Month: October 2022

Prague Scams

Prague Scams

2022

25 October, Tuesday 

The taxi driver was waiting in the airport as arranged. No hassle. A presentable lad in a good car, he smiled and shook my hand in response to a decent tip. Once checked in, I had two pints downstairs in U Medvídků. No more orders taken after half past ten put a stop to unwinding. I walked then to the Old Town Square and back. An awful lot of foreign youngsters roamed the cobbled streets.

This truly is the smallest hotel room I’ve ever had (€104 per night, out of season). I’ve walked into bigger wardrobes.

26 October, Wednesday 

In Prague, the chiselling is official. The country’s largest bank (Česká spořitelna) forces conversion charges on cash withdrawals by foreign cards at its ATMs. It’s a completely legal scam. The dreary rain came as I crossed the Charles Bridge and headed uphill. I stopped off in the Church of St. Nicholas to film the ceiling.

The minor tourist mob at the metal detectors kept me out of the Castle. Up there I instead went to find the Black Ox (U Černého vola). The lovely waitress looked very like someone I used to know but this one was a little bit shorter, a little bit curvier and a little bit prettier. It was a long afternoon but I got out of it by six, having paid no more than €25 (equivalent) for a simple lunch plate and a load of pints to pass the time. The Czechs are an unsmiling bunch in the main but this was the only place I heard anyone laugh. The waitress, the man at the taps, a couple of regulars, it was a pleasant sound, in the otherwise general absence of charm. 

27 October, Thursday 

I got scammed by the driver of a taxi the hotel called at my request this morning. The swarthy greaseball didn’t even step out of the car to check for any baggage but I was tired and my antennae weren’t up. Lesson to self: don’t be too tired to deal with the unexpected. This wasn’t going to be as smooth as my arrival but I’d naturally presumed the hotel would use a reputable taxi firm, with or without prior arrangement. “The cab company with the best reputation is AAA Taxi,” says the Pocket Rough Guide to Prague. Evidently the very rough guide.   

For example, the thousand crown note that I had for the fare (an ample amount) disappeared after I handed it over and turned to reach for my bag on the back seat. He insisted I’d handed him a hundred. For another example, he then loudly and falsely insisted 900 crowns were worth €70. By then I was too tired and confused to go, “What?? No it’s f***ing not!” Given I had no more Czech currency, I paid him off in euros to be rid of him. That’s somewhere crossed off. I did Prague and Prague did me. The poster in the hotel breakfast room had already explained what was expected of tourists.

Noël Coward’s Diaries

Noël Coward’s Diaries

2022

27 September, Tuesday 

Wet day. Still in the Forties in Noël Coward’s bizarre diaries. A lot of the lunches and dinners should have been cut. England may have been dreary then but that didn’t apply to his plate. Luxury abounds, and arse-licking the royals, and playing the piano for such bigwigs when the dinner conversation dies. 

The mention of the 1946 death of David Niven’s wife, who fell into a Hollywood basement in a game of hide-and-seek, recalled Hurd Hatfield telling me these people were not sophisticated (Hurd hung around with “the musicals crowd” instead, at the time). His point is backed by a passage from the autobiography of Oleg Cassini (Jackie Kennedy’s frock fancier), who was at the fatal dinner party. 

The problem was that everyone was in the same line of work, a very insular business. They worked very hard, all the successful ones, and there wasn’t time to know much beyond industry gossip. And so, when conversation waned, we often engaged in party games, especially at smaller dinners: charades, hide-and-seek, anything to pass the time. 

29 September, Thursday 

The story of the connection between Noël Coward and Peter Collinson is touching. A lost boy of twelve finds a father figure who sticks by him and with whom he reunites twenty years later to make a classic film, The Italian Job. 

14 October, Friday 

Noël Coward – usually sensible, often wise but only rarely deep (e.g. on Churchill and Beaverbrook as old men). He was on this earth to enjoy himself. Of his posse, it’s clear Marlene Dietrich was best appreciated in small doses. 

16 October, Sunday 

Very wintry. I was thinking of W. S. Maugham in the South Seas and the contrast with Coward. What sticks in my mind about A Writer’s Notebook is the appearance of so many marooned white men drinking themselves to death and/or retirement, whereas Noël was only out there to enjoy himself. A few pages later it becomes clear how Coward in the early Sixties grew to despise Maugham and his legal antics v. his only child, despite the old man having already appeared occasionally as a benign old codger. It inspires N. C. to reread Cakes and Ale (“Much malice and no heart”). 

23 October, Sunday 

In my first remarks on Coward’s diaries, I used the word “bizarre” and that has returned with a bang in two places after six hundred pages. In 1965, he was in for a minor spot of plastic surgery but his surgeon collapsed and died after it. Twenty pages later he discovers he died himself, on the table, for forty-five seconds, a most unpleasant period in what was left of the surgeon’s time on earth. Noël even imagines the embarrassing headlines that must have gone through the poor man’s mind as those seconds ticked by. 

24 October, Monday 

N. C. found success early, in his mid-twenties, and on New Year’s Day in 1961 he concedes he’s had “a wonderful life” but it’s strange that there is just a single mention (the same number devoted to his father) to any struggle or hardship involved up to the point of making it. (Having been a child actor, he had known enough of “bedbugs and cheap digs and squalor”.) As a man always keen to avoid literary and actual squalor, he must have wanted not to reflect on that too much, not to mind write about it.  

13 November, Sunday 

I forgot to note his 1964 note about Nureyev’s table manners. He actually bit me during dinner, but it was only on the finger and didn’t draw blood. 

P.S.

What is also worth keeping here is a passage from a letter he wrote in late 1959, which acts as a preface for that year.

As one gets older one doesn’t feel quite so strongly any more, one discovers that everything is always going to be exactly the same with different hats on… Looking back… my personality only really changed once, and that was when I was twenty-four and I became a star and a privileged person.