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.