Prague has an ancient and noble tradition of defenestration.

This began in July 1419 when the Catholic Church (that would be us again) “purified” a local sect and, in retaliation, surviving protestors threw the local mayor and a few of his advisors out of his office window.

Since then, over the centuries, numerous civil leaders have been thrown out of windows in response to the Catholic persecution of Protestant minorities. You’d have thought that, after a hundred years or so, the locals would have worked out who was causing the trouble and dealt with them directly.

Just to be on the safe side, this Catholic is going to make sure that his hotel room is on the first floor - above the bar.

In fact, strike the moment it starts getting warm! And keep on striking so it can’t get out of the fire.

The Mother-in-Law (who is now Beatified) made an idle comment that Darling Wifey & I looked like we needed a break, so why didn’t she look after the Tribe for a few days so we could go away somewhere?

60 minutes later I’d booked us a mini-break in Prague.

Today the education authority sent me on a management seminar. I spent several hours at the Holiday Inn listening to a “keynote speaker” deliver “collaborative training” on “distributive leadership.”

Behind him the slogan “Middle Managers Making a Difference” was projected onto a screen.

He pointed to the back of the conference room and shouted at the top of his voice, “My vision is there! I can see it, just three years away! Come with me and we’ll reach it together!”

So, after a few sessions of learning the importance of “walking the talk” and “delegating ownership of stakeholder values” it seems that I am now qualified to “inspire,” to “make decisions” and to “align everyone’s energies.”

I even have a certificate to prove it.

I also have a target: to adopt a collegiate approach to my vision, using an affiliative style to embed it in my leadership strategies, in order to further signify the importance of expectations and fostering in the progress of my department.

Silly me. I thought I was a teacher.

(This entry is dedicated to John, who broke the first rule when he ordered his in black with an aluminium and leather interior, and things just went downhill from there.)

Minis are attention-seeking cars. Men in Minis are tragic. If you do it wrong then you might as well put your elbows together and wave your fingers in the air whilst squealing, “Look at me!”

Observe these simple rules and you, too, can drive a Mini without attracting the attention of men in tight T-shirts and designer sunglasses.

1. “Womanise” the car. Most gay Mini owners make the mistake of “feminising” their car - but this only makes it look gayer. Women and gay men do share the style gene, but gay men are very masculine about it: they-will-not-deviate. Women, on the other hand, get the concept right and then immediately trash it with neglect and sloppy housekeeping. To make your Mini look like it is really owned by a woman you need to scatter sweet wrappers around the interior, leave ancient car park tickets stuck to the windscreen and never, ever top up the washer bottle. A filthy, insect encrusted windscreen is a dead cert: a woman owns this car, ergo any man driving it is heterosexually attached.

2. Kerb it and crunch it. The Mini is a design icon of the new millenium. If you have the XY Chromosome pairing you are inherently in awe of this and will work hard to present its virtues in the most advantageous manner possible. If you have the XX pairing you will say, “It’s very cute,” and still use sound as your primary guide when parking.

3. Thrash it. Do you need an excuse? If you treat your car as a means of getting from A to B, perhaps whilst having fun in the process, then you are clearly not the stereotypical (*ahem*) Mini man. If, on the other hand, you drive slowly with the windows down and your designer sunglasses propped up in your hair (where they get smeared with your hair gel) then you are obviously attention seeking and, regardless of how straight you are, you will not convince anyone.

4. The baby seat. Gay men make wonderful fathers, but they give themselves away in the process. A gay man will see the bogeys that his infant has smeared on the windows of his beloved car and recoil in disgust before reaching for the Windolene. A straight dad will admire the texture of his progeny’s snot and not care one little bit that everything within reach is smeared in a mixture of chocolate, mucus, orange juice and half-chewed gingerbread men.

5. Complain about the car. Fun or not, Minis are incredibly small and when a woman has adjusted the seats you can’t fit a gnat behind the steering wheel. If your head is wedged against the ceiling and your knees are by your elbows, it is obviously someone else’s car. A small price to pay.

Darling Wifey and I have never lived in a prosperous area before.

We grew up in economically depressed areas about 220 miles apart and when we got married we lived for a while in an inner-city sprawl of terraced hovels.

Then we moved to a mining village about ten years after the mine closed.

So, bearing all this in mind, it is not surprising that we have noticed a contrast in the social attitudes here in York.

York is immensely wealthy. That doesn’t mean that everyone is loaded (although there is an above average number of seriously rich people here) but that there are very few people at the other end of the economic scale. The city is a magnet for homelessness, but also has one of the highest employment figures in Britain. There are currently only 57 long-term unemployed in a population of 181,000.

The difference that this makes to people’s attitudes is startling. It’s as if no-one in York has ever had to rethink their lifestyle, or been forced to start again, or lost everything that they have worked for over decades. Everyone is so settled and secure that there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to think about changing anything.

The bottom line is that if you are a York resident and not happy about something, it is:
1. somebody else’s fault, and
2. somebody else’s responsibility to fix it.

Nobody here puts up with anything they don’t like.

And then there is the driving. The traffic jams here are the worst I have seen in Europe - because the road layout was originally Roman but then mutated into some strange pattern during the Dark Ages. As a result, everyone is extremely patient and extremely polite. But no-one bothers following anything that is painted on the roads.

That small car straddling two lanes has a York number plate. And the next box-junction you reach will be blocked by the Park & Ride bus.

I’m not being paid for this advertising, but who cares?

York has some of the best street performers in the country.

Darling Wifey was out all day with some other Harry-Potter-Headcases visiting far-flung places that were used for a three-second shot in the filming of the latest Potter film. (By the way - a good movie but do not watch it with die-hard Harry Potter fans. All they did was complain loudly, ‘THAT wasn’t in the book,’ and ‘He should be taller,’ and ‘Shouldn’t he have a longer beard?‘)

Umm. Hang on - most readers of this page are Darling Wifey’s Potter-Nutter friends…

Anyway, street theatre! Whilst Darling Wifey was out and the Fellowship of the Snot were at nursery, Little Madam and I went into York for lunch. We just wandered from square to square watching the performers - and we sat less than six feet from a man balancing on top of a ladder juggling flaming torches. We watched a man who had starched his clothes to look like he was walking into a gale - and he didn’t even blink for ten minutes! (That’s got to hurt!)

We listened to ten-year-olds playing jazz, Renaissance choral music in six part harmony, rock, Gospel and a barbershop quartet.

But the best of the lot was the stilt-walker with his flies open.