...and that takes me right back to the 'best fish restaurant in PRAGUE' according to the ROUGH GUIDE circa 1994-6...which was in point of fact, a 'hole in the wall'...a former communist public toilet...graffiti on the outside of it...ice and snow around...you could see your breath inside...MARK R, GILL and HULBRUSCH acting like the staff...GILL having to sit on the frozen banks of the VLTAVA in the woods, trying to be a FISHERMAN...miserable as hell...i then got served up DOG-FISH as in 'mini-shark'...

If only my parents had woken up...we would have such a good time as a family - talking about the 'fun times'...what had really happened to us all...

Anyway, the point in all of the above is this...when I look back at that memory...I can recognise the waiter instantly as GILL...but the fact that upon this side of the mirror and a 'sleeper'...I couldn't make the link between the surly GILL of teenage years in SOLIHULL with his 30 something year old self...because he was the guy 'born to succeeed' at ENGINEERING in MANCHESTER...so you wouldn't get him stuttering 'bad English' as a waiter in a 'toilet of a restaurant' in frozen Prague - would you?

...and yet that had been the case. I was fooled by acting - 'a foreigner but his accent wasn't slavic - he was doing Italian waiter'...and situation, context etc...and too much 'water under the bridge'...

So was GURU GUY - also GILL...but with a fake tan and a bit of stuffing in the cheeks? Who knows...

Anyway, both guys projected 'keep away' and so I did...GURU GUY would hardly look at me...he kept turning his head away like GILL when he didn't want me to know what he was up to...and that wide-eyed look...well, you really wanted to keep away when he started doing that one...

The restuarant that they wanted to go to...was the ARMENIAN one...and it looked like it served the best food around at a reasonable price....plus the interest value of the decor etc...in 1980 the entire BI course had been taken there...and shown various programming objects around the interior...

...naturally I was wary of restaurants by that point in time and had no money for them either...I bought my own food after breakfast and was very careful about it...so I begin to wonder now, what might have happened if I had gone with them for that meal? Another ROTHSCHILD test?

The 'worst restaurant in the world' test was 'do you complain about the food, service, no heating - hours wait, or not? If you do - the staff shoot you and then dump your bodies in the VLTAVA...

I can remember now...returning to the DTO to a surprised MATT SMITH...who obviously 'knew all about it'...because when I told him that my parents and I, had visited that so-called FISH RESTAURANT he laughed in surprise and said 'and you survived??!!'...he appeared to find that one quite incredible...i replied that the food wasn't that bad (it was)...puzzled...he tried to stop smiling but didn't and then walked off swiftly...