After the thaw

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The forecasters have been promising us temperatures of up to 16 degrees Celsius this coming week, and Czech papers and websites have been full of stories about the long winter finally being over. From January until just a few days ago, more or less, it has been unusually cold. Indeed, snowfalls in Prague at the start of the year were described as the heaviest in a full three decades.

One consequence of the thaw that eventually followed those snows was that the streets of the city returned to their natural width. For many weeks, pedestrians in the capital experienced frequent bottlenecks, with half the pavement in some spots occupied by mounds of snow.

Of course those mounds didn’t stay white for too long. They quickly turned ugly, going grey, and even black in some places close to traffic. And when the piles of snow melted what was left behind was even uglier. As a friend put it a few weeks ago, I have just discovered that the snow in Prague is made up of cigarette butts and dog poop.

One photograph in the newspaper Lidové noviny featured a great pile of the two substances along with other junk and grit on one side of a city street. It was almost enough to put a body off his morning coffee.

A local official in a part of Brno called Nový Liskovec told Lidové noviny that the district’s dog owners use 300,000 dog poop bags a year. But when it snows they seem to lose their civic spirit (even though you’d imagine the “evidence” would be more visible on snow than concrete or grass) and the brown paper bags are left on their posts.

Now, said the official after the big thaw, the worker who operates our pooper scooper vehicle has his hands full with work, which was perhaps not the most fortunate turn of phrase.

As well as dog pooh, fag ends and other detritus, a huge amount of grit was also left on the streets of many Czech cities and towns once the snow melted. When the first thaws came at the end of February the expert view was evidently that the grit should be left in place until local authorities were reasonably certain the snow wouldn’t return.

But as the spring has drawn ever nearer the question of what to do with the grit has been raised again. Cleaning it for re-use in the future is apparently more expensive than dumping it and just buying fresh grit the following winter.

In any case, who cares about that now? It won’t be too long before the trees are in bloom and the beer gardens are open, and great dirt-filled mounds of snow and grit are happily forgotten.