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Martina..a ‘bohemian’ thirty-something mother of two with a bent towards lost causes, the underdog and fair-play in all aspects of life.

Martina loves swimming in the sea, modern dance, the theatre, visiting museums and art galleries and window shopping followed by coffee and a cake.

Though she wasn’t born at the time of the Prague Spring of 1968, Martina is very much a product of that era and her country. Like Czech geography and history her identity is perpetually salvaging and reconstructing itself in the face of repeated disruptions and troubles – she can also be a walking ‘velvet revolution’ when necessary. I called Martina a ‘bohemian’; well of course she is literally so, Bohemia being the mediaeval kingdom centred in the Czech lands of Bohemia and Morovia – which survived in title until 1918. Bohemia and bohemian are words which sit in Western imagination alongside Atlantis, El Dorado, King Solomon’s Mines, and ‘a gypsy of society’ as Thackeray would have it...! Shakespeare gave Bohemia (Czech) a coast, Chamberlain called it a ‘faraway country inhabited by quarrelling peoples of whom we know nothing’, Puccini’s opera has it in an unheated garret in Paris, Apollinaire places Bohemia beyond the Europe where modernity has reached and Walter Scott has one of his characters from Quentin say ‘I am Zingaro, a Bohemian, an Egyptian, or whatever the Europeans… may choose to call me; but I have no country.’

Martina is none of these and all of these literally and/or imaginatively. In the words of one of her favourite Czech theatre directors, Petr Oslzly, ‘we must all…, deal with the question of freedom and the questions of our humanity – who are we?... where do we come from?...where are we going?’ In true ‘bohemian’ spirit Martina asks these questions, challenging boarders and boundaries – she also grows vegetables and fruit on the side! JE