Squirrelling away to look at a rarely spotted rodent

The story this week begins with an unfortunate flat squirrel encountered on a road in the Czech Republic, awkwardly renamed Czechia, uncomfortably similar to that of war-torn Chechnya fighting for independence from Russia.

It was the dead of night and my son was driving us — my wife, myself, and his wife — back to my Czech-resident son’s summer home-from-home at his barn-cum-workshop deep in the countryside.