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!