i don’t remember being on an aircraft carrier before…

…but i have a fair idea what it must be like slap-bang in the middle of a war, with enemy planes attacking from all angles, the radar tower on fire, the cook shouting ‘no fool mess with ma beans and gets away with it!’, and a general state of pandemonium. in a roundabout way, this is because my flat was designed for very old people. one of the giveaways here is that it is so hot you can roast a chicken without the aid of an oven. another little clue is that the mirror over the sink is conveniently located on a level just below my head, making shaving even more fun than it normally is. the final clue, however, is the doorbell.

there are in fact two doorbells – there is the doorbell for the front door, and the bell on the intercom. they have different sounds so you can tell them apart, but they share one key quality – they are ear-blisteringly loud. the one on the door sounds like someone stole all the bells from st paul’s, notre dame and the duomo, stuck them in the roofspace above my flat, and provided a crack team of campanologists to man them. for those of you who wish to sound a little less gothic, the intercom buzzer has a more modern feel to it and in a previous life was an air-raid siren designed to alert people within a 50-mile radius. the upshot is that if someone is at either of my doors and they ring either of the bells, i can’t claim i didn’t hear them.

however, this is somewhat academic as i am not actually allowed to answer the door. back in my old flat, i once had an entertaining half-hour conversation with a man who came to the door wanting to sell me the very cable package i already had. when i told my boss about it though, she had conniptions. ‘anything could have happened,’ she warned me, ‘anything’. unlike stephen king, my boss knows that a vague menace is always more spooky than a concrete one, and i promised nevermore to open my door.

fast forward to last wednesday, which was a public holiday here. ‘victory day’, as it is known, celebrates the end of the second world war, or the great patriotic war as it is called in russian. it is a very big deal, with signs and banners and flags tacked onto every building, billboard and lamppost in the city. there are three key events – a parade in the morning, a speech by putin on the tv at midday, and fireworks in the evening. there was also a world cup ice hockey match at tea-time, so it was an action-packed day for all concerned and one whose focus was a swelling of national pride and patriotism.

if you are german, it is best to keep a low profile around russians on this day. one of my students told me that once he was on holiday in turkey on may 9^th and the hotel where he was staying was populated exclusively by germans and russians, but on that day the germans all but disappeared. a few brave souls went white-water rafting and it so happened that one boat was german and one was russian. there was a little bit of banter, and some water-splashing of the kind you might see every day, but then one russian suddenly snapped, picked up his paddle and whacked it on the head of the nearest german shouting, ‘that’s for stalingrad!’. it goes very deep here in a way that it doesn’t in britain.

so, having been to the parade, listened to the speech, and watched the ice hockey, i was rounding off the day in style by watching ‘apocalypto’ on dvd. yes, i truly know how to live. and then, suddenly, a siren broke into my reverie about mayan slaughter. halfway across the city, some of the old soldiers, who’d been guests at the parade that day and who were vivid with the memories it brought on, must have looked upwards expecting bombers. but no, it was just my intercom buzzer. without moving her gaze from mel gibson’s paean to knife wounds in south america, my friend asked me who it was. no-one i knew, i assured her, which was true as the real doorbell is my mobile.

the siren went off again. and again. and again. if it was no-one i knew, it occurred to me, then it must be someone i didn’t know. a stranger. on the film, a head rolled ominously down the steps of the chichen itza. the siren kept going. ‘something must be wrong,’ my friend said. ‘you’re right,’ i responded, ‘there’s an air-raid siren in my flat making more noise than a donkey who’s just discovered his retirement home is a tall building in spain, and there’s no way to turn it off.’ i decided to answer it but my friend urged me against it. ‘it could be anything,’ she warned me, ‘anything!’

and it was anything, for next the church bells started pealing too. at first there was a polite one push on the doorbell, but then it started going mad, as if someone had stolen all the bell-ringers’ shoes and then lit a series of small fires under their feet. it was at this stage that my flat began to assume the aura of an aircraft carrier under attack. the evening fireworks started to explode in the night sky outside the window, fighting with the thunder to see which could make the loudest bang. what with all the noise from the church bells and the air raid siren, the scenes of mutilation on the dvd, the sense of an unknown menace outside both doors, the storm, the fireworks, and the general panic gripping the flat’s occupants, i think it’s fair to say that i am in no way exaggerating my plight.

eventually, my friend decided she had to answer the door. almost, anyway, as they don’t answer the door here like we do in britain. as every flat has two doors, what they do is open one door and shout through the other. it lends proceedings a certain siege-like air, especially if you don’t understand what is being shouted. naturally i provided my own translation:

friend: we’re not coming out!

stranger: you know it has to end sometime.

friend: you’ll never take us alive!

stranger: if that’s the way you want it…

etc.

this, as it turned out, was not wholly inaccurate. but what the stranger and his friend downstairs wanted was not us, but my tv. or rather, his tv.

as everything inconvenient tends to do, it all turned on my landlady. if she had played tennis on the men’s circuit in the 1970s, we would now lovingly refer to her as the kind of character the game is missing now. this is because she has a special personality which she made herself using nettles and drain hair. she has a slightly squashed appearance like a raisin trodden underfoot. and she tends to shout-come-scream if a line call goes against her. because of this, it normally takes three of us to deal with her at any one time, and we tag-team it, pulling each other out when the tongue-biting comes close to actual severance. for added spice, when i speak to her it is through a translator, which often makes it seem like we're an old couple who can't bear to speak to each other directly anymore. the other day, for example, she asked me why i hadn’t washed the net curtains.

me: perhaps because the washing machine she promised me 4 months ago still doesn’t work.

boss/translator: i don’t think we’ll tell her that.

me: well tell her the curtains were clean until she touched them with her slimy fingers.

boss/translator: i don’t think we’ll mention that either.

and so on. anyhow, it turned out that my landlady had stolen the tv off the man at the door and passed it off to me as her own. when the man had threatened legal action, she had relented and decided to give the tv up. in the process, and for reasons best known to herself, she had told the man that i was german. given what day it was, the man had made his own assumptions about why i wasn’t responding to the bells and this is why he had been more persistent than a cold sore. he explained that he thought i was hiding behind the door. ‘o no,’ said my friend, eager to clarify the matter, ‘he is english - he was hiding in the open.’ next time, though, i’ll be hiding under cover properly. my boss was right, anything can be out there, anything – even the telly snatchers…

britain and russia have recently suffered from the same affliction…

…local elections. that’s probably where the similarities end. the local election here, for example, encompassed a region larger than europe (as long as you understand that europe doesn’t include the russian part of europe – the russians don’t think of themselves as european anymore than most of the english do). there was also a difference at the polling stations. whereas in britain you roll up, cast your vote and leave, here they had parties at the polling stations – food, drink and music. if this wasn’t enough to make you want to scrawl an ‘x’ in a box, they also had a free scratchcard lottery on the go with the top prizes being six cars and a flat. you didn’t even have to vote to enter, just turn up. if it was your first vote, you got a framed certificate and a t-shirt. all of this seemed to work as turnout was a healthy 60-something%.

perhaps the biggest difference, however, was the result. whereas blair was quick to dismiss losing a 1000-odd seats as par for the mid-term course, here putin suffered no such reversal of fortune. on the contrary, although putin does not officially belong to any party, the party he is associated with took 90% of the seats up for grabs. this is not because russia is secretly a one-party state, as some of the media coverage might suggest, but because they genuinely adore putin. i think people liked blair the first week he was in office, but other than that i don’t remember a time when a prime minister in my lifetime was ever close to receiving the sort of adoration putin does here. the vast majority of people are just plain grateful that he has established and maintained the kind of stability and prosperity we take for granted in britain. the only concern people seem to have about putin is that he will have to leave at the end of the year when his second term is up. in britain, on the other hand, i don’t even think mrs blair wants to see her husband stay in office any longer than it takes for him to pick up his coat and turn off the light.

your cheese sandwich has made me join the undead...

…: fact. i’m not an actual scientist in the traditional sense of wearing a white coat and fiddling with test tubes and knowing anything about science, but, as i understand it, cow gas is pretty much responsible for global warming, and we have so many cows in the first place because all the selfish cheese-eaters in the world put their lunch ahead of global apocalypse. until recently, i was prepared to forgive you all the destruction of the planet for the sake of a little cheddar. however, everything has changed now.

specifically, what has changed are the mosquitoes in my flat. i have no experience of mosquitoes and when they moved in at the beginning of last week i was more than happy to welcome them, show them round, chat over some vodka and blini, etc. but no, that wasn’t good enough – they wanted blood. my blood. my actual real factual existing blood. vampire-like, they steal upon you in the night, knife their vicious little proboscis into your vein and suck the juice of life from your sleeping body. if you ever wake from your sleep again, which you may not given the amount of blood loss involved, then you will have joined the undead.

naturally, my first thought was revenge. i considered bingeing on some free radicals but there weren’t any to hand, so my thoughts turned to old testament violence. while not quite prepared to bite them and suck their blood, i was willing to splatter them all over the wall. armed with a flat palm, i scoured my flat the next day for any sign of these dracula-manqués. unsurprisingly most of them were hanging upside-down from the ceiling, but i found one within reach on the wall and whacked it. mistake. it died alright, but in so doing it unleashed all the blood it had taken from me or someone else or possibly even someone else. it went everywhere. i was aghast. it was like the moment in alien when they realise the aliens have acid for blood. they were unkillable.

my next recourse was to find a flame-thrower or some kind of agent orange with which to bring the war to the mozzies’s front-room. however, when i went to my local arms-supplier i was told they had nothing because the mosquitoes were almost a month early due to global warming. we are isolated in siberia and supplies have to be planned many weeks in advance. i’m paraphrasing here, but basically the shop assistant said we should still have snow on the ground at this time of year but what with all the people eating cheese and encouraging cow growth, the planet had heated up.

the only thing left for me to do was shut my windows to keep the mozzies out. however, the heating is centrally controlled here and it is still on as they don’t switch it off until early may because they haven’t realised the effect all the selfish cheese-eaters have on global warming. it is like sitting on a radiator wearing a40-tog duvet in a greenhouse on the equator in the middle of summer. specifically, it is 18 degrees and the heating is on 24 hours a day. it is ridiculous. so now i have a choice – i boil alive with what little blood is left me or i let myself become a kind of living gro-bag for mosquitoes. whatever i do, i get no rest. it’s either too hot to sleep or i daren’t fall asleep because i know they are there, waiting, in the dark, to suck my blood. it’s a choice between being undead or being undead. enjoy your cheese sandwich.

made in russia...

...from decommissioned cossacks and caviar.

i knew i'd find this somewhere after overhearing a siberian saying 'tak a cloot tae yer oxters son'.

of all the things i thought i'd experience...

…out here – going mano-a-mano with a wild bear, a sabre fight with an enraged cossack, or a troika-ride with julie christie – being a two-day z-list celebrity was not one of them. however, this week i managed to add it to the list. i was at a trade fair dealing with education abroad. i had my own little cubicle with a table and a couple of chairs and a sign saying ‘test your english – ask questions about england’. it seemed innocuous enough and my boss seemed to think it would help her cause, so i was happy to do it. what neither of us banked on though was quite how exotic an englishman is out here. to begin with, people walked by singly and in twos, then they would go and get more people and they would point and laugh, and then, finally, one of them would get the courage up to come and talk to me, at which point as many people as possible would gather around the little table to hear the strange words spoken with the strange accent.

the conversation was pretty basic but very engaging. if i gave a particularly good answer (‘what is your favourite colour?’ ‘green’ ‘ooooooh!’) it sent the whole crowd into raptures. where it got a bit freaky was when people started asking for my autograph and to have their photo taken with me. i kept asking за чем? – what for? i have a deeply unimpressive signature, built for speed not art, but still they seemed to think it was worth something so i was happy to oblige. however, as monroe and lennon knew – fame is not the ride on easy street they would have you believe – it has a terrible cost too. in my case, by the end of each day my voice was reduced to a little gusty noise at the back of my throat and i was compelled to take another in a long line of folk remedies – honey and vodka. awful.

i heard england...

…last night. it came through the window, a strange sound i did not recognise at first but evocative of marmite and radiohead. and then, finally, it dawned on me – it was rain. living in a bone-white desert, i have not heard rain for at least six months. i am sceptical about it.

they stand by the side of the road...

…not looking to cross it or, indeed, looking to do anything at all. snowflakes blow carelessly across their vacant faces. they are well-dressed, often carrying bags of shopping or briefcases, and they just stare into the snow with a terrible yearning on their faces. i see about one a day, however grim the weather. they are suffering from what they call here a ‘depreznyak’ – a little depression. it is a tiny bleakness that shrivels the soul, like dusting a slug with salt. the distress is acute and paralysing, at least for a few minutes or hours, and then they carry on as if they had merely wandered in and out of an accidental void. no-one is astonished.

i see dead people...

…on an almost daily basis here. and many of the dead people are not just dead, they never existed in the first place. when i go to a station, for example, i see anna karenina. when i see my landlady, i hear raskolnikov in my ear. when i hear a doctor, i listen to zhivago. this weekend was no different as i was invited to a dacha. the very word ‘dacha’ is so evocative of great fiction that i can scarcely believe they exist in real life, especially not in this century. nevertheless, they do, and the majority of russian families have a dacha somewhere in the country – ranging from a small shack, where they grow vegetables in the summer, to mansions on large estates the size of a european principality. the dacha i went to was somewhere in between – a wooden house deep inside a forest and perched on the banks of an ice-bound lake with a statue of lenin at the gates holding up a cheery hand in welcome. naturally, my hosts, being russian, were generosity itself and the table moaned under the weight of a muksun cooked in salt the size of small whale, enough lamb to put a shepherd out of work, plus any number of salads and accompanying dishes, my favourite being ‘herring in fur coats’. as wonderful as this fayre was, however, the highlight for me was simply sitting on a bench outside and catching the dacha vibe. i could all but see tolstoy pacing up and down, smoking a pipe and fretting over what to do with his peasants, while chekov emerged from the banya having decided what to do with uncle vanya. of course, that may have been the vodka.

the russians have no word for 'privacy'...

…but they make up for it with a whole lexicon for which english has no answer. here are a few i’ve come across, translated as best as i can (don’t try and pronounce these without asking your parents’ permission first):

иней – stalactitic snow. it is the russians, not the eskimoes, who have 50 different words for snow. this kind of snow is found at outdoor thermal pools in the middle of the forest – at least that’s where i saw it. it looks like frosted flakes of coconut in the shape of an icicle.

душевный – having a warm soul. there are a lot of words to do with ‘soul’ in russian. for example, they say ‘no soul’s in the room’ rather than ‘nobody’s in the room’. this makes them terribly frustrated with our apparently ‘cold and scientific language’. blah blah blah – tell it to shakespeare.

всухомятку – eating without drinking. this is a kind of crime in russia. if you do it, people will stare.

прощай – goodbye forever. the russians like things to be dramatic and this one means you will never ever ever see the other person again. ever.

утопленник – drowned man. this one is pretty sinister – how many drowned men do there have to be before you invent a special word for them? apparently there isn’t an equivalent word for a man who has died of radiation poisoning after going to a sushi bar. at least not yet.

недоперепить – to drink too much but not enough. you know when you’ve had too much alcohol but you don’t actually feel drunk? well, this is the verb for those special occasions. it is probably related to the previous word in some way.

смеркалось – it was getting dark. this one is way out there. you can only use it about the past and it is a complete sentence in itself to which you are not allowed to add anything else. needless to say, i use it every day.

there hasn't been a murder...

…but in order to prevent a death the police have cordoned off an area round my flat. winter in siberia can be a killer – if your car breaks down outside the city and no-one finds you in a couple of hours, you will probably die. however, spring is the real assassin. when the city starts to melt in the new season’s mawkish heat, it’s not just the putrid stench of tulips clogging your nose like poisonous gas you have to watch out for; it’s the small avalanches of snow tumbling off the rooftops too. there is at least 1.5 metres of snow on my balcony and when such thick compacted sheets slide off the roof in clumps 5-6 metres across, it can hurt you if it hits you. the icicles, on the other hand, hanging like crystal spears above the pavements, can actually kill you. they slice clean through car roofs when they fall from a tall enough building. when they hit a human head, the human will never eat blini again. each year several people here are killed in this way. they cordon off likely 'death-spots', such as the one near my flat, when they can, but they can’t shut the city down entirely, so when you go outside you play russian roulette with ice javelins. at least it takes your mind off the impending daffodil hell which will no doubt spew fetid fluorescent yellow cess all over the place sometime soon.

some tyrannies are so close...

…you don’t realise how bad they are until they’re gone. adam and the ants dominion over the charts in the early 1980s springs to mind, as does the belief in a cartesian dualism, and, the archetype of them all, the bogeyman under the bed. typically, we accept, for example, how great the double-drum sound of adam and the ants is, how the tribal chant supplants the need for melody, a good voice and someone who can actually play the guitar with a kind of ur-sound which speaks to the primeval soul within us all. only later, after rehab and madness and vanessa feltz, does enlightenment visit us with a glimpse of the terrible truth: ant music was garbage.

in a similar vein, last friday i realised the passing of another tyranny of which i had previously been unaware: greeting cards. it was when the builders stopped that i knew it was an important day. the builders just down the road from me work a minimum of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, often more. it doesn’t matter if it is minus 40 and a blizzard, they simply keep going. they are driven. however, last friday they stopped, and the reason for this was that it was ‘defender of the motherland day’, or, as some of my students explained it to me – ‘man day’. on this day, all russia celebrates men and how great they are. it makes a pleasant change to celebrate the awesomeness of men but, even so, i had thought it might be one of the kind of made-up days, like ‘bosses’ day’ of the kind we have in england. nevertheless, when the builders stopped i knew it was for real.

because they are ever thoughtful, the russians i know made me feel like a defender of the motherland too by giving me the appropriate greeting and little gifts. what they didn’t give me, though, was cards. nor did i get any cards at new year or christmas or valentine’s or any of the other special days since i have been here. the reason for all this is not because they think i can’t read; rather, it hit me on friday, it’s because there aren’t any cards to give – siberia is a card-free zone. suddenly, the cause of the lightness of spirit i have felt since being here, the extra spring in my step, and the causal joie de vivre with which i take each day is clear – i am free from the tyranny of getting cards. no more hours misspent amongst acres of over-priced pink cardboard, searching for that elusive hallmark verse which is both highly irreverent and deeply sincere and which will have a masterpiece of postmodern art on the front designed to reveal all the depth and shade of my personality. no. this is russia and the tyranny is over: happy day to you all.

god will forgive you...

…apparently. at least he will if you asked for forgiveness yesterday. this is because yesterday was the last day of mazlinitsa. mazlinitsa is like pancake day but spread over a whole week, and this is in a country where pancake day is already spread over the whole year, so you can imagine why some form of forgiveness might be called for. unsurprisingly, then, the last day of mazlinitsa is called forgiveness day. the idea is that you ask for forgiveness from everybody you know, whether you think you need to or not, because you never know whom you have accidentally slighted. when someone asks for forgiveness, you simply reply ‘god will forgive you’. and that is that.

it is all strangely touching – being absolved of an offence of which you are unaware – especially when combined with the mighty blini. the connection between the two seems fragile at first but it is all to do with renewal, as mazlinitsa is actually a festival to say goodbye to winter. blini are symbols of the sun, and of the warmth which is now so close. well, not that close actually. it is minus 34, as i write, and it is snowing and blowing a gale. not even the toughest parts of skegness would consider that summer weather, but still, it was minus 40 the day before so maybe the great pancake in the sky really is on its way. either way, i hope you can forgive me.

some people eat caviar here...

...some people don't.

sometimes you have to get a train...

…when you get a train on the trans-siberian railway. sometimes you don’t. sometimes you can get an electrichka instead. this is better than a train apparently, although it looks remarkably like a train, largely due to the fact that it is actually a train. there are other non-train trains you can get too which also look like trains, but you had better be dead or drunk before you get one of them because everyone else on board will be too. it is a very complicated system.

it is made more complicated by the fact that you have to be stephen hawkings to understand the space-time continuum in which you will be travelling. this is because all the trains in russia operate on moscow time. moscow is several time zones away. when you look at your ticket for the time of your train, you have to do maths to work it out. this is hard. there is a whole chapter on it in ‘a brief history of time’. first of all you have to determine whether you are adding or subtracting, then you have to decide how much you’re going to add or subtract, and then you actually have to do the addition or subtraction – all without the use of excel. you can’t even look at the station clock to help you because you aren’t sure if it’s siberian time or moscow time. they could be trying to trick you, after all.

luckily, i spot a group of quantum mathematicians and hang around listening to them until i have the correct answers (with working out). my iq certified, i join the rest of the population of siberia in the waiting room. everyone i don’t know is there. there is a man with one leg and a long beard, who looks like he sailed with ahab, hawking for change with a tin cup. there is a card school with old men smoking cigars. there is a makeshift nursery using suitcases as crawl-proof walls. a middle-aged woman with slack jowls sleeps with her head lolled back over the seat. a family share satsumas from a handkerchief spread on a babooshka’s lap. a couple stand in the corner embracing tightly, with their heads on each others’ shoulders, not talking. it is not as frenetic or as anonymous as a large british train station. there is life but there is no fuss.

there are also no seats left, so i’m happy when it’s time for me to find my train. it is due to leave from platform 2, it says on the board. unfortunately, when i get outside, i discover that not only is there no platform 2, there are no platforms at all. what there is, is a great snowy plain with trains as long as the horizon. it is fantastic – like a station from a world war 2 film or ‘dr zhivago’. the trains and carriages have no discernible livery beyond a kind of faded darkness. they look like they are haunted relics from the revolution, used for transporting troops to the front to fight the white bolsheviks. i can’t wait to get on board. i am expecting straw.

getting on board is not as simple as it sounds. without a platform and with no steps, it is a big leap from the ground to the train. but, as ever, people help each other, dragging the short and the infirm by their wrists onto the carriage. once inside, there is no straw. instead, there are nooks made from dark wood, as if the whole thing were an old pub on tracks. and like my idea of a perfect pub, there are dark leather benches which you can stretch out on. i can smell alcohol too, so all that’s missing is a dart board. i say hello to my companions in the nook – a couple and a young woman – and sit down. all is well.

and then the conductor shows up. there is one for each carriage and i show her my ticket and passport (and insurance docket – reassuringly bought for every journey). clearly a very curious woman, she starts asking me questions about my sleeping habits. it all seems a little personal when we hardly know each other but i show willing and reply as best as i am able. surprisingly, given that this is siberia, she doesn’t seem to understand russian – specifically my russian. we babble at each other for a bit while i try out different facial expressions – ‘somewhat confused’, ‘not really very sure’, ‘quite uncertain’, ‘flummoxed’, and finally, ‘oo it’s all so mysterious’. in the end i admit, in russian, that i can’t speak russian and that i am a stupid foreigner, in the hope that she will leave me alone.

but no, the young woman next to me has, it turns out, a basic grasp of english.
- you sleep? she asks, pointing to the plank of wood above our heads.
- eh? i reply, using one of the many words common to both languages.
and so it goes on until it’s revealed to me that my ticket is for the fold-down bench six feet in the air. the bench i was sitting on is for the young woman only. naturally, there are no steps and i have to vault up to my new abode using the table. once again, i am forced to ponder the miserable fate of short people in russia.

to begin with, i feel very isolated up there. way down below, as if on a beach seen from some cliffs, the couple have laid out a picnic on the table and are busy sharing it with the evil young woman who understands the devil’s tongue. i worry about my boots, left behind me on the floor. if this were england, they would surely be stolen. and then there’s the fact that i can’t sit up – i am forced to lie down. suddenly it hits me – how fantastic! i am forced to lie down. there is no need to negotiate for knee room with the person opposite, and no jostling for elbow room with the person beside you. i have a bed all to myself and i can do nothing but relax for the next five hours. i watch siberia sail by through the window – it is all wilderness and snow for hundreds of miles. it is hypnotic, and eventually i overcome my fear of falling out of my bunk and fall asleep.

i am reluctant to get up, or down, when my five hours is nearly up, but russian trains are as punctual as the swiss and when the time comes i have to move. i am unable to think of a dignified way to get down for some reason, and so i launch myself off the top as if i were doing parachute training and land on the man sitting opposite. i immediately apologise. the young woman then translates his reply. we all begin to talk in halting english and russian. almost instantly, there is a small crowd. they quiz the young woman. as i am secretly fluent now, i understand they are asking her if she understands me. she says she does a bit but boy, does he speak fast compared to my teacher – and that accent! you don’t hear that on the tapes. then they have a brief competition to see who can imitate me the best. unflatteringly, they all sound like ducks, but still i smile graciously while they wet themselves laughing. i am offered food and drink but it is time to disembark. as we shuffle off, i wonder if this is how it is if you are a foreigner travelling on british trains. if it is, i can’t imagine that the equivalent journey, london-aberdeen, would cost just £4. but then you get steps and a platform in britain and obviously they don’t come cheap.

i am standing on the roof...

…of the tallest building in yekaterinburg. it is the middle of the night. it is icy. it is windy. there is no railing. and there is no guard. it is a beautiful sight and i am reminded once again of the little freedoms the russians enjoy that we don’t.
- you would never be allowed to do this in britain, i say to my friend.
- why not? he asks.
- for health and safety reasons. plus, people would jump off.
- they would jump off? why?
- because they could.
- o, he says, pausing to think about this strange idea, in russia we would only jump off if they told us we couldn’t.

c новым годом...

…or happy new year. and it finally is – new year, i mean. the wait has made godot seem timeous. this is because russia is ever so slightly schizophrenic about the whole festive period. way back in december some of them, myself included, celebrated the western christmas. this was followed a week later by the western new year. a week after that we all celebrated the russian christmas. and eventually yesterday we had the russian new year.

as a result i now have festive fatigue. this condition is much like i imagine shell-shocked soldiers to have felt during world war one, because if there’s one thing russians like to do in order to celebrate something it’s letting off fireworks. if you can remember how overwhelming the sound was during the first 30 minutes of ‘saving private ryan’ when you originally saw it then that gives you some idea of the noise on new year’s night. it was insane. i didn’t so much watch the fireworks as feel them. explosion after explosion pounded the night air, bouncing off the tenement walls and enveloping me in the violence of the blasts. i felt like the fireworks were going off inside me. it was exhilarating in the most literal sense and it went on for hours. by the end of it, i was like a tuning fork on automatic, incessantly trembling with the vibrations.

all of this took place against a backdrop more garish than vegas. for we have lights here, and then some. in the weeks leading up to the festive period, merry gangs of men armed with cable and bulbs fought their way round the snowbound city and hung up lights wherever they could. it’s not like in britain where it’s just the shops in the high street that have lights, it’s everywhere. all the streets have them, all the trees have them, all the buses have them, all the signs have them, all the mobile phone towers, even all the scaffolding on the building sites have them. i’m sure if i stood still long enough they’d have put them on me too. like some kind of luminescent graffiti signalling an underground rebellion against the siberian darkness, it is brighter at night than during the day. and it’s not just any old lights – there are lasers and spectacular flashing displays and a weird phosphorescent plastic and candles and frosted glasses in the trees and searchlights in different colours. there are even whole pictures rendered in light. the bus station, for example, has a giant sketch of a tram on it complete with waving passengers and a driver showing a crooked smile. it will be the work of a year just to take them down again.

amidst the ever-falling snow, it is quite breath-taking, but, this being siberia, no celebration is complete without some terrible scouring of the soul and several of my students sank into a hopeless depression as new year approached. the emotions are too much, mumbled one of them, her head in her hands, as i explained the word ‘tinsel’. i even had one glorious hour with an individual who sat there the whole lesson staring into space, listlessly repeating the fact that he no longer knew anything. i am stupid, he said, can’t you see?

thankfully, my six year olds were less easily daunted by the festive period. they trooped into the lesson bearing a fruit pie on their shoulders the size of an average family table with ‘merry xmas sputnik’ emblazoned on it in decorative pastry. naturally, i wanted to tuck in there and then but i had a lesson to teach first. i had decided to instruct them in the finer points of ‘jingle bells’ by getting them to draw key scenes from the song which they could cut out and hold up at the appropriate point while singing. i drew some bells jingling and they copied – so far, so good. then i drew, as best i could, a one horse open sleigh. they immediately fell about laughing – eta sabawka, they shouted. it’s a dog. and it was - a dog of a picture, if nothing else. when they had settled down ten minutes later, they offered to show me how a horse should be drawn. i was expecting the usual random line and blob hell that constitutes children’s pictures but what i got was four sketches that a young stubbs might have been proud of, complete with snorting equine breath. i was shamed. and, just to rub it in, when we began to sing ‘jingle bells’, instead of chanting ‘one horse open sleigh’, they began to imitate barking and then neighing instead. as they rolled about on the floor laughing and howling like dogs, i wondered if being taunted by six year olds over my inability to draw a horse was grounds for compensation in russia. however, the festive spirit got the better of me and by the end of the lesson we had all ‘agreed’ that we would now say ‘merry woofmas’ for the rest of the season instead. it’s what santa, or grandfather frost, as he is know here, would have wanted.