This thing is…

It's lovely, but it hurts slightly to admit it's lovely. I'm not actually doing anything, it's all in my head. I'm a bit scared, but it's exciting scared. I know it's a passing thing, it's happened before. I mean, god, it's happened loads of times before. It's not as if I don't know how to handle it by now.

Another meeting over at the new place of work today. It doesn't make me any less worried. However… there's nothing I can do about it now, and I've taken the job. I'm sure it'll be fine once I'm into it but shit, I wish I could stay cocooned here forever, now I've actually jumped from the roof and am hoping to fly.

I think it's just - so many things happening all at once. How on earth am I supposed to get a handle on all of them all at once? It's like trying to juggle - and believe me, if you knew how shit my juggling is, you'd know what I meant.

Starting to learn Javascript at bloody last, thanks to not being able to do anything at work, and Jude's book, which is, as he said - great.

Had a meeting with the new boss lady today at lunch, and it didn't seem quite as flakily scary as it did before. Still one of the most frightening ideas in my life. New challenges, Cait - new challenges...

Steve Bowbrick phoned me up. He beat me down, the bugger, but it's still money I wouldn't have had otherwise, I guess.

Well, it's been a long time. You're going to have to sort through a load of old stuff and read forward from there. Why not click here (using my patented "Help" style friendly language) and read forward date wise from the 11th March or whenever the hell it is.

AAAAAGH.

I have found out what I'll be doing as my first assignment in my new job. Ulp. Shaking with fear.

Yesterday, after Danny fucked up an arranged (tell me something new) nice Sunday afternoon out, Kai 'n' I went out after having watched Donnie Brasco at home, to see American History X. It's certainly flawed, but the performances were great. I have to say, there was a specific bit where the racist teenage gang went and smashed up a store. There was a young Asian actress playing a till girl whose character was horrendously abused physically. Not as a sex object, but just as an object. I couldn't watch, it nearly made me sick. I kept thinking, Christ, what kind of private hell must she has gone through steeling herself for that? The visuals were beautiful, it has to be said, but in some ways that distracted from the main drag, uhh… maybe. Anyway. Edward Norton was great, and I obviously now fancy him. Not.

http://www.zoonies.com

It exists.

As of now.

cait@zoonies.com

Blagged some work from Steve Bowbrick, which will be interesting. I haven't actually seen him since that Carl dinner yonks ago. More importantly, I haven't seen lovely Juliette, which is a real shame. However. Anyway. It's all money at the moment, quite frankly.

The cycling is having visually good effects on "the long road down" which is heartening. I keep having to pull these bloody trousers up all the time, which is bloody annoying but also heartening. Thank God I don't have to diet. Cycling ist gut.

And the people in Prague complain about pollution? Good God. Prague coughing and spluttering it occurs to me is far more localised than here. When a car goes past, it belches out black crap in your face. However here, just walking down the road in central London can induce an asthma attack. Within about half a day of coming back to work: headache, bunged up, eyes streaming, ears hurting… jaysus. Anyway- got the photos done. They're… dammit, I'm going to have to set up a pix directory aren't I. I can see it a mile off. However. No humans. No faces.

Prague.

Finished reading "If He Hollers, Let Him Go" by Chester Himes. It's like having a wax strip pulling all the fluff and crap away from your brain. Bloody hell. It's a Sam Fuller movie with no holes barred; an extraordinary, fresh, no bullshit, no extraneous language, straight to the absolute point: "this is what it's like. Listen to me" novel. Published in 1945, either the War was still on or it had just finished. I mean, I read around, I try to listen to other people's voices, but this was explosive. It must have been published on some tiny press at first because good god, it's a real slap in the face. Wonderful. Truly magnificent. I've not been so turned on to read everything by an author for ages. You could sit there and argue the toss about sexism, but the whole point is that he's trying to shock you. He's going out of his way to - not be outrageous, because everything he's talking about was happening, but the point is that he was saying "This is happening". Because, let's face it - who the fuck was listening at the time?

Absolutely brilliant.

Last proper restaurant meal in Prague (is that a god send?). Turned out to be a risotto of sorts, with peas, mushrooms and - bizarro-world - smoked cheese grated over the top! Well, at least it was eatable.

Daytime: wow. We went to the TV tower. Absolutely the most imposing and screwed up looking thing I've seen in years. It reminded me bizarrely of photos I've seen of the Statue Of liberty's torch arm, half built, sticking up like some sort of vast Ray Harihausen model above the backstreet slums and workshops of Paris. This extraordinary, futuristic tube, shooting into the sky above a load of renaissance and turn of the century buildings in this tiny Prague district. Incredible! When the Communists commissioned it, they took over half of a Jewish graveyard for the land. I mean - for fuck's sake… It's the graveyard where Kafka is buried btw, but we didn't have time to go see him. The views from inside the tower (on the eighth floor! Erk!) were exceptional. The whole experience of the thing though, was almost ludicrous it was so weird.

Cesky Raj

Amazingly, my legs worked. Also amazingly, a new receptionist had appeared who spoke halting English. (Godsend!) So we arranged for a taxi to come pick us up at mid day. After that we went walking around the wee paths that went around the bottom of the castle cliffs. I don't know you know, there's no way of describing this place. It's a cathedral built by natural forces and pine trees, that pays homage simply to itself. It's so intensely beautiful and quiet, apart from bird noise… I can't do it justice, and it doesn't matter how hard I try.

The train journey back was soooooooo much better than the bus, thank god. The track seems to follow the line of trees and it almost reaches Prague. We strained to see last views of Trosky castle, and of course failed to.

Cesky Raj

Woke early to a breakfast of lovely rye bread and then, surprise, surprise: cheese!

We decided to walk toward the Valdstejn place, not knowing what it would be like. The walk was something like 4 kilometers, which is nothing, you would think, along a road. Oh, yes - fine. Well try walking up and down great gradients of height and depth all the way, amongst pine trees almost taller than you can see, on top of this plateau of 150 feet high sandstone, and that itself surrounded by more pine trees.

Unbelievably beautiful. So intensely quiet other than the sound of birds that you could hear a breeze coming your way even as a tiny whisper in the pines. It would come toward you, flicker past and you could hear it rustle it's journey away from you, while everything else remained calm. It was so warm and clear it was fabulous.

We made it to the Valdstejn castle and walked down a pathway to a remnant of the seventeenth century castle (which was now being used as a dumping room!) and scratched on to the walls very high up on an arch, filled in with moss was someone's name and a date: 1739.

Fuck.

I took a photo of some other scratchings that were done in 1899 but they didn't come out too well sadly. Walking back towards the hotel we went up a couple of side paths that lasted a couple of kilometres and found ourselves on a prairie, basically, on top of the forest. An eagle flew overhead, there were butterflies and buzzing things all over. We sat down and the quiet was total. Every twenty minutes or so, a train would honk it's horn somewhere a few miles away to let people know at level crossings that it was coming. Unfortunately I began to notice that ants about four times the size of the ones at home - no, scratch that, about 6 times the size, were not just in the vicinity, but in fact the ground was infested with them. I, er, decided we should go.

After a hilarious mid day meal of two packets of M+M's and an ice cream (yeah, well you try finding a salad in the middle of a forest where you've got one stall that sells sweets and postcards for ten miles in either direction) we decided to try to walk for Trosky castle. Trosky castle rises like something from a Tolkein novel on two black shafts of basalt over the top of the highest pine trees on it's very own sandstone columns hill. It looks like the most frightening place you could possibly think of visiting alone. On top of the two basalt obelisks are two towers that can be seen from twenty miles around. They were twinned together by it's medieval builder creating a load of wooden walk ways and buttresses that could be destroyed in time of war (and believe me, there was plenty of war). The oily slick of fear surrounding it was intense. I know we were making it up, but good God, the builder knew how to dominate the neighbourhood.

Sat down for about an hour beside a placid lake. Frogs tootled about so close to us we could probably have lifted them out and I took my shoes and socks off. Holy shit! The water was cold! But, it all did the trick. We were ready to stroll back to Castle Zamek for some kind of cheese related menu items.

On the way back, I heard some squeaking noises on a bank by the road. I strained to see what the hell it was, but couldn't see anything. Looking more closely, I began to see a leaf being nudged from beneath. A mole! There were two, it turned out, and we never saw them but the second - for a brief moment it felt as though you could see a whisper of it's face as it snuffled out- probably smelt us and decided it didn't want to come out to play.

I need to remind you now, there was *no one else around*. Any locals we did see (and that amounted to about 2) didn't want to know. We felt genuinely alone in this extraordinary place. Amazing.