Sticking Close

Prague is as beautiful as everyone has told me it is, but it has a tram system so erratic and unfathomable that Husband and I keep ending up in places which, although interesting, are not quite the ones we intended to visit. Husband is unbothered because he has now completed his successful pilgrimage to the Dukla Prague football stadium - a rather grandiose name for a tired looking oval of green turf, with only half the seating in place so that for some minutes I am under the impression that I am taking photographs of him in a stadium called UKL....

I, on the other hand, am starting to find Prague all a bit stressful - the heat, the aching calves, the fact that delicious through the food is, it rarely seems to feature green vegetables. Also, I keep seeing posters for a film with an incomprehensible title. Incomprehensible apart from the fact that it features Line Manager's first name writ large in bright green capitals. As we swoop down the very long escalators taking us into the bowels of Prague's Metro, this name keeps leaping out at me, occasioning little nudging reminders that next Monday the Habsburg cityscapes will be far behind me, and the best thing in my view is likely to be my screensaver.

We haven't been to a Support Group meeting since we left London, but Prague has two English speaking meetings a day, and better still they are very centrally located. We plan our day around getting to a noon meeting, and when we walk down the street and see the symbol for our Support Group boldly displayed among the shop signs, it feels great. It feels like we are in America - a place where it is OK to be in recovery. In fact it is positively cool !

We're about 10 minutes early for the meeting. We meet all the regulars - people from overseas who are living and working in Prague, as well as some Czech people whose English is marginally better than my own. And we meet people like ourselves - travellers who have felt the need to come to a safe haven and remind themselves of their primary purpose.

We meet G, a Dubliner who is running today's meeting
We meet J, an American who is one of the backbones of the group
We meet J who knows some of the places I used to hang out in "before"
We meet L, a young American woman
And L, a pretty Czech teacher
And T, from Boston, who has only just started coming to meetings
And L who used to work in "the film industry" but is now in the military
And C, who has just flown in from New York and says she is going crazy because all the food she sees is in the shape of a spiral...

Then we have our meeting. And it feels absolutely fantastic to listen to the familiar readings, and all the wise, and funny, and painful and poignant things which people have to say.

It feels so fantastic that at noon the next day, we go back for more...