“Ask that man if you can stroke his hedgehog”, chuckled Sarah. 
She and her friend Becci are music teachers from Stourbridge, and we’re sitting in the midst of the Belgrade beer festival with Paddy from Melbourne.
For reasons that will always be a mystery to us, a local character is carrying a hedgehog 
around the rows of makeshift bars and bustling tables. Actually, ‘makeshift’ is doing them a disservice; the local brewers have clearly gone to town with their illuminated giant inflatable beer bottles and enormous branded banners. This is not the kind of festival to attract connoisseurs of rare ales so much as a free rock concert geared up to sell as much of the stuff as humanly possible.
As the dubious Serbian rock music booms out here below the walls of the historic Belgrade castle, at the point where the river Sava meets the mighty Danube, the bizarre man stops to entertain us, or perhaps to be entertained by us. Becci does indeed get to stroke his hedgehog.
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