Thursday 5th February

11.30am
Checking out of the hotel, we discover it’s only cost us £15 to almost completely empty the minibar. Fantastic.

1.30pm
Given that so much is made of Franz Kafka’s connections with Prague, the museum dedicated to the author is bizarrely hard to find. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 40, and the last photo taken of him depicts what looks like a prepubescent schoolboy dressed in a man’s suit, shoulders crumpled with the weight of the world.

3pm
The old Trade Fair Palace, which now houses the city’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, is an enormous concrete building away from the tourist area which looks like a factory and which used to be a shopping centre of sorts, complete with restaurants and cafes, until its conversion. Works by the likes of Picasso, Klimt, Miro and Warhol sit alongside the outlandish recent creations of conceptual artists which, in taking abstraction to extremes, can only impress as material artefacts and not as depictions of anything. Much of it IS indeed impressive (though we’ll gloss over the huge pictures of a naked woman being covered in goats’ entrails), but after a couple of hours it becomes exhausting trying to take it all in and we leave having seen only a fraction of the works on display.

6pm
The horror of not being able to embark upon another Czech lager drinking spree sinks in – but then I know the flight home would be even more horrific were I to allow myself a few farewell tankards.

9.30pm
Sat in the departure lounge depressed to be leaving, I realise there is one consolation – no more having to stomach the Eurodance cover of Alice Cooper’s ‘Poison’ which seems to have dogged us everywhere we’ve gone.