6th July 1970

A YEAR IN PRAGUE JULY

6/7/70

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you for the nice long letter that arrived today full of news about friends and relations. We were very pleased to hear about Frieda’s baby- I will send her a card. We also had a letter from Auntie Dorothy with all the news from Yeovil. Your express letter has not arrived yet but it is only Monday so a bit early to receive it. We are pleased our holiday is settled. Tony was upset as he would have travelled quicker to Corsica but I would like to see something of Austria and Italy on the journey rather than driving nonstop all day. We have 10 days on Corsica and I think it will be enough to get to know the island. We only had 7 days in Fuenterrabia and it felt like home. However I think Cooks were very bad making you pay for the boat tickets in advance when they may not be able to provide them. Imagine it happening in any other industry. I did not like the sound of the insects in Sardinia- I hope there are less in Corsica.

I am sorry we have not had time to write but I did manage a letter to Paula which I expect you will have read. We had a hectic time driving to Nuremburg and doing all the shopping last weekend. We finally bought a nice tent called the ‘Tahiti’ which sleeps 3 to4 people, so the brochure says but anyway two adults can use it quite comfortably. The tent itself is 10 foot square with an 8foot by 6 foot 6 sleeping compartment which is mosquito proof. It has two windows, a cooking area with washable walls and a plastic roof to keep out the rain. We were very thrifty and went round all the shops comparing the prices of gas stoves, air beds, sleeping bags etc. In the end we had just enough money for a rubber inflatable boat which is now our pride and joy. It is possible to fit an outboard motor to it but at the moment it is propelled by a pair of oars. We had our cars serviced and were shocked at the bill for the Daf -£15 for a service and wheels balanced. We found that his included an hour’s labour for the mechanic to drive to another garage and wait for them to fit in the wheel balancing. We were annoyed by this but they would not reduce the bill.

Nuremburg is a very interesting old city with old castle walls and a modern shopping centre. We treated ourselves to a Chinese meal and an Italian Pizza while we were there. I did not have time to shop for clothes but my old clothes will be OK for camping and boating. It was very nice weather last weekend and I was almost melting on the car seat driving home.

On Sunday we had to try out the tent and drove up the Vltava but not as far as Slapy. We crossed the river by an iron bridge and found a track on the other side. It was quite amusing trying to erect the tent as the instructions were all in German and the pictures seemed to gain and lose poles as they progressed. Actually it is quite simple once you know how. We ended up with 3 spare poles and spent some time wondering where they went until we realised they were for the canopy. We couldn’t resist cooking a meal on our gas stove in our new saucepans. We also tried out the boat and it was really good fun. It was very hot so it was lovely to lie back in the boat and trail my hands in the water whilst Tony paddled.  We had a few arguments about the best way to propel and steer the boat but had developed a good technique by the end of the day.

When we got home we had an unpleasant surprise because the Daf had two flat tyres with needles sticking in them. We called the police and a young officer came round and said it was a common occurrence. Luckily we got them mended as we did not fancy getting the wheels balanced again. The poor Daf is in the wars as I grazed a hub cap on a high curb in a garage- the curb was about a foot high!

Monday and Tuesday of last week I had to go to Brno which again meant a lot of travelling but I had a good time while I was there. On Thursday we went to V.C. for dinner and had a good evening boring them with our holiday films in Slovakia.

On Friday we had the monthly meeting which is why we did not phone. We had just left the office when you rang. P answered and thought you were Czech because you were speaking so slowly.

K.R spent the night with us as her husband was away and she does not like sleeping in her flat on her own.

I must close now as Tony is making the bed and is very tired. I will write again soon.

Love Gillian & Tony.

We really had it quite easy being able to go to Germany and Austria to shop. The contrast with Czechoslovakia was very marked and we wandered round the department stores in Nuremburg like children at Christmas. We would come back to Prague stocked up with food for the next few weeks. Some things like cut flowers were extremely expensive in Czechoslovakia. It was quite normal to take a single rose to the host of a party rather than a bouquet.

Making the bed was a daily task as we slept in the living room on one of the ubiquitous sofa beds. The bedroom in our flat only had a narrow single bed which we used to keep our clothes in and for the occasional visitor.

One of the new ideas in computers at that time was the ability to multi-program. Inputting records from tapes was slow so while that processes was carrying on the central processor was largely idle. Reading punched cards and paper tapes was even slower and this was the method of inputting all programmes and data initially. The newer operating systems allowed another programme to run while data was being read or written. I think the system 4 computers could theoretically run 16 programmes at one time but rarely got above three, nonetheless a major step forward for its day. The operating system for the System 4 machines was called ’multijob’ later to be replaced by the superior ‘J’  We all felt it was superior to IBM’s DOS. It made solving problems in machine-level code and ‘core dumps’ when the computer crashed much more complex as you had to find out which programme was active when the fault occurred. The operating system had to be fine tuned to reflect the mix of programmes submitted by the user. Anyone out there remember this more clearly than Gill does?