To Liberec

We stop off in Terchova to spend the last of my crowns on alcohol and bread rolls, then start the eight and a half hour cross country drive to Liberec. It's hot and uneventful until thirty kilometres north of Prague, when the tyre blows and I spend the next half hour by the side of the road in a fluorescent yellow jacket, right foot on a red triangle to stop it being blown away by huge trucks doing ninety kilometres an hour inches from my toes.

Things have changed but are always the same in Liberec. More supermarkets, new cranes, a KFC on a corner, Hypernova closed. But there's still (for now) the dirty orange bricks and dark brown roof of Tesco, a clock face in Fugnerova, triangle-topped Jested and the cobbled square in front of the town hall. Plus Steve and Henry, half-litres of Svijany and a klobasa with bread. Proseem.

I stumble home at one, realise I only have the indoor key, ring the buzzer, get a ten-crown coin stuck in a phone box, spend twenty minutes failing to borrow a mobile phone, contemplate a hard floor in the railway station, remember which building I'm in, blag my way through the main door and, finally, go to bed. When I wake up the next morning the klobasa reappears. I step barefooted on a toy train. The only paper in the flat is a prescription bag.