I ate a roe-deer steak today - is this what Mark has given up I wonder. It was unparalled even bÿ Impala which is pretty good. This was in Luberec - near where we were yesterday.

Maybe readers will not want to read more accounts of the relationship between the academic and automotive sector here. Just in case anyone still thinks I am just being a boho in bohemia I will just threaten to relate a conversation about plastic moulding simulation I had with the Prof of Manufacturing Systems at Luberec Technical Uni. I think I have almost nailed the issue of why Cz educated engineers have a more practical orientation. It goes back as far as the grand theory of deductivism - not everyone knows that this was a Cz discovery.

Jan Amos Komensky - a 17C Boho thinker invented a vision of knowledge which assumed that all knowledge could be configured as a deductive system. This meant that if you got the structure of education right that you could change easily from one subject to another - the structure would be common - you would just have to mug up a bit on content. Getting the structure right involved psychology and linking the exposure of the students to the various viewpoints on the deductïve system to the maturation of his or her mïnd.

Much of this is pretty close to structuralism and Chomsky� theory of deep structure. It is rather 17C and continental in that it is an extreme form of rationalism - linked in various ways to the thought of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The links�with Spinoza seem especially close given that he was the intellectual flower of a similar mercantile culture which also supported empirical knowledge eg Huyghens on optics. The interestïng question which arises is whether when they came to found the Prague technical university in 1707 they used this kind of didactics at all.

Last night I bought Vita a Pierrot from a shop at the end of the Charles Bridge. It was either that or a puppet Harry Potter but I thought a Pierrot had more relevance to her coming specialisation in art and design. Of course I can hardly deny the influence of P Lunnaire or the Blue Period masterpieces or indeed some works by C Debussy. Did I mention that I have also got her a book of abstract photography from the 20s and 30s?

I walked across the cobbled bridge in the dusk despite the crowds. At the other end I spotted a music shop and in the window was one of those strange Central European open-holed flutes - maybe I will look in tomorrow to see if I can find out more about them. Tomorrow is the day for the technical museum especially as the roe-deer was paid for by the son of the architect.

There are acres of Prague to cover and I am not even trying - I am sure we will all come back. Yvonne insists that she always wanted to come here and that I took no notice. I asked her if she was up to stay in the Stalinist Holiday Inn - where else in the world etc.

I am missing les ouevres tho. Partly reading about other people� endeavours - als� of how they more and more become a defining element in my identity. I have the piccolo but I haven�t played it much. I got it in a pawnshop in Dumbarton just north of Georgetown on my first trip to the USA. I set aside time to go to Dumbarton Oaks cos I like the Stravinsky piece named after it �- alos it has a Stravinsky portrait. I got there early and had to wait for it to open and so I dropped into the pawnshop where I got it for GBP 80. It is a Bundy which is not a brilliant name but not really sold here - I have been told I could sell it for maybe three times that in the UK.

Dumbarton Oaks is a fantastic place and a must if you are in the area. It has an extraordinary museumette in the garden designed by Phillip Johnston and used to house some masterpieces of pre Columban art. The garden is good and there is also an amaying collection of small Byzantine ivory carved figures some from 400 or 500 AD. One of the custodians there told me how the house has an important role in the early history of computing - she had worked there and been involved with von Neuman and others on the ENIAC project. Anyway the pic has an important moment later on in my flitting in and out of the USA.