Benedict Spence

Prague has a graffiti problem. This becomes apparent as the train pulls towards the nineteenth-century Masarykovo Nadrazi station, through the old industrial east of the city. Huge derelict warehouses, some from the communist era, others much older, are covered top to bottom in scrawls and daubs amidst collapsed roofs and glassless windows. It’s unlikely to stay this way for long, though; Prague’s answer to gentrification is swiftly transforming previously rundown areas of the city, making it worth a venture off the beaten track. For all the genteel architecture at its heart, the graffiti is a sign of a city unafraid to show discontent. Trapped behind the Iron Curtain for so long, progress was, for decades, conducted at the whim of communist governments.

If you’d like some idea of how Scotland’s long-awaited return to an international football tournament is going, consider this: it took less than an hour of play before the image of goalkeeper David Marshall leaping, despairingly, into his own net in a doomed effort to stop the Czech Republic’s Patrik Schick scoring a goal from the halfway line became a meme trending worldwide. Marshall can now be found soaring from the top rope of wrestling rings, swinging through the air like Spiderman, sprinting past Usain Bolt to win the 100 meters, and, of course, you can relive what is already the goal of the summer to the Titanic soundtrack.  There’s little time to dwell on the highland horror-show, though, with the auld enemy England next, dauntingly, at Wembley.

When I first heard the expression ‘cocaine hippo,’ my initial thoughts were that it must either be a reference to some sort of industrial scale drug mule operation, or that someone was being rude about Mitch McConnell.  In fact, the origins of the cocaine hippo aren’t far from the former, but are even more outlandish than you might expect.  In the 1980s, when he wasn’t becoming the world’s richest drug kingpin or going to war with the government, Pablo Escobar indulged his various passions: he bought a football team, grew Colombia’s most lustrous moustache (no mean feat in those days) and opened a private zoo on his estate outside Medellin, Hacienda Napoles.

Football is an emotional sport, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune of being in Glasgow on derby day will attest. When your team wins, or even just scores a goal, that emotion can be hard to contain. Players, on occasion, have been known to celebrate such occurrences; sometimes they even make physical contact with each other. And why not?  The FA has announced that it will take a dim view such behaviour from now on, after criticism from politicians that some players have reprehensibly been breaching social distancing guidelines that the wider public have to follow.

When you hear the word ‘stockpiling’, the first thought that pops into your head is probably the image of forest-dwelling folk in remote reaches of the US, usually bearded, always armed, with hunting vests, baseball caps, a few tonnes of canned food buried beneath their shack and enough kerosene to defrost Svalbard. Yet with the prospect of a hard Brexit edging ever closer, stockpiling has become a major pastime of businesses across the UK. The Economist have set aside 30 tonnes of paper to print their magazine, whilst Majestic have secured up to 1.5 million bottles of wine (should the worst happen, I know which warehouse I’ll be looting). Medicines and food are also being stored in bulk.

Lords, Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, children of all ages: the moment you’ve been waiting for has finally arrived. Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, are calling time on their membership of the royal family, deciding to live a financially independent existence, and flying off into the sunset for the snowy wilds of Canada, to live among the trees and elk, beavers and bobcats, presumably to get involved in the fur trade, or logging business, in order to support themselves. Of course, they’ll be doing nothing of the sort.