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.