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.