in nearby Daventry and met Emmylou and Harriet, Ian’s two children by his previous marriage.
The weather was kind enough to allow us all to spend the afternoon on a walk through Daventry Country Park which is based around one of the two reservoirs that feed the summit level of the Grand Union Canal. Emmylou rode her bicycle and found her own island at the edge of the reservoir.
All too soon it was time to leave and head back down the M1 to Luton, return the hire car, get the bus to the airport and catch my Wizz Air flight back to Prague. In typical low-cost airline fashion, my flight departure was delayed but, on this occasion, only by thirty minutes. I had wondered whether I was wise to fly with Wizz Air again following my experience just over two years previously when the equivalent flight was delayed by five and a half hours 🙁
The delay, together with gaining an hour by flying eastwards, meant it was after midnight before we touched down in Prague. However, another taxi ride eventually got me safely back to the Chaplaincy Flat by 01.00 on Friday 31st August.
One of the privileges of being a Christian Minister is being part of what sociologists call people’s ‘major life events’ when I conduct baptisms, weddings or funerals. And because of the somewhat unusual nature of the Prague Anglican congregation, I have conducted relatively few of each of these over the past almost four years I have been here. This in turn has meant that I have been able to give each of these ‘occasional offices’, (as they are collectively known), more attention to detail than might normally otherwise be possible.
All but two of the weddings that I have conducted since arriving in Prague have been cross-cultural – between an English-speaker and a Czech/Slovak/Belarusian. These have inevitably raised cultural and linguistic issues about which I have written previously in this blog. But they have also, without exception, been most enjoyable occasions as relatives and friends of each happy couple, despite their different nationalities and languages, have joined together to celebrate.
Two years ago tomorrow, I conducted the marriage of Jan, a Czech, to Allison, an American. Late last year, I was thrilled to hear that they had taken notice of the third reason that marriage is given according to the preface to the Anglican Marriage Service, ‘as the foundation of family life in which children may be born and nurtured in accordance with God’s will, to his praise and glory’ – Allison was pregnant!
Little Martin Morris Rovný duly arrived in the world early in March of this year. In this era of social media, he had already appeared on Facebook even before he was born with his mother posting pictures of ‘her scan’. Since then, numerous photographs of him have also been posted online by his proud parents.
Jan and Allison currently live in Sweden, where Jan is a research fellow at the University of Gothenburg and Allison has successfully completed and defended her own thesis, as well becoming a mother to her young son. As they were intending to spend a good part of August in Prague with Jan’s family, they asked whether it would be possible for Martin to be baptised at St. Clement’s as in their current rather peripatetic existence, they do see it as their spiritual home. Therefore on Sunday 26th August during our Sunday Eucharist, I baptised Martin Morris in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, using the font that stands just a couple of metres from where his parents had stood almost two years previously to make their marital vows to each other.
As our opening hymn, we sang ‘Come, thou fount of every blessing’ to the American folk tune Nettleton. This was the hymn that Allison’s family, together with the bride and bridegroom, had sung to the rest of the congregation at their wedding – a cappello in four-part harmony! It is a hymn virtually unknown this side of the Atlantic although it does now appear in ‘Common Praise‘, the successor to ‘Hymns Ancient & Modern‘, published in 2000. Not being in the hymnbook we use, I had to reproduce the words on our ‘Weekly Bulletin’ – fortunately they are out of copyright! In doing so, we also made Larry from Texas happy, who was playing the organ for us that Sunday, by for once singing a hymn he knew to what he deemed to be the ‘correct tune’ 🙂
Whilst we had a large number of Jan’s Czech relatives present for the service, the only members of Allison’s family able to be present were her parents, Morris and Mary Elizabeth who had flown over from the USA, especially for the occasion. However, I was very pleased that Morris accepted my invitation to lead our intercessions, immediately following the baptism of his grandson, just as he had led the intercessions at his daughter’s wedding some two years before. It did make once again, for a very special occasion.
), was scheduled to depart at 06.00 CEST that morning. Whilst I am a great believer in using public transport and two night buses would have got me to the airport, I eventually chose the easier option and booked a taxi which was waiting for me outside our apartment block at 04.30. The flight was uneventful and we landed at Luton on time, just before 07.00 BST.
