Grenfell.

Russell, the Jimmy Bo Horne track is excellent, but when I listen to it I have to have the North Korean Juche as the video:

(Apologies for the double post - my wife has now passed her eye over the comment and I'm unable to edit the earlier one. Feel free to remove it)

Hi Hilary,
Thank you for your writing. My late father-in-law, Bob Thaine, had polio and your post has triggered family memories here; it has served as an excuse to put together a history of Bob. Hopefully this response will be followed by something far more substantial by either myself or my sister-in-law, we’re just going to have to pull together some information from different places. It’s particularly pressing as mother-in-law is in her mid nineties and suffering from dementia. A brief disclaimer: as I never met my father-in-law some of my knowledge below is sketchy at best.

Bob (who died many years before I met my wife) caught Polio in the mid-late fifties. He caught it on a Russian ship on the way to NZ from the Australia with his wife Sheila and daughter Madeline. Apparently he caught it because the ship’s crew were running out of water and started to reuse the water from the dinner tables. Bob was paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. Bob was a plant physiologist at DSIR and lived in Palmerston North in his later life, which is where my, now, wife grew up. His early research was sponsored by the same Nuffield Foundation that donated the iron lungs (Bob spent a year in one). Bob and Sheila were involved with setting up the Ryder Cheshire Home in the Manawatu, amongst other things before he died in the early 1990s.

Apparently Bob had a zest for life, loved his cricket and rugby, but also battled depression for much of his illness. I’m told I would have liked him.

When we get his history together we’ll share it with you; it may just take some time!

Thanks Russell. I've had the luck of being in Prague a few times and it really is one of those cities that requires revisiting. In a city that is full of life and tears Ss. Cyril and Methodius Cathedral is a place that is extremely moving. This is the last stand of the partisans who assassinated Heydrich in 1942.

I found Wenseslas Square an incongruous place. Full of English pubs and English shops and with hen and stag dos noisily roaming, but with a deep sense history. And I love the undulating cross that makes up the Jan Palach memorial at the foot of the museum.