There goes the neighbourhood, again

What did I find as I went home Thursday evening but my apartment block surrounded by police officers - grim looking ones. Straight away I bet that my flat had been robbed, cosmic justice for my having said in my last Letter from Prague that Prague was such a safe city. Before I reached the building though, the guilty phase had set in. Had I left the gas on? The water running? Surely they don’t know about the...!!

Normally, I don’t find Czech police officers very intimidating - only large groups of them sauntering ominously around my home. I suppose that’s not nice to admit, since it’s a cop’s job to be at least a little awe-inspiring, but the baby-faced, fawn-eyed 20-year-olds who tend to be on the beat in Prague just aren’t awesome. Even the glock and truncheon look like action figure accessories when they wear them. And what’s more, Czechs call them “poldové”, which might have some more sober connotation to them, I don’t know, but it sounds like a name for a teddy bear or cartoon show to me - “Polda the Bear”, “Polda the Magic Dragon”.

But I digress. Rather than venturing inside and finding a chalk outline on the floor of my flat myself, I went up to one of the more particularly fawn-eyed poldies and asked them what the scoop was. And as it turned out, the fuss had nothing to do with me (of course!) and there was no new scoop, it was just my pesky new neighbour, the American Vice President Joe Biden.

There goes the neighbourhood. But then, you’ll find a statesman next door from time to time, with the Hilton Hotel there. But once in the know, I was surprised there were so few police. After all, the US president himself had passed by here already this year, and what a show that was. I was at home with the chicken pox, bored out of my skull, and watching it out of my window. The narrow street below was stuffed with onlookers, and at once there came this eerie moment when the motorway above it went completely silent – the first time I had ever seen that. The only sound was of the choppers droning. And then came the endless motorcade in a spectacle of emergency lights, with Mr Obama somewhere within, maybe in one of the two twin presidential limousines, maybe not. After all, with two identical limousines, a would-be assailant who got past the barricades, the riot police and the spooky people in sunglasses would have a fifty-fifty chance of assailing the right, heavily-armoured, Cadillac-class tank that the secret service calls “The Beast”, before being blown up by one of the helicopters or shot by the ninja-looking people on the rooftops. And why give them such good odds? But Obama himself was indeed in one of them, as we knew from a half-second smile and wave of a tiny presidential hand behind the very, very thick glass.

Poor Mr Biden came Thursday evening and had no one to wave to at the Hilton, a mere shadow of his boss’ motorcade, one lonely chopper and a few bantering, fawn-eyed poldies to mind his way. Vice-presidential class is simply not presidential class.

And then there’s presidential class, and class of president. In the summer of 1999 I was at Trutnov, the dingy, hippy rock festival that’s the biggest of its kind in the country, and I, like everybody else, was standing on a bleacher bobbing up and down to the Tata Bojs. I didn’t understand Czech, at least not at 140 decibels, and so I neither knew nor cared much why the rest of the crowd had suddenly sat down. “Christian,” my friend said, “sit down, so the president can see!” I turned around and three seats behind me, surrounded by depleted plastic beer cups, was a smiling Václav Havel, with a hairy man in tie-dye talking in his ear. I gaped, waved an apology and sat; he nodded and waved back.

I love the contrast of these two memories, and they leave little doubt which head of state makes a better next-door neighbour. Of course, I know President Havel rides in motorcades and I’m sure Barack Obama chats with hippies, but I like to think I caught both men in their wildly contrasting element.