All the little animals

H = S + C + V

I’ll repeat; H=S+C+V, which, according to four very noteworthy psychologists is the actual formula for happiness.  Amazing, isn’t it?

I’m not entirely sure of all the details, but I’ll try and explain it as best I can. ‘H’ is clearly happiness, which, we’re told, is made up, or equal to, S, C and V. ‘S’, as I read it, is our mental/genetic/whatever happiness default setting. It’s kind of like our emotional neutral, or core weight. That is, when not troubled by major events, S is our normal happiness quota. C refers to our circumstances. I don’t think it’s supposed to mean that rich people are any happier than poor ones, (though they might be) but rather that people rotting away from cancer are probably a lot less happy than those who are not. Lastly, and this is the interesting bit, is ‘V’. ‘V’ refers to the voluntary things we do, or don’t do, to make ourselves happy/ier. The way I understand it, (and I may be wrong)  V is essentially the margin of your happiness wriggle room. I mention it as, other than travel, happiness seems to be the one theme that undercuts this blog, so I thought it a decent enough way of starting a post. That, and because I’m going to come back to it later. But first I need to talk about people electrocuting dogs. This too will become relevant.

Basically – and bear in mind that this is entirely received wisdom – the thrust of the idea behind electrocuting dogs is proving that helplessness can be/is learnt. A psychologist, (Martin Seligman from New York, if you’d like to send him any fan mail) took some dogs and slung some in a high walled pen whereupon he electrocuted them. Initially, and pretty understandably, the dogs would try and jump out of the pen. However, after a while, finding the walls too high, they would give up and simply endure their pretty nasty lot. Once this scientific breakthrough had been achieved, the dogs would be transplanted to a similar pen , but with lower walls, whereupon they were electrocuted again. However, this time, despite the fact they were now physically able to jump out, they would no longer try. Basically, that they had learnt helplessness.

I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert on any of this. If you want more, you could do worse than go to the article I cribbed most of the foregoing from: http://nymag.com/news/features/17573/

I know, this is a crap post. I’m 412 words in and I haven’t mentioned anything about Vietnam yet. However, I wanted to include this, as I was thinking about life before September 14th 2007, (sight loss day) and, ultimately, because this is my blog and I get to write about whatever I like. Those are the rules. However, I was also wondering how high my own walls were before Sight Loss Day, (capitals intended). The truth is, I’m not entirely sure they were all that high. I was doing pretty well, so maybe it’s better to think of Corporate life as indentured slavery, rather than as a dog in a pen. Either way, going back to September 14th 2007, I was delivered a shock big enough to put me into orbit.

The point is, I’m happy. It catches you off guard and, when the full realization of it hits you, the enormity of it can be dizzying. Let’s go back to For Instances, (again with the capitals – see previous posts). I was doing something as simple as walking up the stairs only yesterday and, as is the case with most Vietnamese building – they exist as much on the outside as they do the in – emerged briefly in to the morning’s full unabridged and unedited 36 C of sunshine and there it was, wallop, I was happy.

I think you have to grab those moments.

Saigon

However, let’s not get too carried away. Saigon and Shangri-la are hardly synonymous. Not least because Saigon exists and has rarely been the name of a retirement bungalow. Theft is rife here. It’s endemic. One minute you can be walking down a busy road in full daylight, the next, a pair of quick hands dart out from the back of a passing scooter and your bag’s gone. That’s it. We live on a fairly quiet street. One on which, a couple of weeks ago, my girlfriend was practicing riding her scooter when two guys on a passing bike reached out and grabbed the necklace of her neck. I can’t imagine what that was like and, for no other reason than my gender, am fairly unlikely to. All I can do is guess how such an intrusive, unthinking and unexpected act must have made her feel. All I really know for sure is that it reduced the confident, funny and beautiful person I live with to a sobbing wreck.

The rage, (and I’m using that word very deliberately) acts such as this fills you with is as intense as it is impotent. It’s all encompassing and useless in equal measure. The act’s long over and Elvis has long left the building by the time of arrival and, perhaps, that’s no bad thing. Currently, stories abound about a teacher, at the school where I work, who gave chase after such an incident and, on cornering the thieves, found their motorbike being used on him. He’s still in hospital now.

Don’t get me wrong. Acts like this are never going to be OK, but let’s provide a little context before forming any too damning conclusions. The Vietnamese government has made amazing strides in reducing the extent of poverty here, but it still exists and it’s scent is ever present. Poverty is never photogenic, it’s dirty and ugly and it’s filthy. It dehumanizes those that live in its shadow. The average yearly income here, (for the Middle Class) is around $1,168 PA. Now, compare that to your salary, or the salary of the average Westerner over here and you can begin to provide a context for these actions.  I’m not saying that those who robbed my girlfriend, or robbed that teacher of most of his face, were living below the poverty line and somehow that makes it OK. That’s not where I’m at. I’m simply trying to shade in the grey.

Neither do I want to give the impression that Saigon’s some kind of crime riddled hell hole. It’s not. In truth, I’d feel more at risk on any Saturday night in any market town you can think of anywhere in England than I do here. People are nice. That’s the real truth of the matter. They smile at you in the street and wave at you from passing cars when you’re out on the highway. Kids get a real kick out of shouting ‘Hello!’ at you wherever you go and, I keep coming back to it, people are just nice.

Lottery ticket seller

Every day continues to be an adventure. Saigon never bores. Each street is a testament to both present and past. The relics of french Colonialism rub shoulders with the brutalism of the modern communist apartment blocks. Similarly, in the countryside, by Cu Chi and out by the Mekong Delta the natural serenity of Vietnam – of walkways bordered by fruit trees whose harvest is just there for the picking – rubs shoulders with a far more brutal past. A past whose legacy is still defined in terms of craters, stillborn babies, deformed children and the lame; sights that cut across this country like a leper’s scar across the face of a model. But maybe that particular aspect of history is best left for another time and another post.

But no, life is here, life is now, life is Saigon. Here the nighttime streets are dressed in the brilliant colours of headlight and neon. Old men and women push food carts through the sweltering traffic and all the time Saigon just keeps on moving, breathing and living. That initial sense of alien has never faltered, not for a minute. If anything it’s grown even stronger.

The alien cuts through all. In terms of diet, we continue t0 break new ground. In the short time we’ve been here, everything from Duck’s feet, (last night) to squirrel has been feasted upon. We drank coffee, whose very existence owed itself to having passed through the digestive system of a Civet, (now known as ‘Weasel Shit Coffee’). Eel, Cuttlefish and frog have become dietary staples and nothing, (apart from the one time I ate Chickens’ feet) has disappointed. All of this from street-side cafes, whose patrons feast on small plastic kerbside tables, as the motorbikes roar past and the rats and cockroaches fight audibly and hungrily for the scant remains tossed onto the pavement.

However, of all, it was perhaps the snake that was the most spectacular. With a rough idea of what lay ahead of me, and a few vague recollections of having seen snakes gutted and flailed alive on television, I’ll admit to being a little nervous at the prospect of eating snake myself. However, I’ve always eaten meat and just can’t accept that separating beefburger from cow as anything other than rank hypocrisy.  If you eat meat, something has died so you can do so. It can be emotionally convenient to pretend otherwise; that your pie was never once the adoring object of ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ as it first stumbled around its wide eyed way around its pen but it was and it is.  However, that’s a long way from signing up to witness the wholesale torture of a living animal and I’ll admit that the idea of doing so made me nervous.

Still, on the advice of a colleague, we approached the open fronted Vietnamese Hoi with little idea of what to expect.  I can only describe the place as a strange sort of meeting place, one where petting zoo and menu make an uncomfortable acquaintance. Animals lined all three walls, from the expected mix of fish and lobsters to the more unusual tanks of tortoises, lizards and, of course, snakes.  Snakes seem to play an important role in the Vietnamese psyche. In local shops, it’s not entirely unusual to find bottles of home made medicinal wine with a cobra thrown in for good measure. I’ve tried some, it’s not bad. However, pickled snake is a long way from live, writhing snake and, again, I was caught up with the idea of being responsible

Dinner.

for its torture. In the end, there was nothing much to worry about. There was simply one quick cut from a fairly sturdy pair of scissors and, an inch shorter, the snake was dead. True, going back to the title of this piece, it’s H probably shrunk quite quickly and likely in direct proportion to its S, but I can’t say it suffered much. Really, on reflection, there’s not much your average mutton chop wouldn’t give to have met such a swift end.

After that, came the matter of draining its blood – like wringing out a damp towel – into a bottle of Hanoi Vodka and the removal of its still beating heart and gall bladder for separate consumption. I knew I was going to do this as soon as I heard about it, but still, holding the beating heart of a recently living animal is quite another thing. However, like so much in life, there comes a time to silence the voices, close your mind and take a step forward.

In this case, a swallow forward.

I don’t know how to describe it, really. It’s not like I chewed. Someone told me you could still feel its heart beat in your stomach. However, delighted as I am to report this, that proved not be the case. That notwithstanding,  I’ve got to say that I was acutely conscious of it being there and it still beating. It was almost, in a perverse way, as if I wanted to feel it, that part of me wanted to be more revolted by what I had just done.

But I wasn’t and I’m still not. Instead, I’m filled with a sense of wonder that, when I think about it, still leaves me short of breath. It makes no sense. Five years ago I was an office drone. I worked in industrial suburbia, existing only between those allotted stretches of time between 9am and Whatever PM. I was my job, I was my company, which, at the end of the day, means I wasn’t very much at all. This, before becoming the cautionary tale that everyone was rushing to tell each other about. The cripple that had to be pitied, or the brave soul who carried on. Life beyond these two existences seemed, to me at least, a fairy tale.

A real time interruption for you, (it’s very relevant). Just now, around ten minutes before typing this, my girlfriend and I climbed to the top of this building, watched Saigon stretching out into the horizon in all its dazzling beauty and seediness and we kissed. Christ, I could end this whole blog right there.

But I won’t.

I think this is what I’m driving at. None of us are dogs trying to jump walls. We just don’t have those barriers. Apologies to Mr/Dr/I don’t-really-care Seligman but I don’t accept that the walls are too high. Rather, I prefer to believe that there are no walls at all. Think about it. Think about your life. Are you really such an idiot that you would have consciously denied yourself happiness? Humour me, just for a minute, accept my idea of there being no walls and imagine living your whole life over again. A whole new lifetime of limitless freedom to make limitless choices and, I’ll bet you, you’d make exactly the same ones over again. Because this is who you are and who you want to be and, what’s more, that’s brilliant. Happiness is in the now, not in the maybe. Odds are that the grass isn’t going to be greener on the other side of the fence. You’re not going to be any happier if you’re famous, if you wear the right designer label or you drive the right car. Happiness is mundane. It’s waking up every day with someone you love to live the life you built. That’s it.

My advice? Accept the ‘S’ know that you can always change the ‘C’ and maximise the ‘V’. Then enjoy the ‘H’.

Motorcycle Diaries

If you want to view paradise; Simply look around and view it; Anything you want to, do it; Want to change the world? There’s nothing; To it

Wonka, W.

I’ll begin by going backwards. If you can remember back, way back, before a drunken Friday night cost me my sight and three years of my life, I had a job, a real job. It was here I learnt a lesson that’s served me well, it was that expectation can be the enemy of experience.

My company was sending me on a four week trip. I was to spend two weeks in Los Angeles and a further two weeks in Toronto. Needless to say, it was an exciting prospect. I spent endless evenings surrounded by skylines of imaginary palm trees and days walking the phantom sun soaked streets of the beautiful people. To be fair, Los Angeles could never have lived up to such levels of expectation and, looking back, it’s no surprise that its endless rows of low rise smog stained housing schemes and permanent traffic jams failed to so singularly do so. Toronto however, a city I had given practically no thought to, blew me away. Its vertiginous skyscrapers and wide city streets created an impression upon me that few places have matched since.

Don’t worry, I’m going somewhere with this.

A few days ago I was on my motorbike, way out beyond the city limits, as paddy fields, mangrove swamps and fishing ponds sped past and the sun started to set over the perfectly flat horizon as the world transformed itself into a costume of orange, red and ocher. Below me the bike hummed and I was alone with Vietnam, the only sound my own engine as I rode through a strange and silent landscape. It then occurred to me, quite suddenly, that unknown to myself, I had betrayed my own rule and imagined exactly this scene; exactly that landscape and exactly that motorbike and here it was, rendered tangible in perfect, high definition reality. I grinned so wide my face nearly cracked in two.

That’s a nice ending to a nice anecdote, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Motorbikes are an every day fact of every life here. The city buzzes to the soundtrack of Honda and Yamaha. Government policy is firmly against the car, so families, young Mothers, pensioners and immaculate office workers in immaculate suits all take to the streets on two wheels and still, the traffic can hit gridlock. Whole families of four – and sometimes upwards – sit in rows upon the same scooter, with babies nestled between them for protection. The unhelmeted heads of toddlers peer sleepily over the handlebars of countless mopeds, safe in the knowledge that an adult is in charge. Anything that needs to be carried, from propane tanks to trees, is carried by scooter. It’s stunning. No one ever looks behind them, they just go. Here, the responsibility for not colliding with another bike has shifted from those maneuvering, to those riding. This is not a system where liability counts for much. Rather, this is a system where not hitting anyone counts for everything.

Crossing the road is in itself a leap of faith. Nothing stops the traffic. Pedestrians have no option but to step blindly into the thick five deep lanes of honking and competing motorbikes and make their slow way across the road in the fervent hope that the motorbikes will avoid them, which – universally – they do. Through this jungle of scooters and motorbikes, xe oms, (pronounced, ‘zayoms’) the motorbike taxis that seem to switch business models between transportation, drug dealing and low level pimping hustle and push as they force their way through the over heated and sweltering mass. I’m making it sound dreadful, I know, but it isn’t. It’s amazing and breath taking in equal measure.

I’m going to go off on a tangent for a little bit, so bear with me. I’ll start by creating entirely the wrong impression and tell you that I owned my first car when I was twelve years old. However, while this was certainly an amazing privilege it didn’t stem from a life of one. Rather, my best friend and I scrimped and saved, doing every odd job imaginable until we had the £25 needed to buy a broken down 1.6L cream Hilman Avenger, (we painted a Starsky and Hutch stripe on the side in red oxide paint – it looked brilliant) which we would then sit in, taking it in turns to tear around the fields of my friend’s Father’s farm.  What I’m trying to say is that, if it was fairly normal to have a car at twelve, having access to a motorbike was, for me and my brothers, (back when that was still plural. I might write more about that at some point, but not now) was pretty much par for the course. The point is that, even with that level of experience, I would still look out into the Saigon traffic and wonder how it was even possible to take part in the shambolic carnival that crashed and bounced its way around the streets.

Of course, there was another reason too, one whose mere mention is always enough to bring out the worst in me.  It was true I’d ridden quite a few motorbikes. However, that was with two eyes, rather than just the one that bad luck and bad tempers had left me with; and that peering out at the world through a thick layer of moulded plastic. I’ll be honest, I was hovering somewhere over the grim borderland between nervous and scared. However, some facts are never to be admitted, not even to ourselves. To acknowledge them is to give them shape. Soon shape becomes form and form becomes tangible. Forget what the cod psychologists tell you. Sometimes it really is best to just push the fear down and take a step forward. The alternative is no kind of option.

Either way, I got on the bike.

I think, if it had been left to me, I’d have sat staring at the traffic for an age, taking my time on strategy and denying the nerves that were keeping me pedestrianized. However, after a loose agreement with a friend to rent a pair of bikes turned suddenly to hard reality I had little choice.  The scale of freedom having a bike has lent life here is hard to convey.

Spotted from the bike; transporting live bees

Suddenly nothing was out of reach and southern Vietnam was suddenly lain at my doorstep. However, following my girlfriend’s arrival from Moscow, the limits of the rented scooter became pretty apparent and a more solid solution was required, which was when I saw the Bonus. The first thing I noticed was that it was big. More to the point, it was big, black and dirty. It sounded more like a tractor than a motorbike and I fell absolutely in love with it.

… and it was on the Bonus, grinning from ear to ear as the sun went down, miles out of Saigon, when the float in the carburetor seized and I was left at the side of the road with what was now little more than a scrap metal anchor, which – if you remember – is just after where we came in.

However, in a world peopled by motorbikes there is a solution to most problems and a xe om driver turned out to be mine. As I was crouched by my bike, furiously hitting the carburetor with a stick, I became aware of a figure sitting on a moped at the side of the road, watching me and laughing.  He had a proposition. After some fairly frantic hand signals and a few desperate phone calls to a Vietnamese friend, I came to understand what it was; he planned on pushing me back to the city. That is, he would ride his moped with his left leg pointed out at a right angle to his body and use this to push the rear of my bike back into the city. Whatever concerns I may have harboured over this plan didn’t really count for much. The sun was now down and I was no closer to getting either me or my motorbike back to Saigon. I had little choice but to agree.

I think the memory of that ride will linger for a while. Traffic makes no concessions to the broken or the impaired and in a continued Darwinian frenzy of noise and speed, the xe om driver and I pushed our way through. Similarly, pushing my much heavier bike did little to restrain the xe om driver’s bullish approach to road etiquette. Within what must have been ten minutes of entering the city, it soon became apparent that he was using my bike more as battering ram than paying cargo. Roundabouts, chaotic at the best of times, were approached with a speed and confidence I’ve never experienced as a xe om passenger. The Bonus and I would be pushed mercilessly into the midst of the whirling traffic, while his grinning face would take refuge against the deafening roar of the approaching motorbikes in my lee.

If this sounds ungrateful or churlish, I don’t mean it to be. He got me and the Bonus home without incident and for that, I’m grateful. More to the point, I had the whole carburetor replaced the following day. Of course, since that incident absolutely nothing has gone wrong with the bike and it has been a daily pleasure to ride. That would also be a nice ending to an anecdote. Sadly, however, it’s not a true one. The bike’s been back in the garage twice and started making a strange noise earlier today, but it’s not going anywhere just yet. Because, every now and then , it works perfectly and I head out to the fish ponds, the mangrove swamps and the paddy fields and think back to a cold Moscow afternoon when I sat in my room and tried to imagine what life would be like here. Then, I grin like an idiot.

A Long Way From Kansas

They say whatever you’re looking for, you will find here. They say you come to Vietnam and you understand a lot in a few minutes, but the rest has got to be lived. The smell: that’s the first thing that hits you, promising everything in exchange for your soul. And the heat. Your shirt is straightaway a rag. You can hardly remember your name, or what you came to escape from.

Michael Caine, (not Graham Greene) The Quiet American

South must lead Southwards, North must lead Northwards and, inevitably, East must lead Eastwards and, I suppose, that might lend a vague continuity in the move from Moscow to Saigon. In truth, it’s about the only continuity there is.

It’s January and already the heat is suffocating. To move is to sweat. It almost feels that you need to chew the air before swallowing. Everywhere, down every alley and along every road comes the roar of mopeds. I can’t think of a collective noun for mopeds, a stampede seems about right, but the noise and the energy is unremitting. Nothing stops, ever. Saigon just keeps on moving.

In truth, I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere that’s felt so alive. The whole city buzzes with the sheer energy of life. It’s there, in everything, from the hustlers selling you dope on Bui Vien to the crowds packed tight photographing one another in front of the New Year flower displays at Nguyen Hue.

It can be, it was, it is, overpowering. For a time, I wasn’t even sure if I could last and now, after just a week, I can’t imagine wanting to be anywhere else. This place could never, can never, be home, and I think I need that. Saigon will always belong to the other. I can no more belong here than roses could grow in the Antarctic. Obviously, part of this is physical, I’m unlikely to ever pass as Vietnamese. However, there’s a more significant difference than that, there’s a mental gulf here that I can’t imagine ever crossing. Everything here is alien. That cuts two ways; I am as alien to here as here is to me and that suits me perfectly. For now, I want to remain the visitor. I want to look from the out and see the in.

Let’s go back – way, way back – to windows and the magical. I wrote something about this in Poland. I think, I could check, but I’m too lazy, it was something about hearing swing music through a window and some children playing. Fast forward nearly two years; those sounds are now the sounds of an anonymous vietnamese crooner singing what to me sounds like a traditional song, whilst a group of Vietnamese chat amiably in a language that manages to be both guttural and musical at the same time. I have to remind myself that this is my life now. That now, at least for a year, this is my new reality. And this brings me back to The Amazing, (and back to capitalizing it). It’s alive here. Christ, this already feels like it’s home address. It lives here. Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m a million miles away from right, but I can’t imagine this ever being home. Saigon, Vietnam, all of it, I can’t imagine this being anything other than amazing.

Endings

Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

Joni Mitchell

I’m in limbo. Well, to be exact, I’m in Lancashire. The wind and the rain are pounding off the window of my Father’s study and I’m still trying to make up my mind on how best to frame my final impressions of the last year. The truth is, I can’t.

To be honest, I’m just a little numb. I look back and think of Moscow as a place I was but am not now. I know, there has to be more to it than that and there probably is. Only I’m not feeling it. I have no sense of a long journey completed. Only that I’m here now and I was there then.

I think the real truth of the matter might lie in one of my final trips, (I’m still waiting to post accounts of the others). Towards the end of my contract, I had a week booked off, some money set aside and no particular plans for either. As it was, without a Visa for anywhere but Russia, I headed to Siberia by plane, the idea being to make my way back along the Trans Siberian Railway. It was on this route that I, (I say ‘I’, there were two of us) made a mistake that was to really bring something home to me. We, (getting it now) had intended to stop in a small industrial town called called Kungur, to have a look at the ice caves there. In itself, this wouldn’t have been a problem, apart from the fact that Kungur was two hours out of synch with the train timetable, (all train times in Russia run to Moscow times, whereas all the places in Russia run to their own). As it was, we arrived in the small, frozen Ural town at 5.20pm, with  a departure time of 3.20am and ten hours of yawning nothing stretching out in between. I’m not going to go into any great detail on Kungur; it was empty, cold, archaic and we spent most of the night in a place called ‘The Tractor Bar’, where half the bar was beer on tap and the other half dried fish, (this is also why there are no photos with this entry – my camera’s still there).  The reason that I’m talking about Kungur is that it was in Kungur when I realised what I’d only previously suspected; that, while I knew Moscow relatively well, I really knew next to nothing about Russia.

The truth is that Moscow is an island. They’re currently demolishing the five story ‘Krushchev’ flats, knocked up in the 60′s, replacing them with modern high rises and coating the current, rain stained, concrete flats in shining plastic. It’s a fairly exciting development and one that’s on the lips of most of Moscow’s chattering class. However, it’s the kind of expense that’s unimaginable elsewhere. Even with the crippling corruption, even with the city’s budgets being siphoned off at each juncture, there’s still wealth enough to rebuild and rehouse this massive portion of the city population. That couldn’t happen in Kungur.

In Siberia too, unemployment is at critical levels. During the Second World War, the great majority of Russia’s heavy industry was moved there to protect it from the ever nearing Nazi threat. Along with the transplantation of heavy industry, came the corresponding transplantation of people. New populations in new model towns emerged and Siberia boomed. Now, with the massive military spending of old gone and the majority of heavy industry moved Eastwards to China, Siberia feels as if the tundra is reclaiming the Soviet future for its own. Part of me would like to wax lyrical on this, to drop sly and oblique references to Ozymandias and the durability and power of nature. However, in the face of the hardship, suffering and acute poverty that has come with these changes, such a move could only be considered callous. As always, it is the old that are hit the hardest by these changes; those who believed the most, who worked the hardest to create the socialist utopia of the future are now reaping the capitalist harvest of the present. All this while the bright lights of Moscow shine ever brighter and the oligarchs dance the nights away around the world. So, no, I barely feel that I  know Russia at all.

However, maybe this is true of any capital. I can’t say that London is all that representative of England, or that Edinburgh is of Scotland. It’s also – and equally sadly true – that I have no knowledge on which to base comment on Cardiff or Wales, but I don’t think that’s really the point. Perhaps the point is to assess, if only for myself, how the last year has met my expectations. Given that and given that I had so few to begin with, I can honestly say that its surpassed them. There’s no denying that I’ve had a good time; I met a girl, I formed a band, (we got on the news) and I managed to travel through Georgia and across Central Asia. Please, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that this hasn’t been an awesome year, it’s been a blast. It’s just that I’m trying to formulate some kind of concrete thoughts on what I may, or may not have learnt. Basically, for the next one hundred times I’m asked, ‘What’s Moscow/Russia like?’, I want to come up with an answer – and I can’t.

Perhaps, going back a bit, staying and working in one place isn’t really the answer. Maybe, to form a cohesive impression of a place, it’s best just to visit. To take a mental snap shot, rather than make a feature film. I don’t really know. Perhaps, in time, my thoughts will coalesce and form some kind of cohesive whole and then I’ll be able to tell people what Moscow was like. All I can say for now is that it was home. And that, I think for now, must remain in the Past Simple.

Everything Must Go

To Each His Own Symphony

Django Reinhart

Cast your mind back. Right back to the start of this blog. I can’t remember the exact words, and I’m a bit too lazy to go and look, but I did I say that these entries weren’t likely to be the most regular. That’s now looking a bit understated. In truth, I’ve taken the literary concept of the Unreliable Narrator and built on it to create the Fairly Useless Narrator.

But I think it’s important that I update the blog, not least as I need to set the scene for a couple of travel pieces I’m going to post in a week or so, (don’t bet the farm on this). You see, it would be unfair to leave those of you who still visit and read this blog with the impression of Russia as a land permanently condemned to survive under a never ending blanket of snow and ice. It is,  for most of the year, however, we’ve just come out of a near tropical summer, one which doesn’t really fit with most people’s preconceptions of life here and I think it’s important to address that.

I went back to the UK in later May to attend a friend’s wedding. This, not long after returning from a trip to Uzbekistan. Unsurprisingly, the first question most people would ask is what was Russia like, which, let’s face it, is fair enough. However I found it a hard one to answer. Rather, I’d find myself waxing lyrical about the wonders of Samarkand, a place they’d barely heard of, rather than answer the simplest and most obvious of questions. The fact is that I’d run out of the mental vocabulary with which to describe Moscow. They might as well of asked me what it was like to be mammal.

However, that’s a cop out because I started this thing. I started describing the new and amazing experiences that seemed to assault me on a daily basis and not to finish that, not to see that through is to devalue the experience. It is still amazing and the amazing should always be recorded. In this way, the amazing lives on. Future versions of me, plus any number of  anonymous future readers, get to share in it and, in that way, the amazing never really dies.

Like I said, I’ve started this entry a few times and, before I ever get chance to complete it, something has changed rendering what has gone before irrelevant. The past isn’t always prologue. I am also very, very lazy. But I think the point is that you have to move fast to keep up with any season that isn’t winter here. Spring happens quickly, and it’s not pretty or particularly nice. The snow that has lain for months on end, with constant and unending additions, starts to melt away and slowly gives up its secrets. Amid the litter, lie dead birds, rats, and the occasional lost household pet. Every now and then, the melting snow can reveal the frozen corpse of a tramp, or just some unfortunate reveler who picked the wrong time to sleep it off. Underneath the snow, gradually appearing in patches on either side of the flooded streets the remnants of last year’s grass appear, like the desperate tufts of brown hair upon a nearly bald head It’s not too prepossessing a sight and one not likely to trouble the postcard manufacturers greatly.

However, if the false spring comes on quickly, it leaves with equal alacrity and then something really remarkable happens and I’ve never seen its like before. The standing army of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Azerbaijanis who spend the winter shoveling snow and picking away at the ice, emerge into the first proper week of spring, paintbrushes in hands and begin putting Moscow back together. Everything is painted. In a moment the kerbs are transformed from concrete grey to bright red and white. Similarly, the railings that line the patches of open ground are painted in brilliant colours. Building walls, whose first ten feet haven’t seen daylight since the snow first hit, are now painted bright greens. Bars, whose business it was to shelter the frozen within their protective embrace, now fling open their doors and begin the sawing and hammering that will see them spill out onto the street in temporary pagodas of beer and music. For nearly two weeks the entire city reeks of paint and thinners but, after so short a time, the transformation is complete and Moscow basks in the fresh spring sunlight, waiting for nature to catch up and match its bright new feathers.

It’s not just that summers are hot, (they are) which strikes you, but the enthusiasm with which they’re embraced. Really, seeing Moscow head into the summer is like seeing a drowning man come up for air. The many city parks take their place centre stage in the lives of a lot of Moscow. It seems inconceivable now, writing in a mid afternoon’s autumn gloom, that only a few months ago some friends and I spent an afternoon rollerblading around Sokolniki Park, before finishing off the afternoon with a fairly refreshing swim in the fountain there.  Trust me, there’s few feelings to match doing nothing while the world around you works.

Then, in the middle of all of this, I somehow found myself in step with the city. I couldn’t tell you when or how it happened, but suddenly it was there. I was marching to the same beat as Moscow. Like everyone else, I was desperate to eke out and enjoy every last minute of summer, and soak myself in its heat after the long winter’s cold. Maybe it was this that led to me extending my contract here, to staying on for the remainder of the calender year, I don’t really know. All I know for certain is that there was a point in the summer where everything just felt right, after what seemed a very long time of everything feeling quite wrong.

Maybe, looking back, it was the uncertainty of the next contract in Vietnam that was on my mind. There’s no escaping the fact there’s safety in the known and Moscow, despite its many and glaring, faults is at least known. But to accept that is to run counter to everything that inspired this journey; of the months and years spent hibernating within the mist and fog that was my world after losing my sight. Because that’s how losing your sight hits you. It marks a forced retreat from the world. You stop interacting in the same way as you did before. What is outside appears secondary to what is inside. I don’t know, maybe not. I suppose that if all of that was entirely true, the world’s greatest philosophers would all be blind. But I think there’s an essence of truth in the idea. Certainly, in those periods where I have to, by force of necessity, remove my contact lens, I no longer feel that I’m quite the same person. It seems inconceivable that, following such a drastic change in the way I – literally – see the world that there isn’t a corresponding change in the way the world sees me. Hang on. This is all getting a bit vague. Maybe this will fall the way of someone blind or partially sighted and they’ll get it, but I don’t think anyone else will. It’s, in every sense, a highly personal experience.

I had a vivid reminder of that world recently. A cold spread from my chest and into my eye, requiring  a fairly hurried trip to the hospital. The situation was easily resolved via a bunch of drugs and a few days wandering around my flat without the contact lens, but it was a nasty little reminder of how life used to be. It was also a pretty stark example of Russian free market economics in action. While the ophthalmologist I saw was OK, there is no guarantee that any Doctor you might see here is either capable or qualified. The free market pervades everything unchecked and without restraint. This even extends to the manner in which many professionals gain their qualifications. When this group includes Doctors, the significant expense of any health scare is only matched by the vagueries of a positive outcome.

Though this form of unbridled and unchecked capitalism isn’t simply a direct extension of human nature, as we’re told. I don’t want to believe that people are essentially venal. Here, it comes from the top and creeps its way downwards before engulfing all. Putin has gone on record, on numerous occasions, as saying that the prime motivator for people is money. That is, if you want someone to extend a simple act of human kindness to another, you must first weigh how this act might conflict with their own self interest. It’s a principal that cuts through Moscow, (I have little experience of greater Russia) like, as the tired analogy has it, the writing through a stick of rock. Moscow is all but defined by free market economics and, though life here can be beautiful, the effects of this principal are often ugly in the extreme. There is what I can only describe as an absence of humanity. Everything is on sale, from the Police to the politicians, and I can’t see much room for people in that equation. Because, surely, the whole purpose of any structure must be to benefit those involved within it, not simply the lucky or the ruthless.

But people do thrive here, despite the greed and the corruption, and they’re awesome. The same guy who elbows you in the gut in the charge for the Metro, will be the same guy that jams the train door open and pulls you on board. I think maybe that’s what keeps the city moving, these small, innumerable acts of simple human charity that people extend to each other every day.

Human nature can be pretty shabby. It can be self serving and it can be viscous. There is no end to the evidence for this, throughout history and throughout the world. However, to focus on that at the expense of anything else is to miss the point. From time immemorial, we’ve also set standards of behavior for ourselves that far exceed our ability to live up to them. It doesn’t matter if that standard is religious, political, philosophical or just the simple code of right and wrong that gets us each through the day, it doesn’t really matter. I think what matters is that we’re not quite up to the job of fulfilling these principals. However, that notwithstanding, it never once stops us from trying. Then, when inevitably we fall short of our own expectations, it’s never the expectations which are questioned, but our own abilities to live up to them. Maybe that’s where my head’s at right now. That Moscow might be rank with corruption, that it might whore itself daily to the whims of the corrupt and powerful few, but people here are still trying to create something better and, even if that never happens, that’s still pretty awesome.

The Rest Is Silence

I Fought The Law and the Law Won

Fuller, B.

I want you to imagine a scene. I’ll begin with the cafe. It’s pretty much entirely decorated in shades of purple and pink. Velour drapes hang off the walls, covering every window and entrance. It’ relatively dark, but there are christmas lights hanging off the walls giving the place the feeling of being locked forever in some weird alternate version of a 1980′s Christmas party. To the rear, behind an open lap top, stands a very small and bored looking Asian Man. He’s clad in a sparkling white shirt and wears a tight-fitting waistcoat. Through the sound system and from his lap top, comes the sound of some kind of rudimentary techno beat, over which he sings in a deep baritone, reminiscent of the best club singers past and future. It’s brilliant. Moving his way round the dance floor with surprising fluidity, is the lone figure of a fifty year old man. He’s bald, bespectacled, wearing jeans that come as high as his chest and grinning like a loon. He’s brilliant too. Occasionally, from a nearby table, girls get up and snake their way around what I can best describe as this gyrating goblin, moving seductively to the Oriental’s disco beats. None of this is done with the least sense of irony. Now, that’s utterly brilliant.

It’s scenes like that, which I committed to memory, that continue to make life here what it is. Every where, I am still confronted with the alien and the different. That it comes in recognisable packaging just makes it better. It’s as if you were looking at a familiar scene before realising that the perspective was ever so slightly skewed. Consequentially,  everything you were looking at, everything you first took to be familiar, was something else entirely. Every detail, no matter how small, had been altered in a slight, though ultimately fundamental way.

We’re going through a bit of a lull in the winter at the moment, with the temperature occasionally making its way above zero. With this change comes new bits of strange. I was lying asleep a couple of days ago when I was woken by something that sounded like a car being thrown off the roof. This continued, at irregular intervals for the rest of the night. It was only the next day when the cause became apparent. The layers upon layers of snow that had built up over the last four months were thawing, breaking off like icebergs and falling from the roof of the high-rise. I’ve seen some go from my window and, trust me, that car metaphor’s not too far off. They’re massive. Make no mistake. Snow is a serious business here. These snow falls kill people. On the day I’m writing this, Pravda, (yes, they still publish it) reports two separate incidents of children being hospitalised with cranial concussions and broken bones after being crushed by falling snow.

Throughout the city lies a standing army of street workers who, like Sisyphus, labour

Tractor moving snow

twenty-four hours a day battling to keep the pavements and roads clear in the face of the continual snowfall. Actually, Canute would have been a better analogy, but I’ve used Sisyphus now so it’s staying. Anyway, I threw the Canute one in later, so you’ve got enough to paint your own picture. Where was I? Snow. This army of street workers has now made its way perilously skywards as they work to remove the thick layers of snow off the roofs and into waiting skips below. I don’t think there’s any real danger from these controlled falls, but it does lend a spectacular aspect to my morning’s commute, as enormous avalanches of snow erupt without warning along the wide city streets falling up to thirty metres to the growing snow mountains below.

Diminutive Snow Shoveller in the foreground. State Archaeology Museum in the background.

I think, amidst all this strangeness, it might be easy to lose your sense of self. But then, at other times, I’m not so sure. I wrote something about this for an online magazine, which – if you have a mind to – you can read here: http://innerspacemagazine.wordpress.com/2011/01/27/im-not-me-im-him/ I have no comment on anything else in there. My point here, (which isn’t entirely related to the magazine article) is that there’s a lot of external

Commuters

prompts that make us, us. Maybe this goes back to my fixation on the sofa http://life2thesequel.wordpress.com/2010/10/19/i-dont-know-why-you-say-good-bye-i-say-good-bye/, But then, as I said in the magazine article, it’s not what happens to you that makes you who you are, but how you react to it that defines you. Let’s have a For Instance: Say you were struggling to achieve something. It could be anything, I don’t know what, but imagine that it’s something important to you. OK, so you’re struggling to achieve something and then, as we inevitably sometimes do, you fall short of that goal. I don’t think it matters where you are, or what your circumstances are, whether you’re in Lagos or Lancashire, it’s not falling short of the goal that makes you who you are, but how you react to it that does. It’s in how you deal with that which gives you a glimpse of the ‘Core You’. I apologise for the use of ‘Core You’, it’s a bit pretentious. I think my point is that the reaction has to come from somewhere. That’s to say, this is an equal and opposite reaction to the stimulus. Am I making sense? No? OK, try this; imagine that the failure I outlined above was a falling tennis ball. Well, the Core You would be what it

Sleeping

bounced against when it landed. The bounce is your reaction and consequentially, your best indication of what lies within you; good and/or bad. Sonar would probably have been a better analogy, but, like with my Sisyphus and Canute ones, I’m going to stick with my bouncing ball. However, (and I’m about to contradict myself) I think the more you experience, good and bad, the more it has to impact upon that sense of inner self/Core You. If you’re alive, then experience must force change upon you, so here’s a question; would I have taken this step and come here if I hadn’t lost my sight? Probably not. However, here’s a tougher one; would I have reacted in the same way to being here after having lost my sight as I would before? In other words, has the surface the tennis ball bounced against been fundamentally altered by the experience of being blind? I’m afraid that the truth to that one is, despite my clear self-absorption and rampant narcissism, that I just don’t know. Which is a pity, as that would have been good.

Maybe the Core You is really just a variety of reactions within some slowly shifting boundaries. Maybe it’s not really important to reach a conclusion, just to consider the question. The truth is that I don’t really know.

I should probably have made that clear before agreeing to write the article.

Enough of that. Let’s turn to thrilling accounts of daring and danger. Failing daring, we may just do Danger.

Firstly, some clarification; Russia does not have a Police Service, it has a Militia. From street level, this creates the impression of a permanent occupation. To give you an idea of the scale of this para-military presence, there are supposed to be around 26,000 Police

Militia watching commuters.

Officers in London and 40,000 in New York. Moscow has 150,000 Militia. They line the walls of every Metro Station, attack dogs on tight leashes, staring glumly at the passing crowd, eager to spot the first Caucasian face to detain and question.

A ‘For Instance’? I think so. In my work induction here, I was instructed never to answer the door to the Militia or to hand my documents over to them. The feral dogs that roam the streets looking for scraps of food tend to be better regarded than the Militia. The dogs also roam the streets in similarly sized packs. That they are not highly paid is a given. Subsequently bribery and ‘on the spot fines’ are accepted within the Militia hierarchy as an almost legitimate means of supplementing your income. This isn’t winning them many friends. The barely concealed violence doesn’t help either. At the riots in Manezh Square towards the fag-end of last year, the Militia held back against going in against the far right nationalist, in a near reverse manner to the speed and brutality with which they went in against the liberals protesting for freedom of assembly a few weeks earlier. Don’t worry, this isn’t just a diatribe against the Militia. I’m going somewhere with this.

But first I’m going to go somewhere else.

Moscow is very expensive. This isn’t the same city I came to 1999, where a bunch of Glasgow Post Grads could live/drink like Lords/Bankers on the back of some pretty miserly stipends. Everything here is expensive. Moscow is divided between the very, very

Women selling farm produce in the snow

rich and everyone else; with prices generally geared towards the former. One of the ways this disparity manifests itself is in taxis. There are two types of taxi here; the official cabs with lights and meter, and the ubiquitous, illegal, Gypsy cab. In reality, the official cabs are out of the price range of most people here, so the Gypsy cabs that patrol the nighttime streets looking for anyone with a couple of roubles and an outstretched arm tend to make a pretty acceptable living.

The new Mayor here, Sobyanin, has ordered a crackdown on the Gypsy cabs. That most Gypsy cab drivers are from the Caucuses may not be entirely coincidental. In any event, that was a very long way of getting

City Centre Traffic

round to describing how my flat-mate and I were making our way home in the back of a Gypsy cab when we were flagged over by the Militia. However, I wanted to set the scene and it’s probably important that you know the background to events.  In any event, keeping with that commitment to total honesty, it’s probably also fair to tell you that the pair of us were really quite drunk when all this happened. In retrospect, this was probably luck, as what happened next would have made a sober man very nervous. Drunkenness has many advantages over sobriety, bravery is just one. To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, or why we had stopped. The first thing I was aware of was a uniformed head sticking itself into the cab and ordering us out on to the street. Leaving any car and getting into the freezing cold of a dark Moscow night is always disconcerting, not least when that dark Moscow night is populated by three Militia of varying ages and a nervous looking Gypsy cab driver. However, the nerves didn’t appear to be entirely contained to the cab driver. I remember one of the Militia, probably still in his teens, also seeming quite nervous. That should probably have been the cause for some concern on our part, and I remember telling myself that someone else should probably be quite concerned about it. From here, and after some fairly abrupt questioning, we were bundled into the back of the Militia Car, flanked on either side, and driven across the city. It’s worth stressing at this point that neither of us were in any way scared. In fact, sticking with that whole commitment to honesty thing, I should admit to a shared drunken thrill in the experience. However, maybe that’s just me. I don’t know. Certainly, looking out of the window and staring out at the city passing me by, I don’t remember feeling any real sense of dread. There’s something inherently reassuring about being driven through a city night. Perhaps it’s the neon lights, maybe it’s the warmth of the car against the nighttime’s cold, I don’t really know, but it’s soothing and, even under those fairly extreme circumstances, I was failing to get overly excited. Rather,I remember an idle curiosity as to what would happen next and an almost lazy detachment to events as I calculated the odds of getting a beating. As it was, we came to halt in a darkened and fairly secluded residential area where we were removed from the car and our documents taken off us, (I know we were supposed to keep them but they had guns). I think this was the fist time I became aware of my nerves. I had no idea where we were, but I knew it was dark and no one was about. Furthermore, I knew that they now had my passport and were not looking at us in a very friendly way. The details of what happened next are pretty blurred, but matters soon came to rest on the subject of how much money we had and how much money we were going to give them. For reasons that entirely escape me now, I made the decision to haggle, before conceding to reality and handing over most of our money. Duty done and richer for the experience, the Militia drove off leaving us to the Moscow night.

It was then the Gypsy cab driver appeared from the shadows, telling us that he had followed from a distance and kept watch on us for our own protection. It was never made clear exactly how he was going to protect us. However, he was very clear about now wanting to be paid for this service, which, I’m pretty ashamed to say, we did.

Alone, blinking, shivering and quite drunk, without any money to our name, we looked around our new surroundings. It was then that the dark and forbidding streets segued into the comforting and the familiar as the realisation took hold that the Militia had driven us home. I can only thank them for the courtesy.

We’ve since indulged in endless speculation as to the cause of these events. It might have been that they had initially targeted the Gypsy cab, before finding richer pickings in the back. Alternatively, they may have claimed they were just offering us secure conduct home. Others have suggested that the cab driver was working with the Militia in securing payments from luckless drunks. The truth is that we didn’t really know then and we don’t know now. Everything else is just speculation.

Of course, this is all well and good. But I don’t want to give you the impression of living out here on the edge. Life just doesn’t work that way. As I’ve said many times before, life exists in the day-to-day and the routine. Night time rides with the Moscow Militia are external and quite alien to that. Something strange happened to me a couple of weeks ago. I was at a party when someone spilt their drink on my null. To many, this next admission is going to sound a little strange, but it’s only with the loss of the thing that I realised just how symbiotic my relationship with it had become. Up to that point, it seems that I barely spent a minute outside of a classroom or my flat without it in my ears. It must seem strange to read of someone who

Borovitskaya Metro Station

involuntarily, albeit temporarily, lost one sense going on to quite deliberately forfeit another, but music is a large part of who I am; so here we are and there you go. However, for the first time, I can now actually hear Moscow and the experience is a little disconcerting. As I’ve described previously, three times a week I join a moving army as it makes its way into the centre to start work. The scale of the commute is overwhelming. People, in their thousands, shuffle along the pavements and through the underground passages on to the Metro and into the centre. Nobody does, or could, move quickly. You walk in small steps pressed in on all sides as you make your slow and deliberate way through the cavernous underground system and on into work.

Commuters at Lenin Library Metro

However, and here’s the thing, with one exception, (more on this in a bit) the entire process takes place in absolute silence. I hadn’t realised it until now. Previously, the entire slow motion ballet took place to the accompaniment of The Violent Femmes and the current silence is a little unsettling. I don’t know, maybe this takes place in every city across the world every day. Maybe I’ve been plugged into my null so long I can’t even remember anything before it, but it’s strange. All these people hemmed in and buffeted on all sides, proceeding in their slow immutable fashion and all in absolute silence. It’s weird.

The one exception to this, (as promised) is the speaker system that runs the length of the escalators at most central stations. I’m told that, in the Soviet days, these self-same speakers would play patriotic music and urge the silent shuffling masses onto further endeavours in the field of tax accountancy or whatever, (I don’t even know if the Soviet State employed tax accountants). Now, ironically, they bleat out advertisements, urging the self-same silent and shuffling masses to take part in the new enterprise culture that embodies the new Russia. Every day I walk past a small network of interconnected shops, outside of which, huddled deep within a thick fur coat and hat, stands a very short woman with a loud-speaker urging the passing citizenry to call in at one of her

The Hard Sell

outlets. This is far from an unusual practice here, but it’s odd; every time I see her my mind immediately conjures up images of the commissars urging soldiers onwards to certain suicide in their tens of thousands for the glory of the Motherland and Stalin. Though I don’t think many of them were short women in fur coats.

Remaining vestiges of the soviet era can be seen throughout the city, like empty glasses the

Soviet Art at Metro Station

morning after the party. It’s not just the obvious, like Lenin in his mausoleum, it’s everywhere. The elaborately, (and fantastically) ornate frescos of the Metro hold testimony to thousands of muscled and patriotic workers, or hundreds of

Lenin and the Proletariat.

steadfast and inspirational Lenin’s. It’s not just the Metro either, if you keep an eye out, you can still see engravings and plaques on many walls commemorating the efforts of Party apparatchiks of year’s past. I’m not sure if this is because Moscow is still trying to

Plaque marking the first engagement between Moscow revolutionary forces and those of the Provisional Government

decide how it feels about that period, or it’s just been there so long that no one even notices. Maybe someone else will tell me. Either way, I like it.

This Post Soviet hangover even impacts upon me in a very direct way. In keeping with previous form, one of my first priorities on getting here was to put a band together, (‘Lazarou’, you should check us out. We’re on Facebook). After a while, we needed to move to some proper rehearsal facilities and, after a brief search, located an old Soviet Bunker that rented out rooms. It’s a strange experience, from the outside all you can see is a door in the middle of some scrubland, through which you enter before descending a vertiginous – and with the ice, killer – flight of stairs to the inside. Once there, it’s almost impossible to stand. You scurry, like mice, through the low and rounded and labyrinthine network of tunnels between rehearsal rooms. The doors are nearly all made of heavy iron, with the kind of wheel lock usually reserved for submarine movies. In sum, it’s quite brilliant.

Lazarou: the future of rock and roll

It’s been a few days since I started writing this update and, as you’d expect, temperatures have returned to a more typical seasonal norm. At the time of writing, it’s -11, with -24 predicted for tomorrow. However, temperature notwithstanding, I can’t help shake this feeling that spring is around the corner. Maybe it’s because after the recent snowfalls during the warm period, the air’s a little fresher. Maybe it’s because the sun’s beginning to shine, maybe it’s just me. Perhaps it’s the realisation that all the best bits are still to come. That what I’ve experienced thus far is as nothing compared to what’s waiting for me down the line. After all, that’s what Spring’s about; the promise of what lies ahead and first taste of what the summer will bring. I’ve been thinking about all that ‘Core You’ stuff and I’m still not sure I’ve got it right. On reflection, I have a better idea. Maybe it’s our actions that define us. Not the navel gazing, the introspection or the philosophies, but what we actually do. In a way, that’s infinitely more comforting. It gives us the opportunity of a life without limits. If we accept that we can pretty much achieve whatever we want, and we can, then it must follow that we can be whatever we want. Forget Core You, forget about balls bouncing off surfaces, simply think about what you want to do, then do that. Choose to be that person. That’s a far better option.

Domodedovo Airport Bombing

I had planned to update the blog over the weekend. However a few hours ago, a bomb went off at Domodedovo Airport, killing 35 people, (that number’s correct at the time of writing, it keeps changing) and I wanted to set things down whilst they were still fresh in my mind.

Before I begin, I’m going to ask for a little faith on your part, because I’m going to start by talking about how I’m dressed. Really, I’m not trying to reduce disaster to the trivial or twist someone else’s tragedy into a text about myself, I’m actually getting ready to make a point. It’s just that it won’t be immediately apparent, so I’m going to need you to work with me.

I always dress badly. I always have and, at 38, I can confidently predict that I probably always will. However, today, even by my own poor standards, was a new low. This is why the Caucasian guy who runs one of the kiosks near here found himself laughing so hard at me that it was all he could do to take my order. Don’t misunderstand me, he wasn’t being deliberately offensive, I spend quite a bit of time talking with the guy and, as much as my Russian will allow, telling him about life in the UK and working here. Chances are, even if I’m not ordering food from him, he’ll shout out and wave as I pass by. I like him.

That he’s Caucasian is significant because, again, tensions here are on the rise and, after today, I can only guess what’s going to happen. It seems there’s already an acceptance that those from the Caucuses are somehow responsible for today’s tragedy. Let’s not kid ourselves, it would probably be naive to think otherwise. However, today’s events can only help fuel the ever-growing number of far right nationalist groups that seem to be emerging with every passing day. Let me reach over and open this week’s Moscow News, (www.themoscownews.com). The lead story is of the protests surrounding the trial of the two Ultra Nationalists accused of gunning down human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anastasia Baburova. The story below that concerns the reactions amongst the Caucasian youth groups in response to the rise in Ultra Nationalist violence and some speculation as to what’s going to happen next. A bomb at Domodedovo Airport has just answered that.

So, given this, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Moscow is in the grip of an all-consuming terror; punch drunk and reeling from today’s atrocity. Maybe I’m wrong about this, (really, if you think otherwise, just tell me) but I’m not sensing that. I’m aware that nearly everything I put in this blog seems to come accompanied by a ready army of qualifiers and caveats, however, for once, I’ll make myself clear; Moscow makes you feel small. Big things happen here. Big things on epic scales. Think about it, the course of the 20th Century was pretty much defined by what was happening here. It’s even big to look at. The high rises tower over you wherever you go and whatever you’re doing. It reduces that most Western of attributes, the overriding sense of your own significance, to little. That most valuable of all Western commodities, the value of the individual, doesn’t have quite the same caché here. All that is left for the individual therefore, is to concentrate on what is to be done next and make life as good as it can be. I think what I’m trying to say is that there are very large and very powerful forces at work right now. However, they’re forces that are external to most people and their lives. That most of them will be affected in some manner is almost certain. However, as individuals, all that can be done is to continue as before. It’s like I said in the previous post; the routine is everything.

Certainly, from talking to my students, to watching the usual mass of bored and sleeping faces on the Metro home, I can’t see much evidence of any overriding panic. Of course, some people are nervous. Mostly people are just sympathetic to those that lost their lives today. Mostly, I get the sense of people watching events from the sidelines. Each wondering what ‘they’ will do next about ‘them’ and each trying to work out how they might be affected.

Which takes me back to the Caucasian guy at the kiosk. As I was making my way home from work, trudging through the snow and the ice, trying to put my thoughts in order before writing this blog, I was interrupted by a voice from across the street, shouting something about Glasgow Celtic and there he was, craning over the heads of the people queuing at his kiosk; taking the piss out of me.

Life continues.

It’s true that there is a race problem here and it’s true that there is tension, mistrust and the ever-present threat of violence throughout the city. It’s just not here, it’s not in the every day, and perhaps there’s some cause for hope in that.