drinking vodka without food...

…is for advanced learners only. please do not attempt this without the supervision of a bona fide russian expert:

1) lament the fact that you are forced to drink vodka without food (keep it short, but be sure to mention that the only way you can overcome your infinite sadness at the lack of food is by drinking your sorrows away).
2) turn your head to the side and exhale all the air in your lungs.
3) down vodka in one gulp.
4) immediately sniff your left forearm (note ‘forearm’ – you are not checking for b.o. here but fooling your senses into thinking that you actually do have food. ignore the fact that this is rubbish).
5) repeat steps 1) to 4) until you start sniffing other people’s forearms, legs, etc.
6) get into taxi, drive all over city looking for flat, randomly saying any and all russian numbers with 3 in them to confused driver in the hope that one of them is your block.
7) arrive outside block, tip taxi driver two months’ wages as you can’t get your head around currency when sober, let alone after a couple of carafes of cedar nut vodka.
8) engage mind fully on task of cracking code to flat stairwell lock. it is 3 digits long. imagine it is like the lottery – it could be you! it isn’t.
9) randomly push numbers on key pad – you have to be in it to win it! you don’t.
10) wonder if nose is numb from sub-zero temperatures or from evening of repeatedly rubbing it against forearm. ignore mild panic at the back of your head about hypothermia and imagine you are tom cruise in ‘mission impossible’ dangling from wires. concentrate memory – narrow eyes and frown to aid process of concentration. collapse on step with hilarity at own uselessness/possibility of dying from cold yards from your flat/piece of lint on your glove/etc.
11) apologise twice to woman in nightie who eventually opens the door – first in italian, then remember, go back and repeat in russian. sniff your forearm to show how sincere you are.
12) emerge from coma next day and wonder why left sleeve of shirt is covered in snot and spittle.

anxiety and comfort meet...

…as i ease into the seat. something is wrong, even though it feels so right. for the first time since i’ve been here, i’ve managed to get a seat on the bus home. i am deeply suspicious. i even have a choice – one with no view through the window on the left, or one with no view through the window on the right. naturally, i take the seat with no view on the left.

the lack of a view through the window is one of the many features of riding siberian buses that makes them so endearing. there are several reasons why you can’t see out of the window – the window is dirty or it is covered in ice or there is a frilly pink curtain in the way. siberians aren’t big on curtains in their own homes, perhaps because there is no word for ‘privacy’ in russian, but when it comes to buses they really go to town. and it is always the slightly over-fussy style of curtain that you find in domestic british toilets. to complement this look, there are also fading pictures of kittens or puppies dotted around the place, while the driver very often has to peer through a variety of enormous rubber plants to see where he is going. i’m sure if i looked carefully, i’d find a wool-knit matrooshka doll with a toilet roll underneath.

the source of this travelling toilet chic is the conductor. there is one on every bus and it is invariably a woman. as in all good matriarchal homes, she takes care of the money (18p for anywhere in the city) and keeps the bus spotlessly clean, while the driver, invariably a man, enjoys himself cutting up pedestrians and ladas. i like to think of them as a slightly grumpy couple who might bicker with each other but otherwise show the kind of tough united front that stymied both napoleon and hitler. indeed, the only time i’ve seen the driver leave his seat-cum-armchair was when a slightly drunken man complained for all of two seconds about the driver’s staccato clutch control. the conductor immediately launched into a defence of her ‘husband’ while he simply stopped the bus in the middle of the road, walked up the aisle, literally picked the man up and threw him out of the door.

when choosing which bus to get on – there are so many you can wait a minute or two for the next one – an important factor is the size of the conductor. basically, is she a porker? porkers are rare here – you see about one a week, as opposed to one a minute in britain – but there a couple on the buses. and size really does matter because, despite the number of them, the buses are massively overcrowded. in the mornings it’s not too bad. this is largely because i’m not an early starter and also because my stop is populated by special dwarf russians. these little people take up less room and therefore it feels less congested. sadly for them, all the buses are german (i know this because charmingly they still have all the german signs on them, my favourite being one written in seven different languages, none of which is russian). germans are generally quite tall and so the handrails are placed at an appropriate reach for their height, one which is several inches above the arm length of the little people. the little people then have the choice of whether to fall over every time the driver changes gear, or to jump up, grip on and hang suspended from the rail for the duration of the journey. some of the older desperate ones will grab onto your coat like someone drowning and you have to beat them off or face being pulled to the floor with them.

in the evenings normal size is resumed and a fat conductor can make the difference between life and death. this is because every journey feels like an attempt on the world record for the number of people in a confined space. it is staggering. you can only take shallow breaths, not only because there is very little oxygen left on the bus, but because you are so crushed you can only breathe in when the people around you are breathing out. and this is just the static situation – when the conductor starts moving down the aisle people have to make way for her and the only place available is other people. there is a kind of domino effect and a fat conductor can be felt some 20-25 people away as she rolls slowly through the crowd like a human ball in a claustrophobic’s nightmare of 10-pin bowling.

naturally, only the strong survive, but as the weak ones are crushed and die, this engenders a blitz-like spirit among the rest of the passengers. we all laugh as we sway back and forward to the rhythm of the bad driving, and go into fits when the bus stops and someone else actually tries to get on. there are cheers if they manage it by clambering over heads and lying on top of people in the seats. and if someone wants to get off, it is like the culmination of a successful escape plan if they manage it. for not only do they have to get past the hundreds of bodies, conscious and unconscious, between them and the door, they also have no idea where they are. the windows are dirty, iced up, covered in german stickers, shrouded in pink toilet curtain and finally blocked by the heads of all the people. if we are lucky, someone finds a tiny crack through all the obstacles and sends word back – ‘permyakova!’ if it’s your stop, you steel yourself, square your shoulders and begin your escape. ‘mozhne?’ you say jokingly – ‘is it possible?’ of course, it isn’t, not without someone getting hurt, but this is the ritual and everyone understands – if you break their leg forcing your way through, it is an honourable injury and they accept it without malice just as you would for them. when you finally make it to the outside, the fresh air is painful in your lungs, like a starving man eating too much too soon. but at least you have made it.

all of which makes me suspicious about getting a seat on an uncrowded bus. this state of mind is not helped by the fact that, as usual, they are playing the theme from the godfather over the bus stop tannoy. is someone going to be iced and only us ignorant few don’t know about it? the doors close and the bus pulls away. like all the buses it is old and at every gear change it makes a noise like bruce lee before he launches the decisive kick at someone’s head. i begin to sweat, nervous. the conductor comes and issues my ticket. i recognise her. she is one of the porkers but i am not crushed by her movements. i grip the armrest, all this relaxed and comfortable travelling is making me tense. the bus stops. no one gets on. it is silent. we all look at each other fearfully. this is wrong. it is like we have contravened one of the deeper moral precepts – murder, adultery, baked potatoes without pickled onions. what is going on? suddenly the conductor starts moving down the aisle asking for our destinations. she reports back to the driver. he is not happy as only he should be allowed to sit in comfort. he tells us as much over the tannoy. we agree and offer to bunch up in a corner but it is no use. he kicks us all off and, pathetically, gratefully, we all clamber aboard the next bus, happy to be crushed and starved of oxygen once again.

there is a proper way to drink vodka...

…and this weekend i learnt it:

1) put a large piece of meat on your fork.

2) turn your head to the side and exhale all the air in your lungs.

3) down vodka in one gulp.

4) immediately eat meat.

it’s a simple technique but there is logic behind it. some vodka has a very high proof, so high in fact that it will burn your insides should you have any air in them. exhaling first prevents this tragedy. eating the meat stops you getting totalled in the space of a few minutes and instead allows you to get totalled over a few hours. the russians even have a word for it which means ‘eat and drink at the same time’. it doesn’t stop your head hurting in the morning though. for that there is another in the long line of natural remedies – pickle juice.

all the siberians are clapping...

…so i am clapping too. i feel i am blending in rather well. when the siberians kiss their neighbours, i kiss my neighbour. when they eat, i eat. when they drink, i drink. when they tinkle their little bells, i tinkle my little bell. when they throw rice in the air, i throw it. when they start chanting something at the bride and groom, i start chanting too, even though i do not know what i am saying. i am just one more guest at the wedding, as clear about what is going on as everyone else, even though i have absolutely no idea what is being said by the man in the middle of the big horseshoe of tables with the microphone.

it has been an energetic event so far. the actual wedding ceremony took about three minutes, if that. as far as i could make out, an official at the town hall said to the couple, you are married. they said, yes we are. and they were. it seemed a very civilised way of doing it and everyone clapped loudly while the couple danced around the room to their favourite song. there was a brief pause while they played the theme to ‘the godfather’ and signed some papers, and then we all drank champagne and ate chocolates, before piling into cars and mini-buses. i had seen wedding processions hurtle around the city before with people leaning out of the windows whooping with joy and honking horns and i was all ready to do this but sadly it was deemed too cold so i just had to make do with the hurtling bit.

this involves driving for 10 minutes, stopping, getting out, eating some bread and meat, drinking champagne or vodka, taking pictures, and then getting back in again before heading off to a new place to do the same. it goes on for 2-3 hours and is a lot of fun and a great way to see the city. many of the places we stopped at were memorials to the great patriotic war – the second world war. it is traditional for newlyweds to go to these fantastic monuments (giant candles and flames) to give thanks for the enormous sacrifices made by the 20 000 000 who died defending the motherland.

from there we headed to the reception where i am busy clapping and blending in. suddenly, however, i notice that everyone is looking at a point behind me while they are applauding. i turn round to see what it is and find that the people behind me are looking at a point in front of me. it takes a while, but sherlock-like i eventually put two and two together and realise my cover is blown. they are all actually looking at me. the strange noise i hear coming from the man with the microphone begins to take on a semi-familiar ring too – it is my name with russian vowel sounds. i begin to wonder, have i done something wrong? maybe i didn’t tinkle my bell hard enough or i didn’t kiss my neighbour when i was supposed to. at which point the mc breaks into english – we are honoured today to have a great guest from england…

he continues with this elaborate build-up and i have to stand up and take a bow. he goes on, as if leading up to something. i begin to suspect i will have to make a speech. i am gripped by linguistic paralysis. ever since i came here, my response to russian is to speak italian – it is involuntary and pointless. half of my brain is calculating how many people in the room speak english – i estimate 4 at the most. the other half is compiling this fabulous italian encomium using both the passato prossimo and the passato remoto. i think of my italian teacher, she would have been so proud. and then i remember where i am. think in english, i urge myself. i run through other speeches i have heard. there aren’t any. my head is empty. i wonder, what is a speech? the mc finishes his – i am vaguely aware that it has been magnificent. he has built me up to be some kind of literary great, a master of english prose and verse equalled only by shakespeare. i am a giant, a legend. my words will be beluga for the brain, people will talk about it for years to come, it will be the greatest moment of their lives… he pushes the microphone into my hand. i cough. it will be alright i tell myself, you always think of something. i ponder idly what it might be while the mc gestures for me to speak. everyone is staring at me. er, i say, all the best from england…

and sit back down. i am struck straightaway by the sheer awfulness of the speech. it is worse than anything i have ever heard. if i had stood up, dropped my trousers and farted for 30 seconds it would have been better. i am stunned by myself. these lovely people have invited me to one the great moments in their life and this is how i repay them? naturally, all the siberians are clapping, and, to compound my own ineptitude, as a reflex i start clapping too. i console myself with the thought that only 4 people will have understood it and that even those who did will not grasp how inappropriate it was. at the earliest opportunity i nip out to the foyer for a fag. there is a crowd out there smoking too. immediately they all start speaking english to me – great speech, the mc said it was an example of the british art of brevity as beauty, well done, etc… i am simultaneously mortified that so many people understood what i said and overwhelmed with their generosity of spirit. at which point everything moves on and they begin to show me how to dance siberian-style. it is one of my life’s ambitions and, as five of us fall on the floor in a heap of uncoordinated limbs, i stop caring that i can’t speak english anymore.

every day brings a new low...

…in temperatures. the temperature is an obsession here and every other building has an electronic thermometer on it telling you quite how unimaginably cold it is. apparently, it even affects property prices because the north of the city averages 5 degrees less than the south. earlier this week it got down as far as minus 28 and even the siberians think it’s cold below minus 25 and they shut the schools for the under-12s. bizarrely, this actually felt warmer than later in the day when it rose to the dizzying heights of minus 19. it is the wind that makes the difference. imagine pressing your face against the inside of a freezer, scraping your skin against the ice and repeatedly slamming the door against your head – well, it is much worse than that. i was only outside for 15 minutes and could feel the epidermis blackening and dying on the tiny bits of exposed skin on my face.

naturally, none of this impresses the siberians. many of them are like old people in their 80s who add a few years to their age and pretend to be in their 90s, as if they weren’t old enough. minus 28? this isn’t cold – last winter it was minus 45. you should have seen it – now that, my foreign friend, that is cold. i even did a little experiment with my students, getting them to assign temperatures to the scale - freezing, very cold, cold, cool, mild, warm, very warm, hot. warm came in at 0 degrees and mild at minus 5. obviously, i thought this was ridiculous, but then when the temperature rose to minus 10 the next day it actually seemed like a mini-heatwave and i was too hot. i think this is what they mean by going native.

i knew something was strange...

…even before i opened my eyes. it was darker than it should have been, like the earth had drifted away from the sun during the night and the daylight was thinner. i wondered idly about this scenario for a couple of minutes (the end of civilisation, mass extinction, no more кафе с молоком chocolate bars) before deciding to open my eyes to see if it was true. it wasn’t. it was much more frightening than that: the view from my windows was almost entirely obscured by snow. i had gone to sleep in a flat and woken up in an igloo. wow, i thought, that’s a lot of snow. i can see why siberians don’t bother with curtains. and then i remembered – i live on the second floor.

because i am five i thought this was very exciting and had to get outside as soon as possible, assuming it was actually possible. to honour the occasion, i decided to wear my hat. the way people talk about hats here, endlessly discussing their importance in reverential tones, i have come to think of them as magical objects granting their wearers almost supernatural powers that make you immune to radiation, bear attacks, coverage of the tomkat wedding, and even the cold. while the first three are true, the last one is true only up to a point – that point being some five seconds after stepping outside into a blizzard where the temperature is minus 12 without the wind factor (you will see, i have been told, minus 40 without the wind is a lot better than minus 25 with it – can’t wait).

however, the ferocity of the cold took second place for once to the stupendous scene before me. i had never seen this much snow before. most of the known world had disappeared – cars, trees, buildings and any sense of place. and still it was snowing. but this is siberia and they have their own forces of nature to deal with anything the winter can throw at them – they are called babooshkas. these old women, with snow shovels seemingly twice their size, were out clearing doorways and sculpting defiles through which the rest of us could plough our way to the bus stop.

nothing stops the buses either – literally. you see them come looming out of the violent fog of flakes about 50 metres away, two unsteady lights hovering in the air above where the road used to be. from 25 metres it begins to take on a shape and you see the driver pressed hard against his seat, everyone else crammed at the back of the bus, desperate to slow it down. it skids into touching distance and you notice that the road is several feet lower than it used to be. the doors fling open but still it hasn’t completely stopped. as it edges by, you realise it isn’t going to stop either. people inside the bus hold out their hands and you grab on and jump before the bus picks up speed again and heads into the city. commuting was never so much fun.

along the route there are hundreds of workers with shovels, snow blowers, and tractors trying to clear paths along the roads and pavements. even with all that manpower, however, the snow is still winning and the city is gradually sinking into drift, like a giant wedding cake. as the bus slides through my stop i jump out and land up to my knees in snow. i am helped out by two men in enormous fur hats while, bizarrely, the theme from ‘the third man’ plays over the bus stop tannoy. i turn left because that is what i normally do but i have little sense of direction because the snow is even heavier now, blinding me. i see lowrie-like black blurs moving in the flickering whiteness ahead of me and decide to follow them. coming to a junction, i find that crossing the road is now a matter of life and death. the drivers cannot see, the cars cannot stop and the difference between the road and the pavement is over a metre and a half in places and it is like scrambling up a sand dune.

finally reaching the office, i feel quite heroic. i expect medals. холодно? my friend asks me with a triumphant look on her face – are you cold? i tell her i am and wonder at the glint in her eye. looking around i notice that she is not alone and that, as it turns out, everyone is in a terrific mood. eventually it is explained to me: this is what they have been waiting for. we have had snow and cold for a while now, but this is the real deal and they can finally relax. winter has arrived and siberia is in its element. knee-deep, in fact.

taunting sick foreigners...

...is what passes for fun round these parts.

russian tv...

…god alone knows what that’s about. i say this because no-one i know watches it, except me, and that’s because i am sick and have nothing else to do except smear raspberry jam across my fevered brow. obviously, i don’t understand most of what’s said. it does have great range though. there is one channel seemingly devoted to replaying obscure english football games from about 10 years ago. there is another channel which shows nothing but models walking down the catwalk complete with the most head-sickening camera movements known to tv. my favourite though is probably the russian version of nickelodeon. russian cartoons are dark and flickering, the colours always charred. and the subjects are equally grim – a puppy with cheeky, joyful eyes hides in a dark alley while a crippled old woman gets off a night bus into the snowy, deserted street. the puppy then launches itself from the shadows and viciously attacks the woman, dragging her screaming to the floor before scampering off with her handbag. another one showed a dappled doe frolicking in the snow, the winter sun casting bleak shadows over the animal’s joy before a hunter emerges from hiding and shoots the deer square in the head. touchingly, the animators lovingly detail the powder burn around the entry wound, as if searching for the mystery of the doe’s lost soul in the blackened fur.

i have been given a copy of winnie the pooh to watch when i get round to fixing up my vcr. it is not the disney version. by the look of the cover, winnie is a dark and mournful bear with cruel teeth and claws, while eeyore is a shabby drunk close to death by cirrhosis. if there is a tigger i suspect he will savage winnie in some kind of terrible cartoon cock-fight. the whole thing looks like it was directed by bergman deep in a ten-pill-a-day depression. this is what makes russian tv so very uplifting. there is a programme called ‘calm down’ which, in between shots of a presenter as happy as the sun, shows nothing but people drowning, houses burning, animals with two heads dead in a barn and other brutal stuff like that. i could not understand the title at first, but having watched the cartoons, all is clear: you are going to die, it will be terrible, but so what – get over it.

(as if to prove the point… i have been watching a russian version of ‘the 3 musketeers’ while typing this. they do not buckle much swash, it has to be said. instead, there has just been a 10 minute scene where one of the musketeers toys with shooting himself in the head. he keeps crying about something and symbolically blowing out candles until the room is almost pitch black. eat some jam, i shout at the screen. doubtless i will not find out what happens as this is on a channel which keeps strictly to a 2-hours-per-film schedule and if a film happens to over-run this because of adverts or because it was made by kubrick, then they simply lop the end off. just like life.)

russian illnesses...

…are different from ours. they are more soulful. magnetism from the sun’s rays, for example, is a popular cause of illness here, leading to madness at one extreme and a general dispiritedness at the other. several of my students have also been ill due to the prevalence of a low pressure system. when i ask them what treatment they take for it, they reply dolefully that nothing can be done. because of this the weather forecast has a whole different meaning, and i often check it to see whether certain of my students will be talking the next day or just quietly weeping through the whole lesson.

if russian illnesses are different, then so are the treatments. i know this because i am sick. yesterday i woke up with a throat full of nails. concerned that i would be too hoarse to speak properly i texted one of my colleagues to ask if she could get me some throat lozenges for when i arrived. (this is not laziness on my part, by the way, rather that i have no idea what i am buying – c.f. the story about the mouthwash which turned out to be russian false teeth solution). half way through the first lesson, two of my colleagues asked me to step out into the corridor where one of them had what looked like a small plastic fire extinguisher. try this, she said, it’s better than that western chemical stuff. what is it? i whispered, wondering where my packet of tunes was. eucalyptus, i was informed. desperate, i sprayed it into my mouth, but apparently i was doing it wrong.
- not on your tongue, on your throat.
- (spray) eeugh?
- no, further back.
- (spray) eugh eeugh?
- no, no, no. put your tongue down.
- he’s not putting his tongue down.
- i know.
- (spray) eeugh?
- no.
- here, let me do it. stick your tongue out. no! not that far! there… (spray)
- no, his tongue was still up. let me have a go.

the corridor is a busy place and soon a small crowd had gathered to watch, offer advice, and generally eat picnics. however, with one of them more or less holding my tongue on the floor with her foot, and the other forcing my upper palate against the ceiling with her elbow, my two colleagues were finally convinced they had found the right angle with which to douse the fire in my throat and set about liberally spraying me in eucalyptus. had there been a stray gang of koala bears roaming the area at the time, no doubt my demise would have figured on the ‘unusual crimes’ section of ‘crimewatch’, but, as it was, i merely ended up with the unnerving feeling that i could smell the australian jungle somewhere close by.

of course, it didn’t work, so this morning when i woke up with every joint in my body wracked with pain, i was very clear in my text about the need to supply me with industrial strength lemsip. i want to sweat paracetamol, i said, nothing else will do. however, my boss decided that she wouldn’t let me come to work in case i developed ‘angina’ (pronounced ‘angeena’) which is some terrible russian throat disease which can kill you if it rains, or something like that, and so she promised to bring the medicine to my flat. two hours later, with my head pounding and my limbs aching and my nose running, my boss turned up at the door. i have your medicine, she said. we decided that that western stuff is no good for you so i got you this instead, she went on, holding out a fancy paper bag. please not more eucalyptus, i inwardly prayed, but no – it was half a cup of raspberry jam and a small container of baby food.
- that looks like half a cup of raspberry jam and some baby food.
- yes. raspberry jam contains the same chemicals as aspirin. you put it in your tea.
- i put jam in my tea?
- yes.
- you are a hippy.
- i am not a hippy. 150 million russians know this.
- and the baby food?
- i wanted some. it’s very good for you. i will leave you half.
- thank you.
- you are welcome.

needless to say, i am now fully cured and am currently working on a paper for the lancet about how to cure gout by putting marmalade in your coffee.

andre has a gun...

…in fact, now i look carefully, he has two guns. they are handguns and he keeps them in the glove compartment. luckily, andre and me have an understanding: he won’t shoot me as long as i pay for my ride in his cab and don’t mention the fact that he is the worst driver in siberia. or the fact that he had to stop several times before he found where i lived. i don’t blame him for this because i don’t know where i live either. people ask me and i say я не знаю – i don’t know. this is unfortunate because one of the few topics i have mastered in russian is giving directions. people seem to know this because i have been stopped several times in the street by people asking me for directions. i don’t know if they are armed or not but andre is and he knows where i live now, which is more than i do. he is ecstatic that i don’t mind he is overcharging me by 50 roubles and almost swoons when i give him a 10 rouble tip. this is when he opens the glove box and gives me his card, writing his name and personal number down so that i can call him direct, like we are friends. i imagine him ringing me:
- hey sputnik, want to come play wild west?
- love to andre, but i’m fresh out of semi-automatic pistols.
- that’s ok sputnik, i have two: one for me and one for you.
- great, can we use hollow points this time?
- for sure, who will stop us?

sasha has a big heart...

…either that or he is threatening to slice open my sternum with his cigarette lighter. i am unsure, but he keeps imitating the action of slashing open his chest with the lighter and pulling back the flaps of skin. i opt for the former interpretation because open heart surgery with a blunt piece of plastic would be unpleasant and i think sasha is better than this. the truth is i don’t know. the only words of english sasha knows are ‘father’ and ‘russian’, and the only words of russian i know are ‘can i have some cake please’. normally, this would make for a short conversation but we manage to stretch it out for a good half an hour. sasha pours me a vodka shot equivalent to the daily fluid intake of an average saharan family – ‘mylinki’, he says, meaning ‘small’. russians live in a big country and i think it affects their sense of scale. by a complicated series of gestures involving raising his hand off the floor, sasha intimates that he has been drinking much bigger shots of vodka than this since he was a small child. i deduce he is being lenient on the foreigner. we throw it back in one, if by ‘one’ you understand 30 seconds of non-stop glugging. still, it is better than the stuff back home and i cannot linger long on the trail of lava in my throat because sasha has picked up a fish on his fork and is gesturing for me to eat it. the fish is big enough to have made a shark think twice and, sadly, it never made friends with a frying pan. i ask him what it is called and he says something that sounds like ‘mormon’. it is certainly big enough to have been a mormon and i know that non-orthodox religions are not popular here. i guess sasha killed the mormon by slicing open his sternum with a cigarette lighter. i decide to down it in one as tradition demands and knock the fish back whole. i imagine it splashing into life in the sea of vodka in my stomach. if the evening continues like this, no doubt it will soon have a mate and they can breed and do happy fish things together. sasha seems pleased at any rate and because he is, i am too. it is the russian way.

like the boy in the bubble...

…going outside can kill me. every day since i have been here people have been asking me, где шапка? – where is your hat? when i reply that it’s at home, they look me squarely in the eye and say, matter-of-factly, ‘you will die’. until yesterday i did not understand why.

i have a thermometer outside my kitchen window. yesterday it said minus 10. that’s a bit chilly, i thought to myself, i might need my jacket. at the same time, i also reckoned it was comfortably within the range of temperatures that i like to think of as ‘british’ – cold that i’ve experienced at home. this range goes down as far as minus 20. anything below that is new territory but yesterday, at a mere minus 10, was old hat and, consequently, i didn’t need one.

to be fair to me, my calculations were not entirely foolhardy. i was working yesterday. i have a 2 minute walk to the bus-stop, and there is a bus every 3 minutes. at the other end, i have a 5 minute walk to the office. i figured at most i would be 10 minutes outside – no-one dies in 10 minutes because they haven’t got a hat.

i was wrong. everybody knew i was wrong too. like the only person in fancy dress, i was alone with my bare head. old ladies tutted and crossed themselves when i walked by. young children pointed while their mothers tried to cover their eyes. i’m sure i even heard a blind man thank god for the loss of his sight. but i didn’t need their disapproval to tell me i was wrong.

this is because the siberian cold is different from ours. in britain the cold seeps into your bones, insinuating itself slowly into your very being so you can be cold without even knowing it. in siberia, you always know. the cold is fast and ferocious. it attacks you from the second you walk outside, savaging anything you leave uncovered. it is the wind that makes the difference. after 3000 miles scouring the frozen earth, it has long since lost any warmth it picked up across the northern atlantic. it feels like the wind is a rabid animal, biting your ears and shaking them wildly in its mouth until they tear off.

i felt all this within the taiga-sheltered area before the bus-stop. the bus-stop itself is like the border between this world and the next, exposed to the deep polar sighs that come howling across the plains. it is always colder there, even when it is warm. yesterday it was not warm. i was told i kept flinching, but i think i was in shock. like people who fall into icy water, i did not have full control of my motor functions. you start to hallucinate and feel your breath turn into light. and then, because this is russia, the bus arrives and it is 30 degrees inside, as it is everywhere, and the ice cracks and melts in your veins and you can admire the pretty white stuff under the bright blue sky again.

actual russian joke...

…lenin was kneeling by a river one morning, shaving with an old-fashioned cut-throat razor. not far away a young boy stood watching him. lenin moved the razor slowly up and down his face and the boy stared, absolutely fascinated. this went on for a while: lenin kept shaving with his razor, and the boy kept watching him. up and down, up and down. and still, lenin did not slice the boy’s head off.

answering your questions...

what is siberia like?
imagine the north pole with buildings lurching from the permafrost like icebergs, and trees blasted and disfigured by a cruel wind and you are half way there. this side of the urals there is nothing to impede the wind for thousands of miles and when it blows it stings your face like cold nettles, curdling vast dunes of snow into a desert of bright white candle wax.

what is the weather like?
it's much like a slightly chillier britain really – on the milder days it’s only cold enough to freeze the corneal fluid in your eyes, temporarily leaving you able to look in just one direction; on other days, however, it’s so unbearably cold you can actually see the frost begin to crystallise around words as they leave your mouth, forming little ice sculptures in the shape of sound waves that tinkle like bells when they break on the ground. creating long and complex 'word-bergs', as the locals call them, is a form of art here and ice-poets are prized for their ability to mouth expansive words like 'inconsolable' before their tongues snap off in the liquid oxygen-like conditions. sadly, following glasnost, a fad for welsh place names in the 1990s left a whole generation of dumb siberian poets in its wake and the new wave has reacted by turning to so-called abstract poetry which largely amounts to short screams or sighs.

where do you live?
i live in a one-room wooden shack on the edge of the quilted taiga. at night i have 5.1 surround sound and hi-res dirty moon graphics, with howling wolves to the back of me and trees trailing fingers in the wind on either side. often, i sit by the fire drinking lemon tea from my samovar before going to bed beneath a bear rug.

what is the transport like?
siberian light is much like a cat and is asleep most of the time, so i go to work and come home in the dark. i travel mainly by troika lit by torches made from kerosene-soaked rags wrapped around gnarled branches. these torches have the added benefit of warding off bears and packs of wolves, both of whom are beginning to feel the winter hunger. if it is very cold, the driver gives me some of the kerosene to smear over my face in order to prevent frostbite as it has a lower freezing point than the water you expel while breathing. i have to remember not to smoke on these days, but invariably some people forget and it is not unusual to see people in the street with their faces suddenly lit by flames throw themselves head first into the snow to put them out.

what do you do?
i teach english, mainly to cossacks. i use an approach called task based learning. this involves putting students into role-playing situations, like imagining being in a shop or restaurant, where they have to use all their available vocabulary. when they find they haven’t got enough, it creates a desire to learn more. the other day, for example, i tried them with a scenario where they had to plan a raid on the tatars and it proved most useful for teaching collocations (‘complete massacre’), phrasal verbs (‘slicing someone’s head off’), vocabulary (‘guts’ ‘glory’) and grammar (‘we will kill them all’ not ‘we kill them all’). it is traditional here to finish each lesson with a shot of vodka and so, by the end of the day, i often feel quite tired and emotional.

what is the food like?
siberia is blessed with a rich, black soil that is perfect for growing almost anything, as long as it’s beetroot. in order to keep it fresh for the rest of the year, siberians pickle all the beetroot they grow. the pickle is made from fermented lichen which is available all the time, albeit a few feet beneath the snow in winter. for breakfast, then, i will usually have pickled beetroot cornflakes, for lunch pickled beetroot and chips, and for dinner pickled beetroot soup or borsch. naturally, years of such a diet has an effect on the locals and they generally live longer but look slightly more shriveled and somewhat more angry than their contemporaries elsewhere in the world.

what do they think of the english?
as their main source of information about england comes from weekly showings of ‘the avengers’ at the cinema, they think we are an impossibly glamorous race with a nice line in ‘portable yurts’ or umbrellas. also, they like queen and will often sing the entirety of ‘we are the champions’ if they think i’m feeling homesick, or just if they want to make me sick – i’m not completely sure.

if you've ever wondered...

…where all the gas masks from world war ii went, then i can tell you that aeroflot bought them. when the stewardess donned hers for the safety demonstration before the flight, she looked like she was ready to toss a cs canister down the aisle and hijack the plane. the only thing that offset this impression was the way she cackled throughout, laughing at the idea that knowing where the emergency exits were could possibly save you from the impending death guaranteed by a flight on aeroflot. she did not even pretend to check we were all wearing our seatbelts – not that i could as mine was broken. in fact, everything on the plane was broken – seats, signs, televisions and english. naturally, this all helped to create a millennial style party atmosphere, and as we stuttered off the runway everyone was in oblivion-inspired good spirits – i wouldn’t have been surprised to see the grim reaper somewhere at the back, feet up, happily sharing a drink with his neighbour.

somewhere over finland the window froze over and the gas-masked stewardess began handing out what looked like pills. however, remembering the advice from my childhood never to accept mazzies from strange dealers i declined and prepared to accept my annihilation wide-eyed. the captain’s voice crackled over the intercom. this too was broken and his fading in and out made it sound like he was calling to us from the dark side of the styx. we began to fall out of the sky in the kind of trajectory more commonly adopted by sparrow-hawks. suddenly, as we burst through the startled clouds, there was moscow. for such a large city it moved very quickly – in our direction. the maniacal stewardess decided that this would be the perfect time to hand me my entry documents to fill in. all the ink in my biro was g-forced at the wrong end so i had to write with the paper over my head. the form was all in russian and as far as i know i might as well have been completing my details for entry into the afterlife. i finished just as we bounced off the runway for the first time like a giant tin tennis ball. there were several more bounces before we came to a serene stop and everyone, apart from me, began politely applauding like they were watching a cricket match and someone had just scored a couple of runs.

last year, moscow’s sheremetyevo-2 was voted the worst airport in europe. i can’t really comment for two reasons. firstly, when we landed i was gripped with the kind of life-loving frenzy that had james stewart running through snow-creamed streets shouting ‘i want to live again, clarence’. and secondly, the pilot had actually dropped us off at a building site rather than an airport. it looked like it would make a nice car park when it was finished. at the information desk i asked, in russian, for the location and times of the next bus to sheremetyevo-1. awed by my convincing accent, the woman behind the desk replied in english. in case i did not understand, the man behind me then translated what she said – into english:

- following bus 11 o’clock

- she says following bus 11 o’clock

- i see, and where does it leave from?

- bus go trees, tree circle, bus there

- she says bus go trees, tree circle, bus there

- bus in trees?

- yes

- she says yes

after 20 minutes negotiating the kind of maze usually found in greek myths, i managed to exit the airport and get to the front where, naturally, there were no trees, arranged in druidic circles or otherwise. i wandered about and found the remains of a timetable flyposted in the gloom to concrete some 10 feet above my head. my ‘lonely planet’ guide intimates that russian timetables are more like crossword clues than clear displays of information but, even taking this into account, i was sure that the last bus had left town about an hour ago. i wondered about getting a taxi, not that there were any, but i remembered the advice of the woman next to me on the plane – ‘whatever you do, do not get a taxi, they steal from you and worse. always get a bus’. it was as this was sinking in that a man with a cap pulled low over his face came up to me – ‘taxi?’

i spent the next half an hour vainly asking bus drivers if they were going to sheremetyevo-1 while the man in the cap followed me about like jackals crowding a lame antelope. faced with a choice between being murdered and missing my connecting flight, i naturally chose the possibility of violent death and we haggled over the price:

- how much?

- 700 roubles

- that’s too much

- 700 roubles

- ok then, let’s go

as we wandered over to a darkened corner of some forgotten car park (no doubt the new departure lounge) i felt about my person for potential weapons. thanks to the security at heathrow, my motorola was as lethal as it got. if he was armed with anything more unpleasant than bad manners it was going to be an unfair fight. i decided to disarm him with my winning personality:

- do you like football?

- football?

- да, вам нравится футбол?

- футбол? ах, гацца!

- гацца?

- да, гацца.

- ah! gazza! yes! a man who retired from the game over a decade ago, how very topical you are. scorchio!

- scorchio?

- never mind. гацца!

- да, гацца!

we could have gone on like this for hours if it hadn’t been for the fact that my new friend had some kind of ‘speed’-like device in his car which meant that he couldn’t drive at less than 100mph and we soon arrived at sheremetyevo-1. abandoning the car practically inside the entrance lobby, he got out with me, guided me to the check-in desk through the bosch-like scenes that make sheremetyevo-1, rather than 2, the worst airport in europe and showed me where security was. we shook hands, he left, and i felt that russia was a great place.

by the time another gas-masked stewardess had finished her routine about sick bags and death, i was asleep. i awoke to the sounds of polite applause – looking through the window i could see tyumen airport. it looked like something from the set of a tim burton movie - a giant thatched cottage, sparkling with blue fairy lights in the night. unreal as it seemed, it was strangely moving. d-day plus 1 and i had reached siberia. отлично!

head up, hombre...

... it's d-day -10. unwisely, i feel like one of those 15^th century pioneers, vespucci or magalhaes, putting together my crews and my ships. it's the little details that fuss my head, and i start to imagine forgetting the kegs of lemons and how i'll die of scurvy in some soviet-style breeze-blocked hospital ward with bowed legs and yellow skin, the dictionary just out of reach of my vitamin-deficient fingers, a nurse like julie christie imploring me 'что вы хотите?', while an orthodox priest with a beard like a small grey waterfall rocks back and forwards, muttering deprecations about my unwillingness to die before mass.

of course, when i say lemons, i mean travel plugs, but, the way i see it, not being able to juice up my laptop in siberia is pretty much like dying of scurvy 1000 miles from land anyway. and then there's the clothes. if you've seen 'the day after tomorrow' then you'll know what i'm expecting – specifically, the bit where the cold from space gets sucked to earth and everybody dies with the same disbelieving expression, as if to say 'hey pete, get this - the blood in my veins has actually frozen'. naturally, the current glut of swimming trunks and hawaiian shirts in the shops will fully equip me to deal with this weather. anyhow, i have two hats now – one that makes me look like noddy, and one that makes me look like the last stevedore to get picked for work after the fat kid with snot on his lip and the one-armed drunk who don't see so well afore noon.

actually, i look quite the visual treat at the moment. for some reason, i got it into my head that in order to perfect my russian accent and create that kind of 'zhh' tone, i should move my lips as little as possible. the result is that i look like i've had a stroke and lost control of my facial muscles. i suspect i could make a killing if i patented this technique as a homeopathic alternative to botox. certainly, it reduces the appearance of fine lines and wrinkles and i can imagine jennifer aniston in the commercial going '…and now the science bit', followed by images of beautiful women mouthing 'kalashnikov' to concerned-looking men dressed in immaculate white coats and carrying clipboards. but i digress.