Mobi shot of coffee and cake in Cafe Slavia, the famous old Prague cafe that’s still a lovely place to go

My act of rest-stopping was, then, to scarper to Prague for a long-ish weekend, joining Mrs Tosh who’d been there working for most of the week. Two notable* things emerged from this excursion.

First, the trouble with those damned guidebooks. I bought the Lonely Planet guide to Prague, appreciating the fact it had recently been republished. Terrible mistake. Should have stuck with stuffy old Berlitz or the out-of-date Rough Guide.

Take, for instance, the case of our hotel. Called the Cloister Inn, it was apparently the former home to the secret police back in the Communist days. It appears to have retained much of that period’s charm.

Our room sported true youth hostel elan - single beds like boards, carpet that would cut your feet (I exaggerate) and grains of glass on the bathroom floor that really did cut your feet (I don’t exaggerate). Lonely Planet describes it as:

"A comfortable place."

Maybe the author was resident here back in the day. Everything’s relative, I guess.

He was also frustratingly vague about restaurants. Having apparently glanced at the menu of the very good Klub Architecktu, noting its "apparently vegan" offerings, he dissed it for being part of "a slightly smug complex dedicated to modern architecture".

Slightly smug? What does a "slightly smug" building do to express its self-righteous complacency? Even if a modest little centre, with a very nice restaurant, could express its self-satisfaction, it would be bloody silly to do so in a city like Prague; a Romanesque and Baroque orgy of a place, where much of the most modern architecture is butt-ugly apartment blocks on the outskirts (now interspersed, unlike on our last visit in 1998, with KFCs), or the outstandingly grotesque Hilton.

Were I a complex dedicated to modern architecture, I’d be showing my carefully angled, concrete and suspended glass face with some caution, saying "sorry" quite a lot, and hanging back on the slight smugness until I’d notched up, ooh, say, a century or so of steady success.

Second (yes - this is only the second notable* point, sorry). A few years ago, Motorola took a bunch of tech hacks off to New York (the dot.com bubble was yet to pop). Up the Rockefeller tower, we were treated to a short film on the Future of Mobile Phones - none of which, funnily enough, involved slumping market share or near-universal derision for a pisspoor user interface.

No, they saw The Future as involving sharply dressed chaps changing their plans to travel to LA, and opting instead for Tokyo (as one does) and then booking flights and hotels and a taxi on their Moto mobiles, sprinkling goodness down the m-commerce value chain, or somesuch. Before ordering another latte.

We all sniggered, of course, although not as much as we sniggered when they produced the motivational speaker later on in the presentation. But, the point is, Motorola were pretty much right in their vision. Or, at least, if not spot on, they probably got the extent of the change about right. We really would become mobile-toting cocky latte-sipping bastards within a very short space of time.

Fast forward to this weekend. On arrival in the Czech capital’s airport, I got a text from Mrs Tosh, with the name of a restaurant in which we and others were to meet. I had no address, and no knowledge of its dress code. So I Googled the place. On my mobile. Read it was smarter than sneaks and t-shirt, so changed in the airport, got the address for the taxi driver, and on the way read about the establishment’s fine steaks. Running slightly late, I’d ordered before I arrived.

And that, I realised almost immediately, was a series of acts just oozing technocratic smugness, all so horrifically yuppyesque I probably deserve to be thwacked to death with an oversized, antique, analogue Motorola quite soon.

Which is fine. Just don’t ask me to use the damned thing - the Geneva Convention covers that.

* The dictionary definition of notable is, of course, "worthy of note or notice; remarkable, or characterized by excellence or distinction". I’m using the word in its newer blogging definition, which is to say: worthy of blog post or posts, characterized by less than usual mind-numbing banality. The blogging definition is derived, furthermore, from the Saturday newspaper column definition, coined c. 1988.

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