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.