31 December marked the 30th anniversary of the break-up of Czechoslovakia; one of the few cases in history when a state has been divided up without a single life being lost. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia enjoy a harmonious, friction-free friendship - tinged with a touch of regret for what was once a happy marriage.
"This is my whole life. It's my daily bread." Filip Svrcek cast his eye along the snow-covered banks of the River Morava, watching the grey-green mass flowing towards a weir and hydroelectric power station from the 1930s.
Filip, chairman of the Hodonin Rowing Club, has spent all of his 41 years within earshot of the river, which forms a long stretch of the Czech Republic's south-eastern border with Slovakia. "Over there, that's Slovakia, but for us it's almost the same place," he said, explaining that his rowers follow the rules of river navigation rather than international law.
"We stray into the Slovak half of the river all the time. We don't need official permission - and I hope we never will," he went on.
The only conflicts - in summer months - were with local fishermen rather than the police, he said.
Filip, who lives 500m from the rowing club with his Slovak wife and two children, was just 11 when Czechoslovakia divided into two.
His memory of it is a child's memory: some excitement, confusion, alarm perhaps. But any emotions have long since subsided.
"For me, everything stayed the same. Friends, language - everything was the same."
The Hodonin rowing club is just inside the Czech border with Slovakia, on the banks of the River Morava
In town, at Hodonin's Masaryk Museum, I received a tour of the exhibits devoted to Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the local boy who went on to become the founding father of Czechoslovakia at the close of World War One.
Son of a Slovak coachman and a Moravian cook who both served the imperial court, the young Masaryk - like Filip - was equally at home on both sides of the river.
Technically each time he crossed it he would be passing from the Margraviate of Moravia to the Kingdom of Hungary, from one Habsburg crownland to another.
"But he wouldn't have perceived it like that," said the museum's director Irena Chovancikova, gently scolding my efforts to apply 21st-Century understanding of statehood - with its passports and clearly-defined borders - to the Central Europe of the mid-19th Century.
