In a rare show of workmanship in electrical goods imported to the Czech Republic, my portable stereo has worked well for 15 years – okay – so the casette player died some time ago, but that’s a dead format innit?  I bought it when I lived in Prague for a while in the mid nineties – and it withstood at least 11 house moves. I’d marked my favourite British radio station – Radio 4 – on the dial with nail varnish, but to be honest, hadn’t given the stereo a second thought after discovering how bad the music played on commercial stations could be here.

Not a second thought until… I saw it in the car of our teenage neighbour. He has been hanging around at the house a lot recently, and we even gave him the job of cutting the grass because he seemed lonely… living with his grandmother in a tiny hamlet with not a single sign of friends or a girlfriend. He’d sat on the porch and watched old Czech films with us, and we’d played football together a few times.

When we asked him what the stereo was doing there, he said that he’d bought it in a nearby town. We could have been prepared to believe him about this, well at least there was a type of explanation which wasn’t completely implausible… until he returned the stereo with the radio frequency dial smashed off – it had been there (nail varnished proof and all) half an hour before, when the stereo was sitting in the back of his new car.

If he’d asked if we had an old stereo he could have I would have been happy to give it to him, but instead he took it, which makes him the prime suspect for the break in we had in the winter and the dissapearance of lots of tools from the house.  It’s such a pity. What a stupid, stupid boy.

Last year I researched which essential oils were disliked by moths and put little glasses in various cupboards and drawers to ward off unwanted visitors.  When I went back to them, the scent had faded and a sticky oil residue was left on the containers – which was a pain to clean off.

I cheated a few weeks ago and bought a commercial bio  ‘lavender’  moth repellent – but it stank out the room – even with the wardrobe door shut, and I started having difficulty breathing.  The lavender I planted earlier this year is not yet thriving.  I would be happy to have a good supply of it.

Eventually a solution has occurred to me… I’ve gathered some pine cones from the forest and put the essential oil (geranium to deter flies, and peppermint and cedar to keep moths away) on these – it’s soaked in without touching the shot glasses. Tomorrow I’ll add some chilli and cloves to the glasses and put them about the house.

The drainage out of Novy Mlyn stopped working soon after we started using the inside toilet fully.  Last year I converted it into a liquid only loo (partly due to our lack of info about the complete system, and also because all available water for flushing it was rainwater carried by bucket – so best to keep things simple). It worked well for number ones, though it was a delicate issue having to explain the procedure to visitors – we politely request you poo in the garden please. Soon after we reconnected the water in the spring, we decided to use it as a proper – no holds barred  type of toilet and almost immediately the drainage failed and we discovered the loo was emptying out of the top of a pipe near the back porch. Unpleasant and disappointing.

Husband had a poke about and said it was blocked solid.  A firm of plumbers visited last weekend and offered us a quote for a new system – I wasn’t at the house at the time or I would have insisted they try to rod the thing – but they didn’t.  “If you want a job done properly you have to do it yourself” is a saying I hate in respect of the prospect of sorting out a blocked toilet. But, as a last resort I decided to have a look for myself. Armed with a long stick with a nail stuck through it, I was able to retrieve a pair of trousers, a sheet and a t-shirt from the part of the drain before the bend. The neighbour looked on, with a cross expression which I cannot fathom. The drain is not unblocked – but there may be other items of clothing etc round the corner – for which we need more specialist equipment than a stick with a nail through it.

Why would someone want to sabotage our toilet? Is it the kind of thing one goes to the police about? I don’t feel angry… like when the barns collapsed within an hour of our first visit to our new home, I feel that we’ve coped with far worse than that in recent years.  Anyway, I made use of the bath in the garden after this vastly unpleasant task.  We can’t use the bath inside because of the lack of drainage, but I can’t imagine a better place to have a long soak than a solar heated roll top bath in the sun.

Today we ate a new type of mushroom – well – new to us – not to Czechs who’ve been eating it for hundreds of years.  Amanita Rubescens (known locally as Masák -  meaty) is a relative of both Fly Agaric (the hallucegenic red mushroom with white spots popular in fairy tale illustrations of pixies)  and the Death Cap or Destroying Angel (there’s a clue in the name) – so careful identification is essential. It is therefore important to know how to identify those which are poisonous, especially those which share similarities to edible mushrooms. About 20 people die every year in the Czech Republic because of mushroom poisoning – with Death Cap being the principle culprit – combined with human error (aka – guns aren’t dangerous).

The first time I try any mushroom I identify it using several different sources (both books and Internet based), I also get someone else to identify it, seperately, then cook it thoroughly, and only taste a tiny amount (ie cubic milimetre).  The second time, a few days later, it’s okay to eat more. Sometimes you discover that a mushroom is edible, but not enjoyable.

Some types of mushroom share a chemical element with kidney beans – so must be cooked thoroughly in order to prevent poisoning, others are poisonous when combined with other stuff – like alchohol and the Ink Cap mushroom (now used as a treatment for alchoholics) combined together cause illness.

The variety we ate today was delicious. It tasted a lot like crispy fatty bacon bits (would to somebody who has avoided pork and bacon for many years) – but perhaps because we fried it in a mixture of olive oil and butter, with lots of salt.  No matter how certain I am about identification, eating wild mushrooms feels like taking a risk, and I’m left with unsettling self doubt until they are thoroughly digested and I live to tell the tale.

We have visitors over the summer and I’m not yet sure what our mushroom strategy should be.  I think we should only cook Porchini and Chanterelle for other people – as these are very clearly identifiable and differentiable from poisonous species. We have many books available if visitors want to go into the forest themselves to hunt for different types… maybe we could find a mushroom expert who could help?

Beware the dangers of inaccurate communication…  we now have a kitten on our hands (quite literally – pouncing on me as I try to type).

When we visited Jerry and Vladka at the weekend, we met a kitten. He was like a baby George (the cat we lost last autumn), and wanted to play football, even though the ball was twice his size. Jerry told us that he belonged to his neighbour, and had been a present and we said ‘lovely, how nice’ etc. Once everyone started calling him George (Jiri)  it transpired that Jerry had actually said ‘our neighbour will give you the kitten as a present’. After a few drinks it didn’t seem like such a calamitous error, and on Sunday morning we came home to a not-so-enchanted-by-the-new-arrival Pavouk (sister of lost George).

The kitten now has the rather grand title of  Jiri Druhy – George the Second. It’s been ten months since we last saw the original George. I hope he was catnapped by a family who love him as we did. Jiri Druhy has a lot to live up to.

During a recent wet weekend I decided to make jam. I sat with a friend at the kitchen table and we spent the morning hooking pits out of cherries with  hairpins (the wide sort). These jobs are always so much better in company. I used sugar with added pectin, and put in the zest of a couple of lemons for good measure. Miraculously, it set and I was able to give jars away to friends and neighbours in town.

The end of May is a little early for cherries in this area, so my neighbours were impressed to see jam already…  the magic, extra flavoursome twist to our jam was that the cherries had been steeped in vodka for 11 months! It worked out well. Last year we didn’t have water at Novy Mlyn, so making jam would have been a nightmare, instead I packed the cherries into large jars and topped them up with vodka. I was really surprised that the process actually added a good flavour to the jam.

This year I am going to try to sun dry the cherries. I plan to make square frames out of willow switches & the net curtains (which I removed from every window in the house (washed, of course)). I also plan to sun dry some apples because we didn’t use the crop last year and I have rather enjoyed dried apple made by my students.

Now I have rather a lot of cherry vodka around the place – I wonder if there is a magic solution to that particular glut.