Is that your Ayrshire bacon

No, I'm just warming my hands at this amazing stove in the bedroom of our hotel room in Brno. Actually it isn't lit thank goodness, it's sweltering here. After a turbulent flight through thunderstorms from Toulouse to Prague, we were met by the lovely Linda, an opera director, who was picking us up as a favour for her friend, the festival organiser. She had driven three hours to Prague to meet us, and drove us back during another three-plus hours, all in torrential rain! The drive to Brno was hampered by roadworks, a crash in the tunnel around Prague, and a wheel spectacularly flying off an articulated lorry in front of us. The smell of burning rubber was strong as the lorry immediately screeched to a halt and pulled over into the hard shoulder but the tyre bounced and rolled and swerved along the road for a good two hundred yards swapping lanes before coming to a halt on the hard shoulder too! And all of this in blinding driving rain! Poor Linda did brilliantly and delivered us safely to the hotel, having managed to teach us how to say hello (ahoy) how are you (yak ce mache) and thank you (yeeky). So at about ten o'clock tonight we found ourselves getting something to eat and having a planning meeting with the documentary maker who's making a film about Peter all day tomorrow in between a newspaper interview at 9am and his reading in the theatre at 7pm. To bed now, pondering the puzzle of how a greeting in a landlocked country managed to become a sailor's cliche.