I'm intrigued that edible dormice may share this very barn, my son’s workshop in South Bohemia in the Czech Republic, where I have temporarily set up a desk.

I’M in Czechia, the new and less cumbersome English name for the Czech Republic, writing this in a caravan in the shade of a Scots pine on my son’s half acre of recreation land in the ‘moldavite belt’ of Lower Bohemia, north of the Sumava National Park and the Austrian border.

IT WAS pleasant indeed to be rafting down the River Vltava in Bohemia in Czech Republic of a Sunday afternoon, so pleasant that some of us said that, one day, we’d paddle all the way to the Elbe and across Germany to the North Sea, writes Damien Enright

THE sky was so blue and the sun so warm that my son and his pal took off their shirts to enjoy the weather as they drank raspberry beer outside a bar overlooking the River Vltava in the pretty town of Ceské Budejovice in Lower Bohemia in the Czech Republic.

The EU reference lab in Britain today confirmed tests indicate a dead swan found in the south of the Czech Republic had the H5N1 bird flu virus, an official said.