USHANKA

My ushanka, ordered hurriedly from Amazon when the snow threatened, came this morning.  Arriving early,  the stalwart postman braving the ice had the kindness to hide the parcel in a green garden refuse bag under the table at the side of the house and scrawl a note to that effect on an envelope pushed through the door.  How thoughtful!  Our postmen and women struggling through all manner of weather burdened down by pound upon pound of junk mail, are really quite noble.  Postal spam is a wicked burden on them and us and I'm sure if the Government promised to abolish it it could count on at least five thousand extra votes in every constituency.

So there I have it and you can see it above.  The ushanka - a cold weather hat like a tea cosy with flaps that let down to cover the ears if required -  is a fetching shade of grey, and supposedly the authentic Soviet army model.  It is gunmetal grey and made, I think, from felt with a cotton lining. The outside isn't fur but has a thick carpet-like pile. Anyhow I can vouch for its warmth.  The ushanka even came complete with a  fetching detachable Soviet cap badge in gold and red, the hammer and sickle emblem surrounded by gilded leaves and securely attached by means of two long brass pins.  I have to say that I think it looks very pretty.

I was even in two minds about leaving it on but then I thought it would be asking just too much from my friends and neighbours who must think me eccentric enough as it is. So reluctantly the cap badge has gone; though it can no doubt be easily re-instated if ever there is a need.  Inside on the lining of the ushanka is printed a cartoon of a rabbit and some words in Cyrillic script and the figures 89 - which may well refer to the year of Soviet era manufacture. My ushanka may therefore be already 24 years old, though if so it has been stored well against the day when I might need it.

Also printed is the size, ‘60,’ which refers to the circumference of the head.  I find this slightly too large: the ushanka keeps falling forward, slowly tilting forward over my eyes, but a little padding will remedy that easily.  By my calculation someone whose head is 60 centimetres in circumference has a brain 10 per cent larger than someone whose head is only 58 centimetres in circumference and yet heads apparently range from 54 to 65 centimetres without noticeable effect on the intelligence.  In any case if your brain is too big you become, I understand, an idiot, which perhaps explains why cows and elephants are not the Einstein’s of the animal kingdom. They have large brains but don’t do much with them, except for never forgetting an injury.  Crows, on the other hand, could probably pass the eleven plus, and they have to make do with something the size of a large pea.

I wish my ushanka had arrived yesterday which was Day One of the Great Whiteout.  In fact we only had about three or four inches of snow but it is quite remarkable what changes even a little snowfall like that can bring. On the roads, even with the much reduced traffic, the pristine whiteness soon turns to slush - a grey, gunmetal at first and then for some reason it turns to a warm brown.  I have never understood why.  But out in the countryside the snow remains deep and crisp and even.  And pure white of course.  Yesterday I went for a walk in the gathering gloom of the afternoon and marvelled at the transformation: tranquillity and calm  everywhere descended.  There was a wind blowing and it had again started to snow;  moreover, the snow was lying as the thermometer had again fallen below zero.  Sliding occasionally on the ice, with the snow in my face, battling up the hill,  I felt like Scott on his way to the South Pole, but it was an exhilarating and elemental feeling and when I returned home tired and exhausted I drank a vodka to warm me up.

Vodka? Ushankas? I feel Boraya is turning me into a species of Russian. Perhaps because I have returned to the novel after a deliberate step back and layoff over Christmas and New Year.  First, reading the book, then reworking in my mind all its little connections and consequences and now, at last, putting fingers to keyboard. The country dacha in which Elizabeth and Vladimir begin their romance now has a name - the Casa Malinka - and a provenance in the shape of a Calalan architect.     Its ‘distinctive characteristic, the one that remains forever in your mind, is the external decoration.  It is painted extravagantly in broad vertical curving bands, alternately pink and blue,  and those swirls of colour even in winter bring the warm sunshine of Barcelona to the Gulf of Finland.’  

I have these swirls of colour in my mind - can’t get them out of my mind - have I seen them somewhere?  A photograph, perhaps? Or have I imagined them?  Anyway, unless or until she repaints,  (which she won't do while I am writing the novel) Elizabeth is stuck with them.  ‘Poka.’ 

DEAD, VAST AND MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

One of my Christmas presents this year was Richard Burton’s diaries - a real doorstopper of a book.   Absolutely everything has been included regardless of how repetitive, banal, trivial or uninformative.  It is hard to write a diary whose greater part doesn’t suffer from these characteristics and Burton’s is no exception, but a decent editing job would have produced a book a third the size and much more informative. The editor (Chris Williams of Swansea University who have custody of Burton’s ‘papers’) has also included a mass of footnotes many of which serve little elucidatory purpose.  You might ask then why anyone should want to read it. 


The answer is because the diaries are like gold ore. Among the 'dead vast and middle of the night' entries are brilliant flashes, dramatic observations, fascinating accounts of people and places, illusions and self-deceptions, strengths and vulnerabilities, which make the writing as interesting as the acting.

I am a great fan of Burton and have often been entranced by that magic voice.  I can also remember standing on stage once in front of a 650 watt spotlight struggling to deliver a particular speech and turning to him in my head for help.  Quick as a flash I heard his voice telling me to concentrate on pronouncing each word; if I did this the line would follow, he said.  Whether it was my imagination or the great man taking pity on a fellow thesp what he suggested seemed to work and I drank his health in the bar afterwards.

Though why it is that we drink people’s health, I have no idea.  Booze did for Burton in the end just as it has done for so many of the great and good.  Still it is said that people who drink moderately live longer than those who don’t.  I used to wonder whether this really meant anything in that some of the most miserable people that I have met have been elective teetotallers.  And if one thing kills you faster than alcohol it is misery.  But however would we manage social occasions without it? 

Such as, for instance, Twelfth Night, a long forgotten part of the Winter Festivities calendar which I have been doing my bit all my life to resurrect.  Among our little theatre group here we have now a tradition of doing something on the evening of 5th or 6th January: the jury is still out on which is the correct date.  This year we read a play - Patrick Barlow’s 39 Steps adaptation, which is currently touring the country.  Fourteen people came in all, including a ventriloquist’s dummy called Sonny Goy, and a very good time was had by all.

In the invitation we stated that nibbles would be on offer but so many people brought food that we have been living on leftovers.  But why is it that everyone brings red wine to parties and then asks for white?  My stock of white wine is now seriously deleted but I have enough red wine to float a battleship.  I think I shall have to specify something about this on the invitations next year.

Actually this week I have been ill, sunk by the same virus that seems to be knocking on everyone’s door and I was driven to my bed.  I cannot remember the last time that this happened. My brain refused to function and all I wanted to do was sleep.  The business carried on however and we have had quite a few orders which I struggled to despatch in my dressing gown.  I am better now but a week has gone by with no work done on the Boraya project.  I have printed out the text and it is now a great thick mass of paper.  The next step is to read it. But I am finding this difficult.  Other people have writers’ block, I have readers’ block.  This doesn’t reflect on the text; the few pages I have read are not bad, though I say it myself.  It is hard, though, not to keep spotting the infelicities of a first draft and the bits that will require reworking and so only half my mind is focused on the reading and the other on something else.  Still, I expect I shall get there, if the business gives me half a chance.

Meanwhile I shall read Burton.  At one point in his diary he says ‘if only I didn’t have to work then I might write a book or something.’ Richard, I know the feeling well, though you could, you know, have just walked out on the picture studios, bought a little place in the south of France and set about a life of scribbling or perhaps teaching at Oxford.  But it is all too late. I wish though I had your capacity for speed reading - two or three books a day - and with the ability to retain what I’d read.  What a turbo-charged mind!

CRISE DE FOIE

The Empty Sea Front at Tharon Plage

Our French friend and neighbour again kindly invited us to her house at Tharon to share the New Year reveillon.  The marvellous feast began with ‘amuse bouche,’ continued with a high plate of oysters, followed by scallops, cheese, salad, and finished with a rum baba. Through it all we drank champagne.  Eating all this by candlelight took us pretty much to midnight when we put on the television and counted down the New Year.  Of course, satellite television being what it is we switched to the BBC an hour later and watched Big Ben tolling out the old year and then the lavish fireworks bringing in 2013.  Two bites of the new year cherry, as it were.  I suppose if you were really in the mood and had a big enough satellite dish you could toast the new year 24 times in a single day.  That is if there are 24 time zones, which perhaps there aren’t.  Just as well as you’d need a break every now and then, wouldn’t you,  to replenish the crackers?

In France the provenance of food receives serious attention.  On the fishmonger's stall in the market, all sorts of shrimps nestled among ferocious looking lobsters waving their minor appendages.  Some were labelled as from ‘the equator,’ others from Madagascar, both were relatively inexpensive. Others, looking much the same, were ‘local,’ but twice the price.  Nevertheless, these proved the most popular and so we bought some. Cooked with garlic and piment they were delicious. We also bought conger eel (also local!) on the grounds that I had never eaten it before; the fishmonger cut it into steaks (the original animal looked large enough to have fed the five thousand) and gave us copious culinary advice. In the end we dusted and pan fried it, and while the result was interesting I suspect the poor conger will struggle to make the grade as a gourmet fish.

In France far greater attention is given to food, buying it, preparing it, eating it than in the UK, or most other places come to that.  With the emphasis on local produce and quality, bread baked twice a day, twice weekly food markets, traceability and a strong food culture, the proportion of French GDP devoted to eating must be significant.  What effect, I wonder, does that have on the economy as a whole? Compared to other industrialised countries, does it detract from the efforts to achieve a strong economy, or strengthen them? And does it make people happier, other things being equal?

Still you can have too much of a good thing.  In the interests of internationalism we made some carbonara - an Italian dish of spaghetti in a cheese sauce with small pieces of bacon - delicious but rich.  Not wanting to waste it I heated up the leftovers, adding more cream, butter and parmesan ......but a few hours later I was in agony.  I felt I had been kicked in the stomach by a horse.  I was suffering, so my hostess said, ‘une crise de foie,’  (liver crisis) something very well known in France and caused by eating too much rich food.  I wasn’t so sure.  I thought about those lardons of bacon and wondered whether I had heated them through properly.  I had researched the symptoms of botulism poisoning for my novel ‘Boraya,’ and I wondered if this could be the initial stages of a creeping nervous paralysis that would eventually kill me. Would the hospital in Pornic have Botulinum antidote?  No, said my hostess, it was ‘crise de foie,’ and it would disappear by itself.  Which it did, of course.  I even managed a rich butter croissant for breakfast the next day.

The boulangerie is some three-quarters of a mile away, so someone has to walk or drive there to fetch the breakfast croissants. I prefer to walk for the route is along the promenade, most beautiful in the early morning when the sun is climbing over the grey winter sea.  Above you in the sky flocks of gulls ride the wind, all going in the same direction, as if they, too, are on some morning commute. Besides, the walk gives you an appetite, all that sea air and a chance to reflect.  In the middle of winter, Tharon is deserted, the houses shuttered until Easter.  Strangely this loneliness gives you a feeling of belonging, somehow, as if you and the solitary man on the beach with his metal detector were heirs to this holiday town.  I wondered whether he was also recovering from a ‘crise de foie.’

BORAYA IS FINISHED! (well, the First Draft)

The Flower Seller in Her Youth

I am sitting here at my desk this morning in a state of mild distraction, not knowing quite what I am doing. I have been reduced to clearing out my overflowing ‘pending’ trays and I have just ordered a Christmas present over the internet.

Yesterday I was just as feverishly busy as I have been during any mornings of the last four months, bashing out the first draft of my first novel - Boraya.  But all good things must come to an end and Boraya did, quite suddenly,  around ten to one. I wasn’t quite expecting it, but it was a convenient time all the same to stop for lunch.

To be fair I knew I must be approaching the end because I had already written an epilogue and I knew that when the novel reached the point at which the epilogue began I should have to stop.  But the epilogue, telling of the characters’ futures, seemed a rainbow’s end, forever dancing a tantalising 2,000 words before me.

And then all of a sudden, bump. I decided that readers could just imagine for themselves Vladimir’s historic visit to the Zurich chocolate factory which his great great grandfather had left with his Swiss wife in 1902 in order to found the Imperial Boraya Chocolate Factory in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg.  Besides I had left Vladimir comfortably ensconced with Elizabeth, the diffident young Scots woman whose remarkable romantic and developmental journey the book is really about, in an enormous Swiss bateau lit; so to picture him in complex negotiations about the price and specification of chocolate seemed quite redundant.  And Zurich in late April seemed as good a place as any to let the epilogue begin.

Nevertheless that wasn’t really the end because I had remembered that in her travels between Russia and Scotland Elizabeth had all the time been carrying an urn full of ashes, which she had promised to scatter over - or at least healthily beside - the cauliflowers and artichokes of the Breton countryside. Quite why Elizabeth should be carrying such an urn and a portfolio of certificates relating to it, I shall not immediately reveal, but I can say that she and Vladimir fly to Paris and then take the TGV down to Brittany, scatter the ashes in a little copse of trees, share one or two memories of the deceased and make it back to St Petersburg in 200 words, which must rank for something in the compression stakes.

And so, serendipitously, the scattering of the ashes, though occurring in the middle of the book, was the last bit of it I wrote.  So now, having promised myself some days off before commencing the task of editing, I am at a loose end.  The question that I asked myself ‘could I write a novel’ I have answered. It is done.  Boraya exists.

In fact, not only is it done but its writing has proved far easier than ever I imagined. Indeed the mistake that I made at the beginning was to imagine at all.  Because, in the short experience of this beginner, I discovered the truth in the assertion I first heard advanced by Graham Greene to the effect that an author has really very little idea of what he is going to write until he has written it.

Once my main characters and their setting were reasonably established; once, as it were, I had given them houseroom, they just took over and the manuscript wasn’t mine anymore but theirs.  They acted out their stories and brought along their friends to help them, too.  People I couldn’t dream of suddenly tumbled into the story, demanding their own share of plot: one little minx even ran off with a British Member of Parliament.

Indeed, I took myself to the laptop each morning as though I were reading a book rather than writing one.  I wanted to know what would happen next and the words just appeared on the screen to tell me.

Of course, the characters did occasionally need my help. Vladimir became stuck in hospital and it took me a week to figure how to get him out convincingly;  the transportation of the factory at the end of the book also took some time. Then, there was research - books to read and endless queries to look up on line.  Friends chipped in to help here, too. But in the main, the characters did the work for me. I even found myself on one occasion borrowing one of my character’s mannerisms.

During the writing somebody said to me ‘you talk about your characters as though they are real people!’  But to me they are real people: lovers, heroes, villains, workers, dreamers, young and old, male and female.  Even the old vodka-sodden woman who sells flowers salvaged from the florists’ dustbins in the snow on Nevsky Bridge is real to me.  ‘A wilted rose brings luck,’ she says, unconvincingly, in a creaking voice that echoes a door opening slowly in an empty church.

And she is an echo.  But then in Saint Petersburg the echoes of the past are all around.  Echoes of the 900 day Siege of Leningrad blow through the story like an icy wind: heroism, resilience, the common good, self-sacrifice, the horror and inhumanity of war. The Boraya chocolate factory is not without its scars, or its secrets.

Now the less interesting part of the story has to begin, the re-writes.  One thousand words is simple enough to edit - but one hundred thousand means that you have to edit not just for sentence and paragraph fluency but for consistency between material written months apart.  Still that is for me to worry about.  For the moment I just want to thank everyone who has supported me and encouraged me and helped me on this first stage of the journey.  


The picture shows Alexei Alexeievich Harlamoff  (Russian painter, c 1840–1925) The Flower Seller. 

PEANUTS

Fennie Dove After Hawk Attack

‘PEACE MISSIONS!  Bloody peace missions!  They are to doves what jury service is to people: sometimes interesting, but always a bloody nuisance.  People think they’re simple: fly to so-and-so, pick up an olive branch, on to the war zone, deposit the branch, fly home.  Easy-peasy!  You pick up a whole shedload of karma points and an extra helping of peanuts. Even a medal if you’re really lucky. After all it’s what you’re made for, isn’t it? Elephants roll logs, doves fly peace missions.

‘Well, there I was: called up. “Fly here,” they said. “Where?” I said. “There,” they said.  “Blimey,” I said, “that’s a long way! Dangerous, too.”  “If you’d rather not, Fennie,........” they said. “If you’re feeling off colour......”

‘Of course I’d bloody well rather not! But you’d never live with yourself, would you, after that?  I mean that’s your self-respect gone for a Burton.  Yellow? You might as well be a canary!  So ‘OK,’ I said.  They gave me a big bowl of peanuts and told me to take an early night.  It’s lonely work flying peace missions; like reconnaissance, you always fly alone. In the cold and lonely sky.  Best not to start long books.

‘Crack of dawn next day I’m off, out of the loft and flying high over the fields.  I climb as high as I can for there’s always the risk of some crackpot shooter. What is it about boys with guns? I’m a dove, fella.  But I always say that if you see even the flash of a man before you get properly upstairs, then dive.  Dive!  Shooters always expect birds to climb, you see. So if you dive they fire over the top of you. Dive and the worst you’ll get is an outfield pellet through one of your primaries. Might twinge a bit if it hits the spline, but you’ll be OK. If you’re lucky someone will imp it out for you.

‘I got a pellet up the bum once. That was painful I can tell you.  Thankfully,  just the one. Almost out of range; lodged under the skin. Still there, too.  I get a tweak sometimes sitting on a nest. And another thing, if you do get hit, keep flying, that’s the rule: there’s probably a dog on the ground.

‘Where was I? Oh, yes!  Peace missions.  Well, we don’t set out with our olive branches, not that we have too many olive branches here anyway.  Fortunately, most wars these days seem to occur where they grow olives - have you noticed? Funny that. My solution to the problems in the Middle East - cut down the olive trees!  Ha-ha! No? My little joke!

‘So you fly down to the war zone in the morning, sneak into an olive grove,  all the while watching for trainee belligerents with their 12 bores, pick up a likely branch and then follow your nose fast and low towards the smell of cordite, hedgehopping all the way.  You find some dusty market square in the middle of the tanks and artillery, leave your olive calling card, and get the hell out even faster than you came in, praying that no-one has time to take a bead on you. If you hear a gun, then corkscrew, corkscrew!  Who cares about a few bashed wing tips? The only good thing about a war zone is that most people don’t use shotguns.

‘I know you want to get upstairs to safety as fast as possible but until you make 3,000 feet you’re just a target and a dove hit by a piece of 37mm shrapnel just isn’t a pretty sight.  So fly low through the lanes and alleys. If you’re cornered dodge into a building, there’s always a way out the back.  It’s only when you can’t hear the guns anymore that you pull back on the old stick and reach for the safety of clouds.

‘Well, I made it that time - or I wouldn’t be here now.  And they told me later I’d scored a bullseye. Cease-fire, exchange of prisoners, amnesties, peace treaties - the lot.  Not a bad day’s work for one little dove and a bag of peanuts.  They gave me a medal,  too. I’m proud of that.

‘But I won’t be flying any more missions. No more olive branches for me!  Ha! Wounded coming home, you see.  I tell you: never, ever, get demob happy.  Never relax your concentration, not for one millisecond.  I relaxed for a minute or two and I paid the price.  Right on the bloody doorstep!  ‘There I was, high in the sky, dreaming of a little nest of sticks and a couple of eggs under me and the gangly, squawky squabs hatching -  it’s about all I’m good for these days, but it’s remarkable how peaceful just sitting on a nest can be.  You can even feel the vibrations of the squabs inside the eggs, did you know? That’s real peace for you. That’s when you feel the sun on your back.

‘Sun on your back!  I’ve told you it was a long way.  Well, I’d been flying all day. Used up more adrenaline than an entire football team and I was tired as only a bird that has flown through a war zone can be.  That’s bloody tired, I can tell you.  I thought at first I wouldn’t get home and would have to put down in someone’s garden and beg for crusts, hoping they would have the sense to read the rings on my legs and make a telephone call. That’s an indignity, I can tell you, having your rings read.  But luckily the wind must have been behind me, I looked down and suddenly there was home: the river and the railway line and the two ‘L’ shaped roofs of the cote. Never have moss-clad tiles looked so good.

‘Now, normally, I would do a circuit to check all’s well, but I just wanted to get on the ground and fill my crop with peanuts.  Some cool water from the bird bath wouldn’t go amiss either, I thought to myself.  So, like a fool, I just dropped, didn’t I?  Wiggly-waggly, swish-swish, falling through the air - a disgrace to the whole avian persuasion; but after facing 37mm artillery who cares? I came in from the west with the late afternoon sun behind me....

‘I must have been about two hundred feet when zoom - thunk!  Suddenly, my neck was on fire, I had a searing pain around the clavicle, port wing suddenly useless.  Hawk!  Bloody, bastard hawk.

‘I thought my time had come: it had me fast in its talons and we were hurtling to earth.  All that successful artillery dodging and now this.  I was a goner.

‘The ground was rushing up, the air shrieking past. The hawk had been diving when he took me,  from above and straight out of the sun.  In seconds we would hit the deck.

‘But then a miracle: because I’d been side-slipping, wishy-washing, the hawk hadn’t been able to make a clean strike.  The way he had hold meant that I was tipping him forward, making him dive more.  He couldn’t straighten up.  He couldn’t pull out of the dive. In another second he would take us both into the ground.  He just couldn’t get his tail down, you see. If nothing else he would break his legs. “Good!” I thought.

‘“Let me go,” I yelled, but he just clung on, talons digging deeper.  His great black wings were desperately clawing the air, but at that angle they simply wouldn’t bite. If I was a goner, then so was he. The ground must have been feet away, when at last and with a great squawk of rage, he dropped me. I hit the floor and bounced. 

‘He got his tail down then but so great was his downward momentum that his feathers brushed me on the ground as he flattened out. He shot forward quite out of control. Well, every story has its funny side. Out of control? The hawk flew thwack into a great bunch of tall thistles.  He crashed through them, of course, big heavy bird that he was, but the prickles must have hurt.

‘I could see him climbing lazily away as I lay on the grass, the breath knocked out of me.  He’d be round again in an instant. Could I move before he came back? I had blood running down my neck. My port wing dragged, the muscles in spasm from the hawk’s talons.  I have to say that he’d probably have had me if it hadn’t been for the lovely woman who cares for us coming out of her house at that very moment rattling the peanut tin. Saved! Never has a fortnight’s confinement in the hospital hutch seemed quite such an unalloyed pleasure. 

 ‘Anyway, nice to meet you.  Good luck!  Always best to corkscrew left, what?’



A friend of mine who keeps doves was kind enough to name one of them for me.  A fine strong dove that would fly away during the day and come back at night.  Then one day the dove appeared as you see in the picture - the victim of a hawk strike. Well, I wondered what the dove did during the day and that formed the basis of the story.

BORAYA AND A TRILLION DOLLAR DEFICIT

Interior of Mari Vanna Restaurant, London

 Last Sunday I went up to London to meet a Russian friend, who I had last bumped into at a wedding in Brittany. She told me then the 'famous' (well, at least in our family) Russian hedgehog joke.  "A hedgehog was crossing the road one day.  All was well when it set out but when it reached the middle of the road, it rolled over and died."

That's it.  No follow-up, no punchline. A mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma as Churchill might have said.  Anyway, I have only met two people (apart from my friend) who thought this remotely funny and one of them was me - but there we were last Sunday, several years on and the conversation rattling away as though the intervening time had been a minor interruption.

She had very kindly agreed to help me with the novel, which some of you may know I am writing.  I have always wanted to write but have always been very bad at it - bad at the technical stuff, let alone the creative bit - but gradually all that is becoming easier.  On the internet, on social networking sites and so on I find that many of those whom I have come to regard as old and dear friends are writers of one sort or another and I suppose we inspire and encourage one another, though sometimes I think that I have the best of the bargain.  Having written some 85,000 words now I can talk about 'my novel' for it undoubtedly exists.  It isn't finished yet but what remains - some stirring stuff that includes a car (or rather lorry) chase, a death, a birth, and a  marriage, is all outlined and should be complete before Christmas when the real work of editing will start.

 'Boraya' is about a chocolate factory and is set mainly in St Petersburg in the late 1990's.  It is a romance but also a story of what happens to people whose lives are overwhelmed by external events.  I suppose I was inspired subconsciously by that great volume of Russian literature which becomes addictive when you are a languid and forlorn teenager.  I remember my biology teacher complaining that I was reading surreptitiously during a tedious lesson and having my book shown to all the class much to their amusement. It was a paperback edition of 'Seven Short Novels by Chekhov.'  The book had cost me seven shillings and sixpence and I still have it on my bookshelves, though I suppose decades have passed since I looked at it.

Yet if you write a novel set in a country that you have never visited and in a well-known city, you have to try and get the details reasonably correct.  Interviewed at the Hay Literary Festival this summer William Boyd confessed that he had written a book set in the Philippines and afterwards he had been complimented by the country's tourist office, all without ever going there. He said he just used a guide book and his imagination - so it can be done. Nevertheless mere mortals like me need help.

It isn't just what the protagonists might see around the city;  that can be derived from guidebooks.  No, it is everything else. I wrote down on the train a couple of dozen questions to ask my friend.  Food figured largely among them and it helped that we were eating in a traditional Russian restaurant - the 'Mari Vanna,' so Russian that everyone, staff and customers, spoke that language,  and I was forced out of politeness to say 'Spasibo' to the waiter.  It was a good introduction to Russian food and Russian interiors, this one more like a set decorated for one of Chekhov's plays than a London restaurant.

We spent a long time eating the excellent food - I tried the Siberian Pelmeni, which are a kind of dumpling - while discussing what Russians call each other.  When you would use the ultra-formal equivalent of 'Mr' or 'Mrs,'  for instance, and when you would use the patronymic - that is your addressee's father's name - as in, perhaps, Mikail Sergeievitch, or when you would just use a first name?  But what happens if you are a foreigner?  Under what name would you book a table at a restaurant? What happens even if you don't have an official father (well, you can always invent!).   The name of the restaurant itself is a first name and a patronymic, for the name is a contraction of Maria Ivanovna - a very common name, apparently, in Russia and one that is contracted in speech to 'Mari Vanna.'

Almost everywhere I turn in the story I find a different world.  I am now an expert on the botulinum toxin (nothing to do with the restaurant I hasten to add) for that figures in the story too, as of course does the terrible history of St Petersburg.  As the story unfolds the experience is more like reading a book than writing one in that my characters keep on surprising me. They keep me entertained at least and I hope one day they will entertain you too.

*****

On a completely different topic there has been much discussion in the course of the recent American Presidential Election of that country's trillion dollar deficit.  That figure always worried me.  Surely that can't mean that the US Government spends a trillion dollars more than it receives in taxes?  But then I thought of our own deficit - about £160 billion.  Express that in dollars and we have around $250 billion, which is of course a quarter of a trillion.  If we say that the US economy is about four times the size of the British economy then their deficit really isn't any worse than ours.   Trillion dollars it is.  What an amazing amount of money!  We are all living on tick to an absurd degree.  Easy to say but knowing what to do about it is another matter.

The photograph of the Mari Vanna interior is taken from the internet. I am unsure to whom the credit is due but offer thanks in advance.

CHIPS AND FISH

Atlantic Salmon Migrating Upstream

Yesterday we arrived early at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, which really  is in a Camelot sort of spot beside the dark tumbling river Tummel and in the shadow of the lowering hills.  The sun shone but we took limited advantage as we were soon entombed in the entrails of the theatre with a guide showing us that hidden land beyond the proscenium arch, all the wizardry and gadgetry, the levers, pulleys, trucks, lights and rooms hidden deep in the earth, which all the same manage to have windows looking out across the river.

In this nether world, carefully stacked and parked, we saw the sets of the play we had seen the day before and more bits of set belonging to the play we would see today. We saw the actors' dressing rooms, the costume rooms, the wig rooms (full of wigs, naturally) and the green room, called that for a reason long lost in the mists of time. We learned that the actors work up to 13 and a half hour days for two months learning three or more plays at the same time and rehearsing over and over so that they can then appear in them for our benefit eight times a week. I think such practices are medieval and should be banned.  After all with most of the acting profession 'resting' why make one man or woman do the work of three.  But I suppose that would increase the price of tickets.  Still did they not say something like that about the cost of cleaning chimneys?

It's exhausting enough doing one play, but to finish a matinée and then go straight into something else requires a stamina that has long since passed me by - but then these actors, I suppose, don't have to lead normal lives, don't have to shop or run businesses or write books. Yet even if I didn't have to do these things I very much doubt I could do their job even if I were blessed with a modicum of acting talent.

We are here in the Highlands on holiday with Rosie and Jim, this land of mountain, river and lake and we also took good advantage of these aquatics, for conveniently the theatre is located next to a hydro-electric plant so if ever you are bored with the mechanics of putting on a show you can wander along the riverbank for five minutes to watch the salmon climbing the salmon ladder.  So far this year 5,163 salmon have passed through the 15 metre ladder. The season is from April (Spring fish) to October (Grilse and Stragglers) and the average is 5,400 fish (salmon) in the season, so this is likely to be a below average year, yet more evidence of the inexorable decline of the world's most beautiful fish.  We saw only a trout of some unknown persuasion in the observation chamber, but you never know what you are going to see there for suddenly out of the darkness will come a black shape,streaked with silver and vivid in the brown water. It will fix you with its beady eye and hooked beak, snarling almost in its rush to find the gravel redds in which it will spawn and then to limp back, spent and flattened to the reviving waters of the sea.  Only one in ten salmon make it back to the sea but among those 5,000 salmon that return each year five will have returned three times, or so I have always supposed and so perhaps be candidates for the 49 and three quarter pound monster, a plaster cast of which hangs on the wall of the power station. These in the picture are not so large, but convey the image of something looming out of the water, like silver spotlights in a theatre.