September 8, 2015
Hranice, Czech Republic: Freudian discoveries
IT'S THE HAPPY discoveries that make touring worth while. I hadn't intended to go to Pribor and I certainly didn't expect to spend any time there. But a stop for shopping led to a pause for coffee in the striking main square, and then to a haphazard journey through back streets to re-find my route.
It was on coming down a slope, brakes humming, that I found the road forked in front of me. Both sides led to a larger way running left to right but set in the middle of the fork was not only an appealing house but, in front of it, a stone sculpture of a psychiatrist’s couch.
I had found the birthplace of Sigmund Freud.
The odd thing is that I'd always thought of him as Austrian. He did a lot of work in Vienna, I thought. Well, boundaries have changed a lot round here in the last century and a half, I know, but it's also true that Austria has done a good job of persuading the world that Hitler was German and Mozart an Austrian. Maybe they'd done the same for Sigmunda Freuda, as the sign outside the house called him.
The funny thing about the Freud family is that more than one of them seemed crackers in his own way. Lucian Freud has a talent, a drive even, for making women look strikingly ugly in his paintings. And Clement Freud, whom I met several times and never enjoyed the experience, was a supercilious man who made a living from looking remarkably like the bloodhound with which he advertised dog food in a monotonous voice and from becoming a Member of Parliament for the one term it took voters to choose someone else.
For once, it didn't rain today, although it often came close to it. Nor did the headwind howl, although it was often cold. I shivered when clouds covered the sun and sweated when they didn't.
I came down the stone path from my overnight hideaway around seven and found two dozen children of around 12, dressed alike and looking chilly as they waited for their bus. They chirruped and grinned at my appearance. But that never troubles me; I remember a small boy so inspired by cycle tourists he saw on the English south coast that next summer he became one himself.
The fact they were there at seven shows how early life starts here. It is my observation, probably true but never proven, that people in Europe get out of bed earlier the further east they live. This makes sense because the sun rises earlier there. But the time you start in the morning is a matter of social custom as well as what you have to do that day. And custom seems to be that easterners rise earlier than westerners. Schools start earlier and shops open sooner.
Right now, though, I plan a late start tomorrow. I am ahead of time in my journey to Prague and I'm in a reassuringly inexpensive hotel in Hranice. Like Pribor, I hadn't intended to stop here. I planned to go on to Lipnik, the next town. But it was so thigh-straining a day, so hilly, that spotting a town below me as I rode a stone-strewn path beside a quarry made hesitation improbable. I was as tired as a drunk on a bar-room floor. A hotel, any hotel, would end the day perfectly.
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In reward for the endless roller-coaster of steep hills, I have been granted pretty scenery. Not lip-bitingly beautiful but peaceful, comforting countryside that sighed in sympathy and tried to soothe me. There were bright green fields and cropped corn and scattered woods. This is an area of small orchards, of plums and apples and pears. The spreading branches of isolated plum trees line the road like large-bosomed housewives, fussy but silent. The fruit drops to the road and squelches soggily as I pass. I imagine wasps and ants watching delighted at my work.
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I don't know why the plums stand along the road, separated from each other and not in convenient paddocks. They are like the Napoleon trees that protected marching soldiers in France. They look plucked, but not wholly so or there wouldn't be fruit to drop. And yet they can't be unpicked because the few plums still in the branches would never justify the expense.
And on almost every tree, held by several metres of broad, transparent plastic wrapped round the trunk, is an A4 sheet of paper, white, on which the largest words are "Prodane, 2015". Not, I agree, the world's most pressing mystery but enough to occupy a tired brain for the last hour.
Today's ride: 76 km (47 miles)
Total: 5,807 km (3,606 miles)
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