a pickle

So a really stupid thing just happened. I left work, got back to my apartment block and realised I had no keys. I stood about for a bit, aghast and confused. Oh yes. I had left my keys at home; I could picture them in the place I sometimes fling them (into a pile of woolly hats and scarves – note to self: stop doing that) and I could picture walking out of my flat without collecting them from there. I stood about for a few more moments, depressed. Nothing happened for a bit. Normally my thoughts would have moved on by this point and I would have taken some sort of action but it was -14, it was my twelfth minute of being outside and my brain was shutting down. And finally, tragically, in a P-Sherman-42-Wallaby-Way-Sydney flashback, I remembered that before I left for work this morning I had given my spare keys to Judith the cleaner so that she could lock the door on her way out. Problem identified: my flat was locked and I had no keys and I had been standing about at -14 for a far too long figuring that out and I was definitely on the cusp of death. What a pickle, I thought. I didn’t. I thought: ‘SHIIIIIIT’.

But then I remembered the porter. Phew. That’s why there’s a porter in every single block of flats in Moscow, no matter how disgusting the building is – they’re probably stationed there for just this kind of situation! And the porter in my building is always there. He’s a big oaf that literally never moves. All he does all day long is snooze in his little room-thing on the other side of this door and fester in his own filth. Hooray! I thought. He’ll open the door and let me into my flat with the spare keys he’ll definitely have. Phew phew phew.

I banged on the door. It’s a big, intimidating metal door that looks like the entrance to a Soviet-era nuclear bunker, so when you bang on it with gloved fists, it makes terrifyingly loud ‘BOONG, BOONG’ sort of noise. No answer. I banged on it a few more times, then a lot more times. Luckily my hands were totally numb so I couldn’t feel this at all. BOONG, BOONG, BOONG. Nothing. The porter can’t be in there, I realised. For the first time in his entire life, he has moved. If he was there, he would definitely have heard me knocking - because I really can’t stress how loud this sound is. It’s so loud that porters in St Petersburg were probably opening their doors and wondering why there was no-one there.

Did you then stand about for a bit? I hear you ask, rather unkindly. Yes, yes I did. My vision was going slightly hazy because of the gusts of ice-wind that are so extreme that Philip and I call them Blasts of Fire because there’s no other way of describing the burning sensation in your face when it gets that cold. I feel a photo is needed.

relatively small icicles

But, squinting through the pain, I managed to spot someone fob-keying their way through another cast-iron door into a different part of the building so, now very much in Monkey-Island-mode, I followed them in and asked that porter. Obvious error of course, because once I’d managed to communicate in crap Russian that I didn’t have my keys and that I lived in flat 79, he nodded sagely and explained that flat 79 wasn’t in this part of the building. I didn’t reply, but the expression that means ‘I KNOW, you TWAT’ must be universal because then he shrugged and shuffled back into his little den.

Slightly panicking now, I braced myself for the outside again and walked back to my cast-iron door. That makes it sound like a very smooth action but the ground here is now covered with a hard layer of thick black ice-slab topped with brown snow-slush so you don’t so much walk as.. move forward with your legs. In a permanent state of falling but not actually falling, like someone clutching the sides of an ice-rink making their way around the edges. Well, like that, but with no sides. Basically it takes a great deal of physical agility and mental energy, both of which I was running out of by this point because I was being ice-torched for the thirty-fifth minute and I had no further ideas.

Then. THEN. I noticed that next to my cast iron door was a smaller door, slightly ajar and with a homely yellow light on inside and men’s voices. Not porters… hanging about in a shed-like part of the building… Caretakers! I idiotically concluded, having for no obvious reason forgotten that I was not in Oxford. I knocked confidently on the door and pushed it further open.

‘Hello,’ I said, in crap Russian, ‘I do not have keys. I forgot keys. I… don’t… um…’

Yes - my sentence genuinely Trailed Off Uncertainly (something I had previously assumed only happens in scripts) as I took in the scene in front of me – empty bottles of beer, half-empty bottles of vodka and two leering Fagin-esque unwashed homeless unsavoury-looking characters – and realised that they were probably not about to let me in to the building and offer to fix my bike while they were at it. One of them stood up. Another amusing pickle to record on my blog! I thought. I didn’t think that at all. I thought ‘SHIIIIIIIT!’

He – let’s call him Evgeny the Foul – staggered forwards, crashing into the doorway, rebounded off it out into the freezing cold and lumbered up to me in three irregular drunken trudges. Trudge. Trudgetrudge. And then he just stopped, cocked his head and peered at my face as if he was remembering it from somewhere. He scrutinised me for a good few seconds, maybe even ten, during which time he was either ruminating on the complex machinations of the universe and all the possibilities and intricacies that led this sorry-looking girl to him or he was having literally no thoughts at all, while I remained completely motionless so as not to anger him, as if he was not a man who would have toppled over if I had prodded him but some sort of enormous.. bear. Better to be safe than sorry, I belatedly thought. And finally, he swivelled towards the electronic keypad, emitted a sort of belching/speaking sound that may well have been Russian numbers, and jabbed at number 1 with his index finger. Except he accidentally dragged his finger down the keypad before removing it so that instead of entering ‘1’, he entered ‘14677#’.

He grunted, pressed C, and started again.

‘157844’.

He grunted, pressed C: attempt three. ‘

‘1.. 39485#’

Grunt. C. Attempt four. I felt it was time to intervene. Maybe that was unwise but I could see us standing there for quite some time and did I mention it was minus -14?

‘No, no, thank you, it’s no problem, thank you.’ I tried to guide him away from the keypad without actually touching him. ‘Thank you, goodbye. GOODBYE.’ And, bewildered, Evgeny-the-Foul shuffled back into his den. Before I had time to contemplate whether or not I was lucky to still be alive, and how much longer this was likely to be the case, a lady wandered past. ‘Excuse me!’ I said. ‘I forgot keys! How this?!’ and gestured desperately at the keypad.

‘Something something 104 something something,’ she said kindly, and I quickly understood (because you get used to that sort of conversation) that the porter only opens the door if you press 104 on the keypad, and that that’s what Evgeny the Foul was probably trying to do! Evgeny the Foul But Essentially Well-Meaning! What a wonderful world it is, I realised in a rush of delirious, extreme-cold-induced sense of contentment, when people try to help you no matter how hammered or potentially dangerous they are. This feeling lasted for about three seconds until I learned that the “porter” doesn’t understand a word of English, or have any spare keys or anything useful to say. He just shrugs sleepily and looks fat. I was still locked out. DAMN YOU WORLD, I thought, because by this point I had more or less been driven to despair by how cold everything was, and how difficult everything was, and how stupid everything was, and how nothing cold or difficult or stupid ever happens in London, and how crap Moscow therefore was, and how utterly, utterly pointless this so-called porter was, all of which led me to say the following hurtful statement to him:

You are the least helpful person I have ever met and you smell appalling.

My anger dissolved. It’s unkind to say hurtful things in English to people who don’t speak English, however value-less their job might be. And an hour later, after phoning HR, and the cleaner, explaining the situation to a few more people, making many trips to various places and reclaiming my spare keys back from Judith, I finally made it back into my flat having lost all feeling in my hands (which were bright red) and face (which, and more disturbingly, had turned a sort of grey colour) but with that strange feeling - something that I did used to experience a lot at Oxford - when you think you might have learnt something but you’re not sure what it is. All ideas welcome.

space dogs.

'Bolik', and 'Substitute for Missing Bolik'* are just two of the great Soviet space dogs. Bolik's replacement was rounded up in Moscow when Bolik escaped, not wishing to be sent into orbit in a tiny capsule with nutritious goo for food, no room to turn round and just a saucer-sized window from which she could get a view of the earth no dog should ever have. The first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, was surely one of the bravest men to have ever lived, but he couldn't have done it had it not been for Bolik and her friends.

There were actually more than 50 space-dogs rocketed up by the Soviet Union at the beginning of the space race, in various Sputniks, at a time when the USSR's space agency was years ahead of NASA. Bolik's most famous friends were perhaps Belka and Strelka, two little jack-russelish strays that I had the pleasure of meeting last Sunday (in taxidermied form… much like meeting Lenin really). Belka and Strelka returned safely to earth, as did most of the other space-dogs including Little Curly and Little Blackie. Despite their survival, it's hard for a dog lover to be too enthusiastic about these Soviet efforts when you see the size of the capsule these poor little buggers were crammed into for their missions.

At least they are now suitably commemorated. Above the Moscow Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics is a vast obelisk and the wee beasts are the first thing you see when you actually get inside. The Explorers of the Cosmos monument was actually put up following the successful launch of the world's first satellite, but I do wonder whether a little bronze Bolik and a Substitute ought to have been added to its crowning protuberance after their grandest of adventures.

*remember to check your balls.

matryoshka adventure to kazan: part two

After that, the weekend was very lovely. If you ever find yourself in Kazan, definitely go and see the following things:

The Kremlin. Philip and I now expect there to be a kremlin in a city in the same way we once expected there to be clean tap water. A 'kremlin' (or in Russian, 'krem-l') is a 'citadel or walled centre' found in Russian cities and they were historically administrative and religious centres, sort of a tiny city within a city. The most famous one obviously is in Moscow but other important Russian cities have still preserved theirs – in fact, the kremlin in Kazan is a UNESCO world heritage site (the Russians were clearly proud of this and presumably that's why they got the word 'UNESCO' engraved all over it.. slightly missing the point maybe, but never mind).

The interesting thing about the Kazan Kremlin is that by far the most striking building is a mosque. Well, all the cathedrals in Russia have the trademark Sultan-of-Arabia-style onion domes and so arguably they all look a bit mosque-y (not my finest observation but whatever) but the real mosques had a very different quality. Still obviously treasured buildings, but much simpler. Apart from the one in the Kremlin though, which looked like the Soviet era, the Disney corporation and Islam had decided to share headquarters and while in theory they all agreed on 'GIGANTIC PALACE' they had all ultimately been forced to make some stylistic compromises.

I liked it! Philip did not. But the Annunciation Cathedral and the Syuyumbike Tower were pretty spectacular too, and it was a windy day, sun lowering, dark clouds rolling across the sky = ideal epic photo shoot conditions. I was delighted. We haven't had epic photo shoot conditions since we climbed Kilimanjaro and I couldn't really appreciate it then because of minor irritations like the fact that there was no oxygen and my brain was shutting down.

The unexpected cathedral. I don't know what this one was called or even really where it was (note to self: never write for travel guides) but during a Sunday morning walk around the city we followed an increasingly shabby road and ended up quite far out of the centre in what looked like a huge construction site where nothing was actually being built – and right in the middle of it was this:

We walked up some stone steps that appeared to lead to nowhere in particular but were ideally placed for a better view, and stood on a platform with an old Tatar man who was standing so still that it looked like he'd been posited there by a tour operator to make Tatarstan look more authentic. And we met a gorgeous stray cat, which kept nudging my boots with its face and winding itself around my legs. Stroked it, looked out over the cathedral and the big mess that surrounded it, and felt very peaceful. You know, in that stroking-a-cat-and-looking-at-an-unexpected-cathedral-from-a-height sort of way.

National Museum of the Republic of Tatarstan. The building itself was beautiful 19th century affair, much like so many of the buildings in Kazan, which give the city a crumbly Venetian sense of once being magnificent and prosperous and now tragically.. not. With a judiciously-employed money injection from the government and a bit of a tidy-up tourists would be flocking to Kazan in droves and the Lonely Planet would be referring to it as the Salzburg of the North, or whatever. At the moment though, it's a bit seedy.

Anyway, back to the museum. For a museum where all the information is written in either Cyrillic or Tatar (Tatar being the equivalent of Welsh, in that signs etc. are written in both languages in a kind of pointed way) it was surprisingly interesting! Mostly because they showed you examples of national dress through the ages and I loved what the women wore. Particularly stunning was a 17th century shin-length pleated fringe skirt and velvet waistcoat in baby pink and wine - so hot right now. There was also a small but fantastic collection of Russian art tucked away on the top floor, which alone would have made the trip worthwhile.

So yes, some wonderful things to do. But equally importantly, definitely do NOT:

Book tickets to a jazz concert called 'L.O.V.E.' because you can't find tickets for the opera or ballet. The lead singer of the band will be drunk (apparently very common at local concerts in the provinces, no matter how prestigious the concert hall), he will swagger about as if he is the next Frank Sinatra even though he has less charisma than a paper clip, or a.. pencil sharpener (yes I am writing this at work and casting about my desk for inspiration - fail) and no matter what note he tries to sing he will always hit the same one. Bad times. Luckily he let his hugely talented backing singers do a couple of acapella arrangements and they were so good it was almost worth going. And I always enjoy watching elderly Russian women knock back pre-concert vodka shots at the theatre bars. If Philip makes me go to any more jazz events I will start doing the same. No really.

Use the toilets in the shopping centre. Again, Kilimanjaro springs to mind. Except that was waaaaay up a mountain in Tanzania, and this was in a self-professed European city of culture. And just.. how can a shopping centre with an Ecco and cafes serving freshly squeezed apple and carrot juice also have a long-drop? How?

Go for longer than three days. We arrived on Thursday night and by lunchtime on Sunday, it was definitely time to leave. It started to freak us out after a while, the combination of familiarity and strangeness, trying to understand how and why it was like Western Europe but not, and like Russia but not, and sort of Asian but not. The novelty of it wears off when you realise that you're about to get on a plane, not to straightforward old England where you can reflect on everything and have a mug of Ovaltine, but to equally complicated Moscow, which is also like Western Europe but not, and like the rest of Russia but not, and admittedly not at all like Asia, but you're still just as embroiled as ever and the word 'Ovaltine' means about as much as 'accountability' or 'public enquiry' or 'road safety' or 'reasonably-priced, non fur-trimmed item of clothing' and for some reason everyone thinks that sushi is the height of sophistication à la the eighties and that mullets are the height of cool à la never.

And that was our weekend in Kazan, and another tour-de-force blog post from me. I keep meaning to make them shorter and more punchy like Philip's and totally failing.

matryoshka adventure to kazan – part one: fail

Kazan is the capital of Tatarstan, which is a Russian federal state. Who knew eh? We decided to visit for the following reasons:

Reason 1. Last week it was Unity Day in Russia. Or National Unity Day. Or the Day of People's Unity. No-one seems very sure about the translation, or even the point of the day. I just asked Alexei, a guy from work, and he said:

It used to be celebration of Bolshevik Party in 1918, but now it is just celebration of unity of people. And also celebration of when Polish invasion was defeated in 17th century. It is historic day basically.

And then we both nodded for a bit. Alexei looked confused. Anyway the point is, it meant we had a four-day bank holiday weekend (hooray for unity!) and it was time to do a mini-adventure, or an adventure within an adventure, or what we in Russia like to call – that's right - a matryoshka adventure.

Reason 2. All the accommodation in all of the little towns closer to Moscow was fully booked, and we had been reliably informed that people generally quite want to go to Kazan since other people have reliably informed them that it's supposed to be nice there.

Reason 3. The guide book explained that it's an Islamic part of Russia where 'mosques and cathedrals curiously inspect each other from the tops of minarets' and I found this anthropomorphising of buildings hugely appealing. A crap reason, but there it is.

So off we went!

Our hotel was called ''KORSTON HOTEL AND MALL KAZAN' – and that's what it was: an enormous, overstated, over-marbled shopping centre, the type with information points and far too many opportunities to buy freshly squeezed juices and smoothies. A Tatarstan Westfield, if the Westfield Centre had a hotel in it, and also a selection of shops all selling that classic combination of Turkish national dress, tobacco pipes, hip-flasks and stuffed wolves. But never mind, because outside there would be a world of mosques and cathedrals curiously inspecting each other from the tops of minarets! Wouldn't there?

By the end of the evening on the first day, I didn't know and I didn't care. All I knew was that after a long and unfortunate sequence of standard Russian restaurant mishaps (the English menu being out-of-date, the Cyrillic menu being, as Philip put it, more of a guide to food the restaurant has historically served, a total lack of language skills on the part of everyone involved, me being so faint with hunger that I was about to eat the tablecloth and maybe even Philip) I had managed to accidentally order – and I can hardly bear to post this photo but in the name of Journalism I bloody ruddy will - THIS:

Note to everyone in the world: never order food at a restaurant if you don't know what it is. When it arrives, you still won't know what it is. When you eat it, you still won't know what it is. You'll think it's two large meatballs made from unidentifiable meat. You'll wonder why the meatballs are hollow. You'll crack a joke about how it looks like testicles. You'll realise as you're speaking that that's what it definitely is, and your entire life will come crashing down. And I don't mean to sound melodramatic, but every meal you have from then on, for the rest of your life, will remind you of the time you chewed and swallowed the fennel-covered bollocks of an animal.

Which by the way had a single cherry tomato placed inside each of them. There's something beautiful about how grotesque that is. It moves me to nausea and inspires the beginnings of retch-reflex. And when the waitress brought out another, fourth, meal that we hadn’t ordered, some sort of hideous white-cheese slop hiding whatever was underneath (the aborted foetus of a sheep? the anal passage of a cow?) and then gave us the bill for four meals, only one of which we had actually intended to order, I nearly cried*.

So we woke up the next morning with absolutely no expectations for the day ahead. Stay tuned for part two of our matryoshka adventure to Kazan, where I reveal: what happened the next day! And! What happened the day after!

*I did cry.

forest fire

I'm not really a city person. If I don't get out into the countryside regularly I start coming apart at the seams. This means that when the offer came to go and plant trees in the Russian forests that were damaged by the vast forest fires this summer, I accepted for mostly selfish reasons. I slightly rued my decision when it transpired that getting to said forests would require a three hour mini-bus journey at 8 o'clock on a Sunday morning. Still, faint heart ne'er won fair maid etc.

I hadn't realised that in fact the fires are still burning… underground. I'm not really sure how that's possible, but all around in what's left of the woodland, smoke is pouring up through vents in the earth. My Russian friends set about pouring bottles of water into these to try to extinguish them. I stood back and inwardly praised their optimism. Acres upon hundreds of acres of silver birches have had their roots burned away from beneath and then toppled onto one another, so now their white bodies are sprawled everywhere, with their obscene blackened feet naked and on show. It is a sombre sight.

Our job, on a patch of farmland, was to plant seedlings which will be transferred into the forest once the land has been cleared of the fallen and our new trees have grown into stout saplings. We managed to plant over 4000 between 6 of us, which felt like a good day's work, until the farmer told us that his two sons have each so far (since August!) planted over a million trees. Both sons also work full time. After our now feeble-seeming exertions our host (whose purple-upholstered tractor, slightly smaller than the man himself, you can see here) rewarded us with pickled mushrooms.

Some wisdom gleaned from my experience:

1. Farm dogs and cats can be best friends, given the proper encouragement.
2. Never eat berries you find growing in the Russian countryside.
3. Never pickle mushrooms you find growing in the Russian countryside.
4. Never try to put out a forest fire with a small bottle of Evian.

five things

I've loved everything about the last couple of weeks (except for work, obviously.) Not even sure where to start, so instead, here's a list of 5 arbitrarily selected things I love about Moscow.

1. The first one is actually a view. You reach the gold-domed and magnificent if slightly chavvy Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, walk around the back of it, cross the bridge and all of a sudden you're faced with the most incredible panoramic view of the city and whatever difficulties or problems you've encountered that week all seem insignificant because at that moment you can't help but think, oh my god LOOK AT THAT GHOST SHIP.

ssome quite impressive Russian poses from Filye and Felushka

2. The opera. We went to one and I loved it. I think. Sort of. It involved a fat man dressed up as some sort of Arabic peacock (arguably camel) and I'm quite sure it wasn't supposed to be a comedy but it was VERY funny, unapologetically mad, and when the crowd took their bows there was this ridiculous, triumphant technicolour explosion of fireworks, dry ice and glitter pouring down on to the stage, wonderful. It was like my life had been massively lacking glitter and I hadn't realised it until that moment.

The audience though.. their applause was the most bizarre thing I've ever encountered at a performance. No real applause.. they just clapped along to the music. So the exhausted cast were bowing with these fixed, weirded-out grins on their faces and for their efforts they received an unsmiling audience stoically clapping along to the reprise music, beat by excruciating beat. No resurgent breaking into appreciative we're-going-now-but-well-done-again applause. Just: smack, smack, smack, smack, and then it stopped, and everyone left. Soviet era clapping. So that was totally weird. But not as weird as...

3. THIS DOG:

which I felt the need to mention only because it is one of the most stupid-looking things I've ever seen. They abound in Moscow, these tiny pseudo-dogs peeping out of their mobile handbag houses on the shoulder of their adoring bejewelled human mothers.. but they're not normally as bad as this tiny Yoda-bunny dog-gerbil. The owner: when I asked if I could please take a picture of it, she stooped to the ground, put its ludicrous little rabbit-hood up, propped the dog itself up on its hind legs and beamed at me. I took the picture and then thought.. yes. That was an extremely unusual moment.


4. The supermarket. Admittedly it has been a bit of a love-hate relationship with supermarkets so far, mostly hate. But I was in a particularly bad mood when I wrote that last post and my poppy seed phase had probably reached its zenith - the thing is, yes it's difficult to find things like cheddar cheese and worcester sauce, and yes they usually only stock ONE LEEK AT A TIME, but these things become much easier to forgive when the supermarket itself looks like this:




And sells drinks like this:

(which I bought, because cheddar cheese or no cheddar cheese, it obviously wouldn't feel like home without my favourite "English Traditions Manchester Gin & Tonic made with London dry gin".)


5. And finally, Zara Moscow. A shop I have no strong feelings about in the UK, but that's because they're not completely unironically selling THESE:

Did not buy. Massively regretting.

poppy seed cake and the deli counter: unfriendliness, rage and shame

After some dedicated weeks of scouring supermarket shelves and google-translating cyrillic I had nearly gathered together all of the ingredients required for Rachel Allen's poppy seed cake, which was the most Russian-sounding recipe I could find that didn't involve fifteen different layers or have the phrase 'bird's milk' in the title. I now had all the ingredients except for poppy seeds. Fail. I'm determined to make this cake to the point of insanity. I don't know why. I just must make it. My quest is now a long drawn out and ridiculous one that involves me going into supermarkets, picking up bread with poppy seeds on it, finding the least hostile-looking member of staff, pointing to the poppy seeds and saying 'You have?' like a retard. They don't have. They never, ever have. They glance around dully as if there might be some scattered around on the floor somewhere, and then they say 'Nyet.' And with every stony-faced nyet, part of my dignity crumbles. They don't care about my poppy seeds. Literally nobody does.

On Sunday, as a final effort, I decided to seek out the famous Eliseyev supermarket: chandelier-lined cereal aisles, gold-plated fridge sections, jewel-encrusted carrier bags; it really was stupidly ornate, and surely they since they had all sorts of totally pointless groceries they might also have poppy s… nyet. The bloody woman couldn't even find it in herself to be nice about it. Not 'really sorry, we seem to be out!' or 'I don't think so, but perhaps you could try [useful information]', or 'I know poppy seeds is the Russian element in your cake, and here we are in the most quintessentially Russian supermarket in the world, and all we eat is poppy seeds on everything, but we just don't seem to stock them or sometimes even know what they are – weird!' Just another stony-faced nyet.

So now I was depressed and so hungry I was starting to feel dizzy, and I knew that what I needed most in the world was an uplifting snack and as quickly as possible. So it was against this background that I went to the deli counter. I queued for 15 long minutes. Finally, deli counter woman looked at me humourlessly. I brightened. My uplifting snack! It was coming!

'Um,' I said, gathering my thoughts and summoning the word for 'I would like' – and then an Odious Witch bustled in and barked her order at the deli counter lady, as if my presence in the queue in front of her was an inane fact that had absolutely no bearing on her life! Like a football score! And I could just be brushed aside like some sort of small beetle! My mouth fell open. The humourless deli lady regarded me for a moment - as if some social etiquette was niggling at the peripheries of her consciousness, something about common decency, but she couldn't quite… no, she'd drawn a blank – and the Odious Witch was duly served, and the beetle was not.

I had expected to encounter a lower threshold of unfriendliness here, mostly since all of the advice given to me before I left for Moscow revolved around the central premise that if I smile too much people will think I'm some sort of lunatic. But that wasn't a massive revelation, frankly. I was actually very confident that I had, over the years, mastered the art of not smiling in situations where to do so might sound alarm bells in the minds of the people around me. Overcrowded buses. Post office queues. A crowd of people gathered around a cyclist who is lying about 8 metres away from his bike. I'm usually quite adept at playing these things by ear. How different can Russia be, I thought.

No but seriously, they said.

Oh, I said. Well. Then maybe I'll take it up a notch or two, maybe I'll extend my repertoire of non-smiling situations to also include situations where I previously might have smiled if I was in a good mood! I don't know like, handing clothes back to fitting rooms assistants. The Waterstones queue. Standing up to allow someone to get to their seat. Where they might have had a smile in London, they will have a curt nod of acknowledgment in Moscow. I will conduct interactions with sales assistants and waitresses with an air of gravitas. There would be a distinct cooling of my general demeanour.

No, they said, as in, even when you meet people for the first time and you're introducing yourself, don't even smile then.

But that's actually just rude, I said, and thus began my struggle with the cultural personality of Moscow, which came to a head right at the moment when the Odious Witch pushed in front of me in that queue, and the Rage came, I knew it would, I tried to quell it but after a month of stony-faced nyets it was so evitable it was almost prophesized, and as I walked up to her I thought (so angrily that if this thought had been hovering in text above my head, there would have been flames blazing off it) 'Let's see how easy it is to ignore me when I do THIS' - and lightly shoulder-shoved her as I walked past. I think I meant to just pointedly elbow-knock her handbag, but I must have made real contact, in the way the you might if you were trying to get off the tube and the doors were about to close, because she actually oomphed. I've just done that, I thought. I've just shoved a lady. She oomphed.

The Rage fizzled out like a crap firework, quickly to be replaced by the Shame. I dashed out of the supermarket, genuinely mortified by the discovery that after years of believing that I was well-adjusted, I was, against all odds, an aggressive anti-social menace. What else might I be capable of? I caught up with Philip and examined him anxiously from the depths of despair, wondering if he would break up with me when he knew that I was unhinged. But apparently he already knew, so we spent the rest of the Sunday much like we had spent Saturday: not baking Rachel Allen's stupid sodding poppy seed cake.

Actually, we went to the zoo and it was quite fun. Maybe I should have been writing about that instead.