Roger Scruton’s diary: Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere. And Sophie and the children feel the same.

We borrow the old cottage in the Moravian Sudetenland from which to explore a landscape wiped away by war. Since the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, their fields have gradually reforested themselves. The lanes between the crops, in which every intersection was marked by a stone Calvary or a shrine to a patron saint, are now overgrown, the lovely statuary stolen for some bourgeois garden.