BiB

“Darling, do you think my haircut makes me look like Hitler?”

“Absolyut not,” answered the Russian with conviction bordering on the complimentary. Odd for him to miss the chance for a bit of an insult. Telling me I looked like Hitler would have been a forfeit-free chance to say I was a bit of a wanker. “You don’t look heterosexual at all.”

“Not gitera (hetero), Gitlera (Hitler), you silly billy (if memory serves me rightly).”

“Oh, yes, yes, you look like Gitler.”

I went to a gay bar once. Alone. I’ve mostly stumbled from one long-term relationship to another but I think I managed to squeeze in ten seconds of singleness when I was about 9. Not that I haven’t gone to bars alone as a married man. No-one thinks you’re a prostitute in the gay world if you go to a bar alone. Unless you go to a bar alone when you’re 17, that is, and everyone else in the bar is 80. Then the punters would be justified in suspecting rent. But I’ve always been perfectly sanguine at going to a bar alone to drown my indifferences.

So I went to a bar. Drowned my indifferences. As ever, in the gay world, the bar was strewn with other indifference-drowning solos. Bars are our churches and I happened, on this one occasion, to have pride of place with our high priest, the barman. It’s a rather public confessional but we gays are as promiscuous with our words as we are with our affections and there’s no room for prudishness where the gay soul is concerned. Except our churches blaze trails and our confessionals can easily see the high priest confessing to one of his flock.

“Wan’ anuvva?”

“Oh, go on then… A bit quiet tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, they won’ all arrive for anuvva while yet, will they.” He polished a glass with disdain. “Tend to come ‘ere a bit later, dun’t they.” Glanced over it and hung it up on the sticky-out rack. “Why, ya bored? You can get up on the bar and do a dance f’rus if ya like, can’tcha?” He chuckled and went off to serve anuvva punter.

“Is this your bar then?” I went on unimaginatively as he reappeared with a dishcloth flung nonchalantly over his left shoulder.

“Yeah, had it for years now, inni. Was in Spain before, wunni, wiv Brian,” I quickly played back the conversation thus far in my head - I’d forgotten my dictaphone - and was sure Brian hadn’t come up, “but come back ‘ere now, inni. Anuvva cuppla years and then I’ll give it up.” He shooed away the bar with his hand. “Do summink else then, wunni.” I nodded along consistently without proffering any suggestions of my own. “’s all right doin’ this when you’re young, innit, but I don’t still wanna be doin’ this when I’m owld.” His brows and mouth made one complete revolution at the mention of the profanity. “And Brian died, didnee. Car crash. Just like that. Can ‘appen that quickly.” He polished some more. I contorted my face as the occasion demanded. “Naa, ’s OK when you’re young, this, but not when you’re owld… Oh ‘ere’s a few more come in, look. Ya wun’t be so bored now as ya was, will ya?”

A few more punters had indeed trickled in. Amongst them a dish of cosmic proportions. A huge, great lumbering thing. A hint of shyness. He only looked up from his beer out of the corner of his glassy eyes. He examined his finger-nails with undeserved thoroughness. I changed my order to the beer he was drinking to increase my attractiveness. Needn’t have bothered as the late Brian’s other half was soon leaping to my assistance. “‘ere, whassyer name?” If beer hadn’t been taken I’d have minded where this was going. “Broke,” I said, unmindingly. “‘n whass yours?” he asked the cosmic dish, predictably. “Mmwike,” said Mike, combining shyness and aggression, his eyes darting left to right and lips stretched to breaking point.

The introductions done, Mmwike and I bumbled through conversation. Nice enough, it turned out, though his beauty meant any judgment I made couldn’t possibly be objective. I’m a pathetic flirt and invariably turn into a helpless himbo. “Um, Mmwike, sorry, I mean, Mike, so what’s a nice boy like you… [internally, "No, bugger, bugger, you can't ask that. That's Christmas-cracker-level chat-up. Um, pay him a compliment."] Um, Mmwike, sorry, Mike, um… [internally, "Oh, for god's sake, just carry on bumbling along."] Um, Mmwike, sorry, Mike, um, er… you don’t seem gay, really, not that gays seem anything and, erm, of course it’s all just stereo…”

“Naa, I ain’t.”

“Oh [internally, "fuck"].”

“Well, I am a bit.”

“Oh [internally, "yippety doo-da"].”

“I mean, only in the way all men are.”

“Oh [internally, "oh, he's insane. What a pity. Most men aren't a bit gay, are they?"].”

“You don’t seem speshly gay yerself.”

“Oh [internally, "oh, he actually is insane].”

We chatted on. He told me about his girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend. His daughter. His ex-girlfriend’s gay uncle whom they’d discovered the gay bar with. He liked it and came back (presumably when he was in one of his a-bit-gay moods). We drank. He told me about his drinking problem. Said he was a social worker. Then offered to drive me home.

Was this a prelude to one of his a-bit-gay moments?

I accepted heroically. “Sure it’s no trouble?”

“Naa, ’s on me way.”

We drew up at my front door. For tradition’s sake, I thought I’d better check where on the hetero-scale he was currently positioning himself. “Um, would you like to come in?”

“Naa, gotta get back. Workin’ in the mornin’. But it was nice talkin’ to ya.” True. It had been perfectly nice. “Gotta pen? I’ll give ya my e-mail.” (E-mail must have pre-dated mobiles.) We fumbled around and between us managed to exchange e-mail addresses. I probably hadn’t removed my coat before firing off an e-mail saying how nice it had been to meet.

A few days later, an e-mail appeared from Mmwike. I was secretly thrilled. Then berated myself for being so pathetic. “Broke, get a grip. He’s straight. He’s got a girlfriend and daughter.” But his beauty overrode all that.

“Thanks for your e-mail,” began his e-mail. “You met me on a bad day.” Oh, I hadn’t realised. Maybe he’d been there to drown real sorrows, though he hadn’t alluded to them in our chat. “I won’t have a chance to go out for a beer again soon.” Oh, that sounds final enough. Never mind. “But if you ever want to book me, one-on-one, for a couple of hours, let me know. To put it in plain English, I’m a male whore. Hope you don’t mind. See ya.”

Heterosexuals. Honestly. No morals.

At last it’s come to me. It’s going to make me so rich I’ll probably be able to help you all out. Someone get China on the phone.

Still suffering post-Christmas so need this financial revolution to really hit the spot. I’m statistically average in this regard, of course, as every radio programme on at the moment appears to be about how to declare yourself bankrupt for almost nothing (though in Scotland) and then isn’t it divorce day round about now for all the couples whom Christmas helped realise just that little bit more glassily clearly quite how much they loathe each other? I’ve had to switch over to BBC Radio Cymru so that I can’t understand a word anyone’s saying. (I lie. Someone said, “…fit for purpose…” a minute ago.)

Though maybe trickle-down will trickle down to me eventually and I’ll soon be reaping the rewards of all the wealth our neighbourhood seems to have generated of late. I’ve told you before that Ruislip’s up-and-coming and I can see this on my trips to the supermarket. Shoponomics. Instead of the supermarket being either utterly empty, which it always had been till recently, bar the staff, the Russian and me, or frequented by the odd teenager buying beer and Coke, it’s now not uncommon to see handsome young couples with perfect babies and perfect prams who obviously couldn’t find a place to live in the funkier area further south.

All a far cry from the days when supermarkets were all new and shiny and spangly to us (well, to me again) after moving here from St. Petersburg, where we lived like in the good old former times, going to the market all the time - I was once told I looked like Thomas Anders by a vendrix as I pored over her herbs. “Have you got any thyme?” I asked, having thanked her for her heart-warming compliment. “Oi, thyme. No. Zere is no thyme in all St. Petersburg. Not in all Raasha vill you find thyme. You never vill find thyme. Must be suicide everybody. Life so tsyerrible.” We cried together for a while and warmed our hands over a dying candle-flame, then bade each other a fond farewell. We knew we’d never see each other again. I dried my eyes. And went to the next vendrix. “Um, hello. Have you got thyme for me?” “For you, Thomas, I’ve got all the time in the world.” “I’m not Thomas. I’m BiB.” “Oh, OK, in that case, I retract my joke. Wouldn’t work in Russian anyway.” “Indeed… So, got any thyme?” “Yep. That’ll be 7 roubles please.” Shopping was an emotional roller-coaster then - and buying different products from the specialist purveyors thereof. The butcher. The baker. The cigarette-maker. All long before our fish-finger days…

“I khev diskaavered gryeat new tasty and nutritious produkt,” said the Russian breathlessly within hours of us clearing immigration and being granted refuge in this fine land. “Oh my god, what? What?” I asked. I was still young. “Double-length cigarettes? Vats of wine on wheels? Big, fat, luscious prawns that even we can afford?” “No, beets of feesh kaavered in bryed-kryamb.” “Darling, you don’t pronounce the b in kryamb. I mean crumb.” “Vot you talkink about? Vi not even speak Eenglyeesh.” “Darling, I do apologise. I must be inventing it all for some point in the future when there’ll be a website where I can spout bollocks, where I can note things down. A web-jotter. A bjot. Or a web-register. Yes, where I can write it all down. In my bredge… Darling, fish-fingers aren’t interesting. You need to try some of the other things the west’s got to offer. Like, um, wine that isn’t from Moldova. And drugs.”

So, yes, now the supermarket’s full of nice couples. So nice I worry for them, almost. So healthy-looking. Fresh-skinned. Happy. Not at all normal. “Look at how perfect he is,” I said to the Russian about the worryingly perfect father of a newly-formed nuclear family loitering at the cheese-counter. We waited for them to choose their cheese and then ordered one twice as expensive to show them we were no slouches when it came to professional success either… then waited for them to wheel themselves out of ear-shot and asked for our money back from the cheese-vendrix, saying I’d just had confirmation of my cheese allergy from the doctor by SMS. Sorry. His wife was perfect too. The child was wrapped up perfectly for the meteorological conditions that prevailed. The Russian and I looked at ourselves in the mirror to see if we were as perfect as they were. We took deep breaths and rolled on in silence. Caught up with the perfect family and found the father’s Achilles’ heel. Hair cut much too high at the back and not even blended in. A straight line. Tosser. It’s the children I feel sorry for.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. Shoponomics. So I’m surrounded by rich people. And am poorer than a church-mouse. And we know it’s important to keep up with the Müllers. So I racked my brains for at least a minute and a half to come up with a world-improving and finance-revolutionising plan and, as luck would have it, the brainstorming didn’t go to waste.

So, it’s moulds. I’m envisioning mini elasticated bath-caps, sort of gerbil-head sized. These would be filled with some conveniently unctuous, mobile but sturdy mucus. Then, whenever you sat on a chair or at a table with uneven legs, which probably even The Queen has experienced, you’d whip out your handy mini elasticated bath-cap filled with the secret unctuous but sturdy mucus and it would stabilise the formerly uneven table or chair. And, if we make them pretty enough, they’d be so much more pleasing than a folded bit of fish-finger packaging.

I only need about a 30-grand cut. Someone do all the work and get on to China and then send me the cheque.

And not a sweet sound coming down to be had for love nor money.

I’ve had my biannual clock-change, which I really need to align with when the clocks go back and forward for the sake of neatness. Except my clock-change is by twelve hours. And at some point in the winter - this year, now - I decide that, if I am to see daylight at all before midsummer, I have to change shift and get up at 5am rather than go to bed then.

Which makes for a quiet start to the day. Of course half the neighbours are primly up, wandering primly around preparing to go off to lead prim days. Odd that the neighbours can pull of primness while semi-nude, but they can. One stiff-backed neighbour eats her breakfast primly. The neighbour who drinks wine alone breakfasts geometrically at his table. Others primly draw their curtains so that us nosy neighbours can’t sneak a prim look at how they live their early starts.

Pitch outside and silent for the first couple of hours of the day. The traffic doesn’t set the cobbles rumbling in earnest till the sun’s risen languidly over the rooftops. The children trudging with grim determination off to school don’t make much noise. Nor do the Berliners with regular jobs as they turn up their collars and purse their lips in readiness for pursuit of another euro. And it’s too cold and too dark for us wastrels to bustle about on our balconies. No need for me, now that smoking’s a thing of the past, to be on ours till the summer. And no way for the residents of the 100%-long-term-unemployment house across the street to enjoy theirs as builders have knocked the bastards clean away in some early stage of a total architectural makeover.

Too early for the Russian to elephant noisily and meatily around the place. Too early to seek company in the TV. It would feel pornographic to switch to my favourite channels at this time of the morning/night. Though Al Jazeera might easily be showing something gripping at any time. (Do folk watch? They do these great little slice-of-life documentaries. I’ve watched an Iranian online imam, a Swedish woman on a quest to find her Sami father whom she’d only seen on a stamp and a formerly homeless Argentinian who now worked for Loony Radio. Really. Quite marvellous. Their news coverage ain’t bad either.) And Belsat - yes, we have a Belarusian channel - only starts broadcasting its pap later on. Plus the neighbours would have complained by the time my finger had completed its first transaction with the remote-control.

The shipping forecast is yet to begin, but that’s better to be lulled to sleep by than lulled awake to with its sea-shanty names and cyclones losing their identity. (God Save the Queen might shudder you awake again though.) The farmers will be on soon, complaining of the cost of raising pigs. The French lesson’s almost over.

Any luck and there might soon be enough blue in the sky for a pair of sailor’s trousers.

Quiz! No prize. Bar the glory, as ever.

So where’s
this lovely lady - oh, no, sorry, I didn’t mean that one. Slip of the upload. Though I was in beautiful Edinburgh for a few seconds, actually, over the Chrimble period, and didn’t get to see my favourite dead clone -
I meant, this lovely lady, to be found, then?

Sorry it’s such a shit photo. It’s a shit quiz, actually, as quizzes go, because I don’t quite know the answer myself, and I’ve been reading Dawkins so know of the importance of mathematic formulae and know that you can’t have an equation, if a shit quiz is an equation, with two unknown bits. But I sort of know the answer, a bit. So where’s the lady?

The photo’s shit for a number of reasons. If I can do the blaming-others part first, let me say the version on my computer isn’t nearly as dark as what wordpress is coming up with. I don’t know if what I did to the original photo, which I cleverly managed to get to the computer from my camera, can be called as much as photoshopping, but I did adjust the brightness and contrast on the as-dark-as-what-you-see-now original and then equally cleverly press save, but wordpress seems to have overridden my efforts. Hopefully you all have a torch next to your computers for just such moments and you might be able to see her with a bit of a flash in her general direction.

The blaming-me part of explaining away the photo’s shitness is that I can’t take photos, due to an unsteady hand brought on by years of drink, drugs, debt and relationships, plus the camera’s crap, because it’s cheap, which is why I bought it, and I didn’t realise it had an image-steadier-for-alcoholics button until too late. And then the lady is in a bit of a dark place. So that’s a bit why you’ve got too much dado-like-thing and not enough headdress.

So where is she?

(By the way, not ‘Who is she?’, because I haven’t got the foggiest.)

Darlings, answer me this. The nice girl who sells coffee at Teddington Station earns, say, sick squid, sorry, six quid an hour. That’s an estimate but based on loosely empirical evidence as I just walked in on the Russian checking fantasy job listings for when we move, upon the flight of pigs and above my corpse, to London. So the nice girl - Spanish, I thought - earns six quid an hour. How long do people in England work? 40 hours a week? And there are probably 4-and-a-half working weeks a month, so that’s 180 hours a month which comes to - oh god, the calculator’s miles away and I’m on the laptop - erm, 1080 pounds a month. Before tax and national insurance, which accounts for about a third, doesn’t it? So that’s, erm, 360 gone, so she’s left with about 700 quid. Darlings, tell me, how the fuck, in London, does she not die of starvation in ten seconds? Or is that what happens, and the turnover of nice, young ladies selling coffee at Teddington Station is one a day? Or is she perhaps helped to avoid public transportation costs by being given a cardboard box in the corner and a dusty, filthy, threadbare blanket to keep the chill from her bones? Because she can’t afford to live in Teddington and it costs 700 quid to travel one stop from there in either direction, which, in any case, only gets you to another leafy suburb which she couldn’t afford to live in. I asked the Russian if I should propose marriage and take her away from all this (or that) but poverty and squalor for poverty and squalor is not a good swap and, anyway, perhaps she likes London, and, anyway, then our train came and we’d been waiting so long that taking it was too good an opportunity to miss, even if I did miss out on getting married for my troubles.

I was reminded of the benefits of being able to understand what people say and thought it has perhaps not come about by chance that people in one place speak the same language. Such a brilliant idea! Eavesdropping is my favourite thing in the world apart from internet access and I’m bored of only being able to half-eavesdrop Germans. And, anyway, all Germans ever complain about is how expensive everything is, which isn’t juicy enough for a seasoned eavesdropper.

“Yuh, yuh,” said a boy who looked like he might have been in Prince William’s class at school loudly into his telephone. “Yuh, yuh, I’m pretty bloody ready for that, yuh.” He got off at the same stop as us and I was dreading when I finally got a good look at him - so far I had only seen his floppy blond hair, tall, aristo stature and ludicrously long luggage - skiing! - and heard him yuh - that he would have the annoyingly good Merchant Ivory looks that that type often annoyingly has. “Yuh, can you open the barrier please?” (Muffled response from TfL person behind glass, perhaps suggesting the passenger insert his ticket into it.) “Yuh - and with petulance - but it’s in my bag. Can you just open the barrier please? I’m going to miss my flight.” Before I could check whether he was a dish or not, I had my own trouble with a machine saying something about oysters and by the time that was sorted in a haze of fluster, sweat and foundation-laying-for-an-argument-with-the-Russian, he had dashed off with his long luggage dragging behind him like the train on Princess Diana’s wedding dress.

“Dunnee look luvly?” I said to the Russian, who pointed out that I was wrong to even check if he was beautiful and that he had all the beauty I needed… We finally caught up with the skier and there was nothing Merchant Ivory about him at all.

“Fuck off, you fat, ugly cow,” I screamed at Lindsay Davenport. I don’t even think she is a fat, ugly cow, particularly, but relationships can make you say the rudest things, as I explained to my brother and sister, who happened to witness the moment, and they forgave me my intemperate outburst. “Don’t you love her?” asked some random person who leapt to Lindsay Davenport’s defence. “Of course I bloody love her, but it’s just all so exhausting.” And I slumped onto the sofa. “Stop being gay,” the Russian said within everyone’s earshot. A mouse fell off the lampshade onto my shoulder…

“I sink my braazer is autist,” presently said the Russian, who received a special mention in the best newcomer category at last year’s world social autism awards. I’d worried as much myself. I’d sent an unnaturally gushing New Year’s text to my quasi-brother-in-law saying that I INSISTED he come to London with us on our next trip. “Tomorrow I drive to babushka,” came his less gushing reply.

“So, zis button must be svitched on and zis vun off for remote-control to vörk and…” continued the Russian explaining the thornier difficulties of how to change channels in my mother’s spectacularly low-tech abode. “Darling, I’ll never change channel in this house ever in my life. Instead, work out how long it’s going to take you to finish explaining this to me and just repeat ‘I love you’ over and over for the corresponding time instead.”

Planning now to snuggle up for a good bout of lovely, London-induced, cosy man-illness for the rest of the winter. Happy New Year!

Those who work in advertising in France have made it law that a female orgasm must feature in every TV ad. Regardless of whether toothpaste, wallpaper, cat-food or something more pertinently sexy is being hard-sold, the ad must have a woman nearing ecstasy. “A-oh-a-oh-a-chet-ez ce pa-ah-oh-ah-oh-aah-pier (ah, oui, c’est tellement bien) peint.” Dunno if it works. But France seems like a happy enough place.

I once went to a wedding near Paris and travelled with a woman who happens to live a life of relative luxury in London and, while she usually seems a pretty regular type of person, apart from being minted, you are only given an insight into her ivory tower when you and she are unleashed on the French provinces together.

For France still seems to do province. More than the UK, or, rather, and this is perhaps simply a matter of space, it is still easier to find relatively cut-off province in the environs of Paris than it is near London. We heroically made our way to a station not a million miles from Paris. From there, we would have the adventure of getting on a smaller line and arriving at a village station where we would be the only people getting on or off and the poplars would look brilliant in the French summer sun and our host would pick us up in a DS (actually, I think it was a Renault 5, but still…) and we’d probably all be dressed in white linen and it would all be bucolic and perfect and French and wonderful. We wandered off to find the ticket office for the tiny trains. Explained to the bonhomme where we’d like to go only to be told that the last train had gone. It was not yet noon.

We resourcefully found a phone box. It worked only intermittently. Almost impossible to get through to a taxi rank. It was Saturday and the province had closed. We waited hours for a carriage. So long, in fact, that we’d made friends with other people at the station. My rich companion confided in me that transport and telephones, indeed, everything in France appeared not to work. This was a woman with a very different experience of London from my own.

And it’s been nice being in France, even if the mountains do make the most of my very many imperfections. Both for the day-to-day, the getting stuck at provincial, empty, deserted railway-stations, but which are still staffed and, after so long, you are bound to become friends with the SNCFer, and the passion of articulation, not just in the ads, but on TV in general, with pundits of whatever hue currently going through Sarkozy’s love-life with a fine toothcomb and then bollocking themselves for this ’showbization de la politique’. And the hanging on, here and there, to old routines. It’s been almost a pleasure to be turned away from restaurants for wanting to eat at an irregular hour, and then to be served by a nice, inbred waitress in a homely, unfussy way on simple plates and given simple knives and forks when the time is right.

I am far from Paris, in every sense. Village life appears, just, to be surviving. The village I am in must have been tiny twenty years ago. A nice little circle of a village. The church in the middle and peeking out over the top. The remains of a castle. Some old stone houses. Insane old country dogs with one eye and three legs which chase cars. The monument in front of the mairie to those from the village who died in the two World Wars. And the odd ancient local as the surviving relics of times past. Onto the village have been added nine billion chalets and other residences. There’s a crap new restaurant or two. A smart one selling unsimple food on unsimple plates with unsimple knives and forks. The permanent population, so the story goes, is 600. It increases to 18,000 when the tourists come. And yet I’ve got a feeling this is an out-of-the-way resort as resorts go. It’s not near the railway line. And even the new bit of the town is deserted on a weekday when night falls and the skiers must put off perfection for another day.

And it’s all fantastically beautiful. The village itself is pretty enough. But, and as inimical as they are for an utterly impractical city homo, you can’t go too far wrong on the beauty stakes with mountains, forests, lakes, sunshine and snow. “Just like Komi Repaablik, Raasha,” the Russian says proudly and as a softener for if we should ever, and so perish this thought, have to move back to Russia by some extremely cruel twist of fate.

And the mountain air. It really is knocking us out. As is the vin chaud.

Humanity is divided into those who like skiing and those who don’t. Those who like having a go at things and those who are scared of everything. Those who like life and the world and those who don’t. I’ve got a feeling that those who fall into the second category on each occasion also happen to have a great love of drinking.

It’s dispiriting to look at those who like to ski. All perfect and sporty and young and healthy. Probably never had a drink in their lives. Dressed perfectly. Whooshing perfectly to a glamorous stop at the bottom of each slope. Wearing perfect boots and goggles. And the odd one that does happen to have outdone you in years also happens to have outdone you in everything else. Pensioner skiing couples are the ghost-writers of your destitute Christmases future. Pensioner skiing couples may say a polite bonjour and clomp past you in those awkward boots with a saccharine smile but when you turn round to see if they’ve noticed you’re not meant to be here, their eyes bore through you and tattoo the pensioner skiing couples’ motto into your shrivelled heart. “We have led perfect lives. We are still a perfect couple. We don’t touch a drop. What about you?”

Salutary, salutary.

My parents are to blame, natch. Not that I mind them not having created a skier, and I like drinking. They even tried to, vaguely, thinking it might be the done thing, or I mistakenly nagged them into it, and packed me off to Switzerland when I was 15 but Robert B_ and I bunked off the lessons and went to Montreux and a Liverpudlian girl of solid frame tried to snog me and then, when I said I wasn’t ready for that sort of commitment so early in our acquaintance, told everyone in Switzerland I was gay. And Paul T_ got unsightly cold-sores all over his face and John G_ had a problem with mucus so skiing was spoiled for me forever.

And I was sure skiing was better suited to other children. Like John G_, in fact, who seemed to do nothing but ski and go to balls. Balls! At 15! Whereas I came from a much more HP-Sauce, homework-on-knees, overlit-rooms, siblings-and-their-friends-everywhere and TV-constantly-on kind of home. And I double-knew I wasn’t a skier when I went to a discotheque for youths in Switzerland. The Swiss youngsters were, naturally, terrified of us marauding school-kids behaving with the disdain for abroad that UK youngsters are taught at school and went all out to befriend us, thinking it might mitigate their ultimate punishment whenever that came. (It didn’t, as far as I remember.) My 15-year-old classmates commented effusively on the quality of the Swiss totty and I probably threw in a half-hearted phwoar or two for the sake of decency while fainting with admiration for anyone that had mastered the snowplough. (John G_, a natural born skier, was awfully good, in spite of the mucal issue, which put paid to any potential admiration, actually.)

And here the Russian and I sit now, surrounded by those who like skiing, those who like having a go at things and those who like life and the world. The Russian more naturally fits into their number, and has the advantage of having grown up in snow. Yet good + bad = bad and, rather than him pulling me towards that noble category, I, sadly, appear to be dragging him towards the hellish domain of those who are scared of everything, those who don’t like life and the world and those who happen to have a great love of drinking.

“Darling, we hate activities and nature and yet we always seem to get stuck in some national park or nature reserve whenever we go on holiday,” I say, hopefully, mumblingly and quickly, trying to subtly claim we are both natural non-skiers who should only ever holiday in administrative areas with a population in the millions and vermin and humans as the only representatives of the animal kingdom. “No, darlink. You not vont do anysink. You lazy and scared of everysink.” “Um, yes, well, that said, should we run away to Barcelona tomorrow? It’d only take a hundred hours by two coaches and two trains.” “No, ve go cross-country ski.”

I love the comfort zone. The familiar. The unchallenging. That which takes no physical skills. Which doesn’t have to be learnt. And the Russian says my New Year’s Resolution for 2008 must be to learn to drive. Yet I’d happily move to the middle of the forest as long as any mountains it had in it were bulldozed and there was broadband. (Mind you, I saw wolves today, which was spine-tinglingly exhilarating and that made me forget how bad I was at life until at least half a second after they left my field of vision.)

And just let’s not even mention snowboarders.

The Russian and I are running away to the mountains with nothing but a suitcaseful of bordering-on-the-defunct bank-cards between us. I’ve never had a good idea in my life but I’m brilliant at bad ones and dashing off to places when you’re otherwise struggling to keep the wolf from the door might just be my best bad idea yet.

I’ve got a feeling I hate mountains. I haven’t got the shoes for them and all they do is provide ravines and canyons and any number of fissures for folk to fall down and die. And the Russian will deliberately do things like go out for a walk wearing nothing but a singlet at 4 one morning just to make me worry that he’s dead. All he ever does is disappear when we’re in places. Only to reappear alively at some later point. Which is a relief.

I’m sure I hate mountains.

Our trip to the mountains will involve trains. If I try to be normal, I think this might provide a moment of beauty. Training it through the mountains. Imagine. But then the only thing trains through the mountains ever do, presumably, is fall off their tracks and down ravines and canyons and any number of crevices with enormous loss of life. Though maybe I’ll be exempt from death for wearing the wrong shoes. You never know what mood fate might be in.

I’m convinced I detest mountains.

It appears the accommodation we’ll be in will have an element of the communal about it. Not shared bedrooms, which I wouldn’t majorly give a toss about, really, though I wouldn’t sleep a wink for fear of snoring my co-nappers to distraction, but some of the leisure facilities. A pool, allegedly. For us and others. Maybe even a sauna. And a gymmy bit. I could do with making use of those, but they’re bound to be overrun with people from genetically unpink and perfect nations who’ll swim like mermaids, pump iron like Arnie and sweat neatly down their genetically superior bodies while I thrash about like a hippo, break my arm opening the gymmy-bit door and wheeze the wheeze of the dying in the sauna.

I’m convinced I loathe the communal.

“I’ll give you skiing tips depending on the snow reports I get,” came the advice of the person extremely kindly making the accommodation in the death-trap mountains available to us. “Oh, I don’t think I’ll be doing any skiing,” I answered feebly. “But might you say if there are restaurants and bars to speak of?” “Nonsense, you must have a go on at least the baby slopes,” which maybe I’d better to justify the largesse. But won’t that cost money? “There’s a restaurant you can eat in without taking your skis off.” Skis? If I cut some old plastic tubing in half, that might do the trick. Hair-clips should do to attach them to my inappropriate footwear.

I think I hate sport.

Still, important to get into the festive spirit.

I think I hate winter.

Whenever I set foot on England’s hallowed, muddy soil, I am overcome by an insatiable urge to drink milk, which must be why they call it the motherland.

I was being a good pal, visiting my friend. She is 96, so it is a tad easier for me to visit her than vice versa. And she has never taken a plane in her life and is probably unlikely to start now as to get her to her bed takes two paid acolytes, with her chanting to her legs, “Come on legs,” the whole time. And it’s always good to go and check where you are on the I-hate-England-I-love-England continuum.

Inevitably, there’s not much fresh in a 96-year-old’s day-to-day life. Her news might be a slightly tweaked reworking of an event from 70 years ago. She tells me how she is. Worse since I last saw her, she claims, though I am hard pushed to discern the enworsement. Lonelier than ever, she claims, though her house is as busy as King’s Cross Station (but without the prostitutes) with relatives of the three subsequent generations, neighbours and life-assistants of one type or another constantly traipsing in and out. But if you’re stuck in a chair for most of the day and know that there is no initiative you can take yourself, perhaps the hours of loneliness do last longer than for you or me.

“Darling, you won’t believe it, C_ (great-grandson) can play songs to me on his lap-dog.” “Lap-dog?” “Darling, I mean lap-top.” C_ appeared. “What did you play her?” “Just whatever she asked for, I found on youtube.” I thought I’d make the world a little more mysterious and offer the same service. “Darling, you mean your lap-dog has the same songs?” “It does.” “Darling, you don’t mean it! You’re too brilliant!”

We had You’re the Top galore, Pretty Polly Oliver, Stille Nacht (though not by The Hoff, sadly) (I’ve got a feeling his Deutsch isn’t a patch on Leonardo di Caprio’s), Danny Boy (though not by Cher, thankfully) (”Darling, switch it off. It’s too sad, I can’t bear it”), Oh No John, Spanish Ladies, Alphabet (OK, not really) and all sorts of other folksy favourites.

“Darling, you go and do some work now. It’s just such heaven that you’re here. I spend so much time alone.” I fire up my latest gripping translation. Twelve seconds pass. I translate half a word. “Darling, do you think you might do something with me now?” We do an anti-Alzheimer’s crossword. Etymon is one of the rather satisfying answers. “Darling, do you love words? I adore words. I always thought it was awfully important that people should speak French. Have I told you the story about when I told M_ (her grandson, my ex) about Jean-Paul Sartre and, ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres.’” It’s one of her favourite tells. The story goes that she mentioned it to M_. He was, depending on the mood, anywhere between five minutes and five years old. “Darling, and do you know what he answered?” I did, as I’ve been told the story a good 300 times and I sneakily had my mobile out so that I could text M_ live that the story was getting a fresh airing. “L’enfer, c’est moi.” She tells it as evidence of his troubled genius. He says he had probably heard the noise ‘c’est moi’ somewhere and managed to repeat it. “L’enfer, c’est that story,” came his rather pleasing reply with equally pleasing alacrity.

Sheep grazed gormlessly in the field opposite her house.

When silence seemed appropriate, I stared at the fire. My pal soon got bored of that state of affairs and would ask why I was staring at it. “I don’t know. I’m mesmerised.” … “What must the etymology of mesmerised be?” We both propounded our theories. Mine was, “‘erm, dunno really,” and hers was, “Chambers Oxford Dictionary, bottom shelf.” Darlings, and hands up who knows where the word comes from? I was half-expecting the dic to say something along the lines of, “…from the Greek mesmein - to entrance,” but it said nothing of the sort. In fact it’s some old German, a Herr Mesmer, who went and got a verb named after himself by hypnotising folk left, right and centre.

Which we’d better make into a game, let’s face it. I asked my pal what the verb named after her surname would mean. Let’s say she’s called Smith. Which she isn’t. She hesitated so I prompted her with, “smithise - to sprinkle one’s speech with the word darling.” To bibbise, naturally, means to be a talentless, work-shy scrounger.

Darlings, I know half of us are anonymous, but please invent a verb with some surname/name/nom-de-blog plus -ise and give me the definition. -ize verbs will be tolerated upon submission of extenuating documentation.

The only reason I’m not a mass murderer is that I don’t have a driving licence. Because if you’re a mass murderer, or even a singular one, you always have to do that thing of killing the people in one place and then rolling them up in a rug and driving from Stoke-on-Trent to somewhere really far, like Penang, to dispose of the body and thus cleverly make it difficult to revisit the scene of at least that part of the crime. Mind you, I love it when that type gets caught because the clever people in Penang find the body a squillion years later and there’s a spore from some Stoke-only tree in the tyre mark and they work out that the tyre was from a type of British car that was never exported and the DVLA knows who had that type of car in the year of the murder - only three people (and one was The Queen, and she doesn’t do crimes, and the other one was someone uninteresting and incapable of murder) - and then the murderer, who’s since mended his ways and has become the Lord Mayor, is arrested in the middle of a Stoke’s-Favourite-Cow competition and then someone in Minnesota decides to make a TV programme about it and that gets shown in Germany at 3 o’clock one February morning and you happen to be watching because you’re lying sleeplessly on the sofa having decided your beloved is the wickedest person on earth. But I can’t drive, which is why I don’t go about killing all and sundry. Which scores me morality points both for greenery and for sparing life. Plus what if I got played by Christopher Biggins in the reenactment part of the programme from Minnesota? So I don’t kill, for a number of reasons.

But, darlings, and call it incitement to violence if you will, I think we should start exterminating shop assistants. Do away with the damned bally lot of them and roll them up in a carpet the size of Slovenia and then attach a block of concrete to their collected feet and hurl them into the sea (but not the Sea of Azov, because that’s receding and we’d be found out really quickly).

We’d only popped out for a bit of fish and some truffles. As we live in a backwater where everyone hates life, there’s nothing of any interest whatsoever for sale in our local supermarkets. A Chinese whisper starts at the supermarket’s automatic doors and swells to a deafening roar by the time it’s got to our house if they’ve stocked something exciting like a nice bit of tongue. But fresh fish is beyond them all so if we want that, we have to travel to do so.

As I live in a constant state of abject penury, I have tailored my consuming habits accordingly. I’ve cut right back on the champers, we’ve swapped from beluga to salmon caviar (don’t tell anyone) and, darlings, the truffles were a snip at only 150 euros a kilo. And I have been gifted with a loathing of shopping. So I’m happy to duck in, get my truffles and duck straight back out again. But the Russian’s a more proper gay with an eye too large for his wallet and likes looking at and owning things whereas I am happy to walk around with my eyes shut and own nothing but the handed-me-down shirt on my back.

“I must khev autumn jeckyet end shyuz,” my darling intoned seriously. Russians are great slaves to the seasons. Give ‘em an equinox and they’re out changing their wardrobes as quick as a flash. It’s as much of a crime to wear your ushanka in Russia before December 21st as it is to wear white after Labor Day in the USA.

We escalatored ourselves further and further away from the fresh fish and truffles in a big shop. I would hesitate momentarily as we attained each new floor, wondering if we’d arrived in shopping heaven. But the Russian appeared to know the layout disconcertingly well and would say, “No. Khousekhold ityems… No. Vimmin’s ityems…” We got to the men’s bit. I have no knowledge of or interest in fashion but I have always found men’s shoes a disappointment. The shoes on sale looked identical to the ones in the shops my mother would have dragged me around to buy black shoes for school 30 years ago. “I don’t want to do my fucking homework. I wanna go pictures,” I screamed at the Russian such that everyone was distracted and one man even dropped his shoehorn. Then I apologised to everyone over the public address system, explaining that I’d got carried away in a shopping-induced daydream.

“Zese vuns?” asked the Russian. “No, darling. They’re disgusting.” … “Zese vuns?” “No, darling. They make you look like a 90-year-old paedophile.” … “Zese vuns?” “No, darling. Only the Mr. Men can wear those shoes with swirls.”

We gave up on shoes.

We wandered over to the jackets. Rows and rows of jackets crying out for an old man to take pity on them. Enough suits to clothe a hotel lobby in Brussels. Oilskin jackets. Tweed. Fucking tweed. Anoraks.

And then a lovely jacket. It stood out like a lovely jacket. A nice light-blue. I fancied the headless model that was wearing it. That lovely. I wouldn’t have dreamt of wearing it because I don’t own a gallery. And I wouldn’t have dreamt of buying it because it cost more than 2p. But now that I am my mother, I snatched a sneaky look at the price-tag so that I’d have something to complain about and had agreed with myself in the build-up to the sneaky look that I’d purse my lips and say, “Well! Would you credit it!” if it cost anything more than 50c. 400 euros. 400 effing euros. For a jacket! And not three weeks to the next equinox!

I dashed off to look for a complaints book but could only find a book of condolences so I wrote quickly that Perdita-who-used-to-work-in-accounts would remain the queen of my heart for ever and dashed back to the Russian. He was looking at the lovely jacket’s poorer twin. Before I’d even decided whether it was nice or not I had my hands out to look for the tag. Quite a bit less but still three figures which I think nothing but a house should cost by rights.

“Darlink, you look like tryemp. Try it on.” I did, just for fun. And out of nowhere appeared a shop assistant wearing a t-shirt that was much too tight for an alcoholic in his late forties and white jeans with a distractingly large and sported-with-pride bulge and no belt. A Stringfellow haircut. Had probably run a bar on Mallorca. Loved ‘em and left ‘em. Gone bankrupt and been chased out of island and turned up in Berlin with the sole purpose of making me want to kill him.

“Ooh, suits you, sir. Looks very good. Won’t let the wind through. You can wear the collar up or down. People normally put their hands in the pockets like this. My grandfather had one of these. I’ve sold four today. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime buy. Do you want a new scarf with it?” And before we knew it, the Russian and I were trudging, defeated and silent, to the till and being wished a nice day.

Need stringing up. The lot of ‘em.

I was just saying to the Russian that, in a way, it’s a shame his nipples aren’t on his back as then I could have a little manipulate of them instead of just getting plain back when sitting behind him watching Wife Swap. But then I suppose they’re conveniently enough positioned where they are at other times and I can’t get on to the United Nations at this hour to suggest a working group be set up, chaired by São Tomé and Principe, to prepare a fact-finding mission AND feasibility study into whether we can all have our nips moved.

And, darlings, I can’t write about TV and Wife Swap again, so will limit myself to saying it is quite the most engaging televisual experience I’ve ever had. Twice. Yes, twice I can remember watching the programme and twice it’s been perfect as they have, inevitably, got two utterly different wives, one of whom is prim, proper and as anal about how the cutlery sits in its little plastic home as Mickey Rourke was about his suits in that film - what’s it called? 13¾ Weeks? - with Kim Basingstoke and the other who is, as luck would have it, less prim, untroubled by intellect and happy to live in a one-bedroomed cesspit. God, it’s a good watch.

So, I won’t blog about that. No TV. No nipples. That’s in the constitution.

I’m being a beaver at the moment. Beavering away at all sorts. Mostly of a translatorly bent. So I’m a zombie. Incapable of thought. And equally incapable of blogging. So I’m only really writing this to keep my hand in (and now dispel inopportune thoughts of the Hokey Cokey). And to say hello again.

Hello again.

…or, rather, no-cape. Darlings, I’m so indignant I’ve had to switch on the lap-top.

Do excuse this barrel-scraping and blogging about what’s on’t telly but, you know, sometimes there’s no choice. And I’m quite a believer in telly, in a way, even though I don’t watch much a) because I think it makes me a more solid member of the intellectual bourgeoisie the less I watch and b) because we don’t leave the bastard on standby for ecology/tightness reasons which means actually having to move to turn the thing on. And just as well, because the moment I do resolve to set out on a quest for the remotes, I’m normally gripped.

Darlings, remember I told you, because it’s important that we don’t have secrets from each other, that the Russian bought a new box so we could, we hoped, pick up Anglo-channels for my mother’s visit? Well, it’s been quite an acquisition. I’ve already mentioned (no secrets, remember…) the 800 new Arabic channels - we’ve got both Al-Jazeeras - and that the new soft porn is very soft indeed. Also very depressing. And I do think that if the girls taking your phone calls live and feigning interest in each other’s bits were given a crowbar, they’d liberate themselves out of slavery. As luck would have it, we did get all those BBCs and CNNs and Fox Newses. We got a Cuban channel. A Turkish channel or two. A very, very low-budget Hungarian channel. A Polish one which seems to talk about nothing but god. A Bible channel. And then a good sprinkling of stuff from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

So I’m live-blogging Spanish TV for you. Not all of it. Just one, regional, satellite channel. Televisió Valenciana Internacional, one of whose aims is promoting the social structure (and other things) (like no-frills bullfighting) of the Land of Valencia in Spain and the rest of the world. I’m not sure I think TV is the right medium for social-structure promotion but the bullfight’s got me gripped.

But, darlings, they’ve cut such corners it’s all a bit of a scandal. I know nothing about bullfights but can tell this is only Vauxhall Conference level, a poor copy of the real thing. I’ve never been to a bullfight on any of my trips to Spain in case I instantly turned into Hemingway but I do remember the man of the house (or the man of one of the houses) I stayed at on my first trip to Madrid a hundred years ago - I arrived wearing a polo-neck in August because of being so mal élevé - watched them on video and we even saw one matado(r) get gored, which his daughter pointed out to me was autodefensa. I was 16 and didn’t dare express an opinion, though secretly I was chuffed for the bull.

Anyway, that was over 20 years ago. It’s November, not August. And I’m very much not in Spain. Nor did I become Hemingway. But seeing the Spanish sun and the sand in the arena has got me (semi-)gripped. I don’t know if this is November sun. You never can tell with those Spaniards. But if this is what bullfighting has come to, I shall have to write a letter in the strongest terms to Su Majestad Rey Juan Carlos de Castilla, Ceuta y Melilla y Jefe de las Corridas to alert him to this distressing and blatant example of dumbing-down.

I don’t particularly like animals, especially ones that can kill us, but this no-frills bullfighting is majorly taking the piss out of the bulls. The Russian says I mustn’t worry, (”Take a tablet.” OK, he doesn’t say that really) and the bulls know what they’re doing and are playing along. Like the wrestling. I think I’m watching bull no. 3 - once you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all, frankly - and I, in stark contrast to my beloved, don’t think any of them had been prepped about what they were getting into. They make their way through a sort of bull-flap into the arena and you can tell they don’t know it’s about to be ritual humiliation. Initially, they are on the sand alone to bask unbothered in the jeers of a full-house. No sign of a matador. Or atormentador. For their no-frills tormentors don’t even have the common decency to kill the poor beasts once they’ve driven them to distraction. Instead, the boys, all with modern haircuts, hide themselves behind a little fence where the bull can see them but hasn’t got a hope in hell of getting a bit of blood for his efforts and then our hapless hero is ultimately ushered back through his flap none the wiser what he’s been paraded around like a common criminal in the Valencian sun for.

No tradition is respected. The bulls, at least, have the common decency to hoof the sand every now and again. Someone’s got some manners. But you’ve got to conclude, and I don’t know if this is because they’re no-frills bulls, though they look the real deal - black, horns, quite handsome - that bulls aren’t very good at what they do. I must have been watching for a good week now and no bull has struck gold. Not once. Either they are slow to learn or have very poor analytical skills. If they could just once, even by accident, not go for the perfect straight-line form of attack, they might get a nice bit of revenge and slake their thirst for blood.

But it’s the matadors who are the real disgrace. Perhaps because they’re no-frills. Maybe they’re apprentices. But not one of them is dressed up to the nines in the correct garb and the only headwear I’ve seen is a baseball cap. Indeed, the non-murderous matadors seem to be wearing baseball outfits. Elasticated waists. Numbers on their t-shirts.

And not a cape in sight. Their main move is best described as a wiggle. They do come-on-then, you-want-some signs to the bull, let it charge, and then wiggle deftly out of its way at the last minute. Some have replaced the cape with a stick and are pole-vaulting the poor beasts, which is adding insult to injury. And some, in my least favourite move, simply run away.

I’m wondering if no-frills bullfighting is a bit like WWF wrestling for Spaniards. You know, a cheapo day out (though WWF wrestling probably costs more than a trip to the moon, doesn’t it?) for all the family. Or like going to see the Harlem Globetrotters at Wembley Arena. (Don’t laugh. Mad Lizzie was doing the warm-up.) Easily watchable but not overly taxing, especially as I can’t even be bothered to force myself to compare man and beast when the beasts have given such a poor account of themselves.

Still, Spain is obviously in a deep philosophical crisis covering identity, the limitations of regional autonomy and its place in the modern world. I just saw someone wave a plastic bag at the bull.

Darlings, I haven’t done a single useful thing all day. Nothing productive. Worthy. Deserving of a gold star, a big tick or a slap on the back. Haven’t done a scrap of the work I should be doing, unless purists will count the perhaps even as much as fifteen seconds I did after midnight last night. Haven’t massaged the Russian’s bunions or bought him a big diamond ring. Haven’t done anything bureaucratic. (Not that I can remember there’s anything bureaucratic I specifically and urgently need to attend do, but there probably is, this being Germany.) Haven’t rung my mum. Paid any bills. Self-flagellated.

So I hope blogging counts.

Darlings, as I don’t have any convictions (I mean ideas, though I don’t think I have a criminal record either, though no doubt German computers flash up all sorts of asterisks and exclamation marks by my name due to paperly infractions I have committed) and, in a way, life isn’t especially ghastly at the moment, I have nothing at all to say. At all. Apart from hello.

I reminded myself somewhere and sometime or other, seeing as blogging is the only thing in life I like (as well as jam roly-poly) and the only thing I am prepared to take seriously - paying bills? Pah! Making my way in the world? Sod it! Blogging? Hell yeah - and, potentially, even make an effort with, that I had decided I should buy a notebook to note down things I wanted to shock, scintillate and scandalise anyone who happens to drop in here with. I can’t afford a notebook, of course, even with all the money I have saved from not smoking (still livid with myself for stopping. It’s so English of me to have stopped, isn’t it? So Protestant. I’m probably going to have to start preaching about the nation’s morals soon. Once I learn German), but, as luck would have it, I had one lying about. “Yes, that’ll come in handy,” I said to myself, though I mischose my moment, and accidentally said it out loud when I happened to be leering at some Pangasius - is that really catfish? - in the supermarket and the sales assistant of unclear gender - I think she’s a woman but she has a pencil moustache and a not ungenerous beard - frowned disapprovingly. So now I’ve taken to jotting down things, and then the scribbles stare back at me and make me feel guilty and have ruined the whole experience altogether.

Anyway.

Erm.

Anyway…

All the things I’ve got written down are pants.

But it’s too late for usefulness today. You can’t start the working day when it’s dark. As much as I detest winter, it’s quite cosy, in a way, it being pitch at four. I can soon look forward to hibernation and my body-clock switching to its anti-nocturnal setting. Going to bed at about 7, like in children’s books, and getting up at about 4. Though I can’t blame the darkness today. Not entirely. (Darlings, can ordinary folk use this as an excuse for not working? Can you say, “Sorry I didn’t come into work today. It was too dark”?) No, it was another moment of ill-timed low-grade spontaneity. I happened to be over near our home-discotheque, probably putting something away as the Russian (probably) came into my bijou home-officette and (probably) quook with anger that a dictionary was on my table rather than on its shelf. I lingered a while, to put off activity a precious few useless seconds longer. Pressed play on my tape-deck willing to let my ears be buffeted by whatever it was happened to be lying around compactly in there. And I knew there was no hope once I’d been got into disco-bunny mode by everyone’s favourite Turkish pop song.

If I can just be bothered to get dressed, it’ll probably be a long night…

Darlings, I’ve had yet another brilliant idea which I’m sure is going to earn me millions so I can pay off my debts and never translate another word and probably win the Nobel Prize for Cleverness into the bargain. None of you be unscrupulous, please, and go stealing my idea before I’ve had a chance to jam the switchboard of whichever organisation can bring my idea to fruition. To discourage unscrupulousness, I even promise to throw a big party for all of us once the cheque has cleared.

In my Nobel speech, I’ll thank my mum, and cry, because mothers are a necessity of invention, both for having you in the first place, for which I suppose we really must all be grateful, and then, in my case, for making me have to fly to go and see her. All my best ideas happen above clouds.

Mothers are troubling though, aren’t they? Mine has been and gone. When she arrived, we’d run out of conversation before we’d got to the train-station in the airport, and that was after I’d even resorted to her favourite subjects of public transport and how to get to and from places. And, being a lady of few interests, naturally my mother would rather have not been here, were it not for me insisting on ridiculously living abroad, but she comes from deferential and non-complaining times and remembers rationing so thinks, I suppose rightly, that flying to and being in Berlin is a luxury - she was horrified that someone we know decided simply to miss a flight the other day - and sensibly decided to make the most of a bad lot.

My mother, as I’ve said, doesn’t really do interests. Or believe in Europe. Germany is probably a hazy concept. War probably features in there somewhere. Football too. Maybe sausage. And Berlin is the capital, so that means it’s sort of London. But my mother knows it’s the done thing to be interested in places. And things. And foreign cultures. She isn’t, of course, at all interested, but we like to keep up appearances, even within the family… We’d set off on an of-unspecified-destination walk. Inevitably, this would take us through our utterly uninteresting and devoid-of-attractions part of town. Conversation would have dried up before the end of our street once I’d asked her if she was cold and how her legs were bearing up. I could cope with the silence, which is probably due to having grown up after punk or something, but my mother must think it’s a grim state of affairs when a mother and son walk along the streets of a foreign city in silence so she’d look for prompts. We’d walk past a video shop called something uncryptic like Videoshop. “Oh, what’s that shop called Videoshop?” “It’s a video shop.” “A video shop?” “Yes, a video shop. Called Videoshop.” We’d resume a silence unbroken even as we passed our local sex shop (uncryptically called Sex Shop).

We flew back to London with my mother. The Russian had that hard-won visa to exploit. And we beed perfect tourists. Didn’t see a soul, of course, as I have finally resigned myself to admitting is now the case for ever. Trips to the UK are so consumed with family and duty that I will never see a friend again unless we agree to meet in a neutral venue. But London was heaven. Utter, total heaven. I fell head over heels in love. I spent four years’ earnings on public transport but it was still perfect. Friendly. Polite. I was called love and darling by total strangers. Beautiful. Exciting. Hectic. (My walking speed doubled.)

And the flight. Which was before I was reminded how heavenly London was, so I was still in disdain-for-England mode. We flew of a morning. Even though I need clouds for my ideas to bloom, they obliged by being suitably wispy and not impeding my view of the island as we flew in. And it looked so wonderful. The Essex coast - I assume it was Essex - seemed to be one long, perfect beach. There was the delicious patchwork of irregular fields, which I associate with England, until I checked and saw that it was just the same in Holland on the way back, but I’m going to pretend it’s English, like Russians pretend silver birch exist exclusively in Russia, even though we have them in the back yard here and they abound where my mother lives, and the nicely rolling landscape. From above, settlements looked wonderful. Nature looked perfect. Indeed, Essex seemed like paradise on earth. And yet we sort of know this isn’t true.

“Hmm,” I pondered. “I am slightly bored of being a linguistic cripple in Berlin. Maybe it’s time to come back to the homeland. But then the people here are so horrid.” (The wonderful love-and-darling-callers of London were yet to intervene, remember.) “And England is so depressing in so many ways. And, anyway, I couldn’t afford a glass of tap-water here. And it’s lovely being a foreigner. And I’d understand the TV here and would have my brain filled with McCannness. Hmm…”

And then I had my brilliant idea. Which none of you must steal. Darlings, as I can resolutely confirm that the world looks nicer from above, and as nice and love-and-darling-callers are, we must still agree that people are basically ghastly and human contact is to be kept to a strict minimum, I have come up with a solution that will ease overcrowding and anti-social behaviour all at once (as long as we’re choosy about who can live in these communities of the future). Living atop beanstalks.

Once we slay the giants and can neutralise the smell of an Englishman’s blood, I’m sure we’ll be laughing.

My mother’s visit is so close I can feel its tepid breath on my neck. It also coincides with the Russian deciding it’s time to update our lives and me finally dropping off the pace after a valiant effort to keep up with the world.

Darlings, what do I do with a mother in town for A WEEK? Yes, a week. In almost November, when even I - and I am not in my 70s - only want to leave the house for three seconds at a time because it’s so utterly arctic. Your tips would be greatly appreciated. Let me give you a few tipping tips by telling you something about my mother and the sort of things she likes to get up to…

Interests: n/a

German knowledge: n/a (although that’s not surprising, seeing as she’s never studied the language and that’s not much worse than I speak it and I’ve lived here for 6 years)

Leavealoneability: n/a

So it’s 24/7 mum.

My sister and I sniggered as we booked her flight over the internet while chatting on the phone. “What am I going to DO with her for a week? We don’t even get Home and Away.” My sister had my mother’s card to book the flight, which was a great show of trust in itself, as my mother usually shields her details from me when we visit a cashpoint machine together like a girly swot hiding their schoolwork. The flight, inevitably, cost 2p. “Mum, it’ll be 2p,” my sister shouted. “Can’t you get it cheaper?” my mother inquired reasonably. I assumed she wouldn’t be going for the voluntary carbon-offsetting payment.

My mother’s been to Berlin once before. In November. For a week. It was so freezing she couldn’t bear to leave the house and she loathed every second of her stay. She said our house was disgusting - we’ve moved since - and if we had that type of curtains… and we really shouldn’t eat mince… and if we just put a little bit aside every month, we’d be as rich as Croesus in no time. My mother is very much from the you-were-lucky generation, not realising, of course, that she was, in fact, very lucky to be around at the time when it was possible for a 21-year-old newly-wed to buy a house in central(ish) London for 30p…

So it’s been a hive of activity here to try to dedisgustingify our flat. The only practical thing I can do is paint. In fact, and I don’t know why I’ve been endowed with this ability, I can do it better than the Russian and that gives me trillions of bigger-cock points and him woeful cock-shrink. But not wanting to allow this skill of mine not to be put to good use and, let’s face it, painting is also rather unpleasant, which means the Russian thinks it’s trebly worthwhile, my beloved is always looking out for an opportunity where I can don my mask (which I remove after three seconds because I can’t breathe) and get busy with my roller. (Darlings, but I’m so a brush-man. Rollers are pants.)

One piece of good luck for me is that the Russian is, like most Russians, a great believer in the temporary solution. So rather than us repainting the whole damned flat, we just scoot around the place - it doesn’t take long - looking for non-white patches and agree to rewhiten those. I rewhitened like nobody’s business and pretended manlily not to notice when I could see the Russian looking on in loving admiration of the fact that I was a) occupied doing something useful and unpleasant and b) occupied at all. He offered me tea. “Got any cake?” I asked in my best Estuary and then tried to pinch his arse.

So the flat’s presentable for Mrs. Inberlin senior, but what about the cultural programme? Normally, for the home bits of any visitor’s stay, we have the wonders of the internet for them to play with and the map of Europe in the hall for them to stare at. But my mother is pre-internet and doesn’t believe in Europe. She’d rather die than leaf through one of my (four) books. No, the telly is her only friend. I zapped through our channels to see if anything passed muster. Euronews might have her entertained for nineteen seconds and the soft porn bemused for another twenty. “Darling, if we move the furniture around, might we be able to get a different set of channels?” “No, but ve kyen buy anuzzer recyeivyer.”

We trotted off to my least favourite shop in the world with bright lights, spotty assistants and wall-to-wall electrical goods. Darlings, and this is where I realised I have officially become old. My only other boyfriend of note was older than me so I have always felt young. I was the one who was lavished in praise for being able to set the video. But the technology carousel has either just picked up enough speed or I’ve just lost enough strength to be thrown off the ride and cast into gadget oblivion. I don’t mind in the least.

We found the receiver. The Russian compared it to others and spoke to me in tongues. “Hmm, maybe TBS4 recyeivyer eez byettyer zan TBS5.” He then had manly conversation with one of the spotty assistants about which wire he’d need to be able to use both at once and I wandered round the shop. And, darlings, I didn’t know what most of the things were. I approached one thing which looked quite pleasing. A flattish oblong with engaging lights. I whittled my choices down to a scanner or a sandwich-toaster. The Russian reappeared at my shoulder sporting fresh bruises, blood and singed hair. “Oh, what happened to you?” “Oh, you know, ze assistyent and I decide to khev fight and light our farts for manly fun.” “Oh I see… Darling, do you think this thing is a scanner or a sandwich-toaster?” “It’s lifestyle,” he answered curtly. Please no-one tell me what a lifestyle is. I want to live in mother-level ignorance of all developments from here on in.

We still haven’t got Home and Away, but we do have a million Arabic channels and the soft porn’s got softer.

Oh my god. My mother’s coming to visit. For a week.

Oh my god. The phone calls about Christmas have started. Rival bids for our attendance. And everyone claiming - falsely - that they won’t be offended if we opt for another option. And the thought of children expressing dissatisfaction at their miserly presents and being comforted by their parents who say, “There, there, poor little darling. It’s just miserly old Uncle BiB and the Russian. It’s because they’re gay and don’t know what’s normal.” No wonder we usually boycott the bastard.

So a survey-cum-game for us to be going on with.

The worry of it all meant that the Russian and I decided a spontaneous booze-up was in order. That followed a spontaneous shop-up. I don’t have a bean, of course, but I’d just paid 20 kopecks off my credit card bill so decided I could give it a bit of a pounding. The Russian thinks shopping is pleasant and wondered why I was preparing a noose for myself as we approached some department store where he wanted to buy a guide to London for future reference because my local knowledge is out-of-date and useless (though I could, thankfully, point out that it had wrongly located a landmark on the first page I saw). “Buy music,” the Russian instructed me. Oddly, and just as I was about to install my portable gallows, I remembered there was something I wanted to buy. Well, wanted to possess. I’d rather have stolen it, in a way, or have had it sent to me, but as I don’t do crime and can’t spend all my time waiting for people to give me presents I haven’t intimated I’m expecting, I trotted downstairs to look for Beethoven’s Cello Sonata no.3 in A. Darlings, if you don’t know it, find it this instant and listen to it and feel inadequate - unless you are brilliant - that a fellow human can have composed such brilliance. (Here’s a bit so you can have the fun of seeing how nuts Glenn Gould looks at a piano.) It gives Britney a run for her money. I wanted it played by Jacqueline Du Pré and Stephen Kovacevich but the only cheapo CD I could find was the good lady and Daniel Barenboim. “Oh wanking fuck,” I shouted out loud and then decided I’d try to pretend to be one of those posh people that knows about music and went to hassle the staff. “‘ere, see this recordin’ ‘ere, ’s by Du Pré ‘n Barenboim, ‘n I wan’ Du Pré ‘n Kovacevich, dunn I?” Except I said it in bad German. The staff member looked at me pityingly and then said, no, they didn’t have exactly what I was looking for but might I be interested in a Jacqueline Du Pré box-set? I had a peek. 50 euros. And then box-sets make me think for no good reason of people who like Dire Straits and I wondered if I might not have to start drinking real ale and grow a beard if I bought one.

“Darling, buy me a box-set,” I texted the Russian a couple of floors above me, including texting symbols for throwing a tantrum and tears.

“Fak off. Buy yoursyelf.”

And then I remembered I had a credit card and that it would, therefore, be free, so I did.

Anyway, where were we?

Oh yes, so we decided to get drunk. Or tiddly. In my blogging pub. Where I’ve supped with all these folks. Now the blogging pub has a hint of the gayers about it. It’s not as much as gay, but it must be semi-officially gay-friendly or gay run or there’s something in the water because it always has an above-average sprinkling of whoopsies. But yesterday it was, or so we thought, wall-to-wall shirt-lifters. All shaved heads and delicate manners.

This for no good reason made the Russian and me wonder again what sort of hets we’d make. I drifted off - the blogging pub has massive, fuck-off windows so it’s hard not to stare out of them, especially when you get distracted by a nice bit of awkward socialising. A correct young lady with a bike ran into an acquaintance, a correct young man with glasses, and a friend of his. They were introduced - there was awkward kissing and awkward hand-shaking - and the threesome attempted small-talk. And they were so brittle that I actually worried they might shatter and end up as shards of person around each other’s feet - as he described me as being liked by one parent-in-law and hated by another and I saw myself as my older brothers. They can both drive and play football but probably aren’t much better acquainted with a drill than I am. They’re not ludicrously butch so the leap of faith wasn’t too far. The Russian has a hetero twin so I imagined him as him with a very nagged wife and, again, the prospect wasn’t too ludicrous.

A German member of staff asked an English member of staff how to say a couple of the dishes’ names in English. “What?” I thought to myself. “That group of classic Berlin homos next to us aren’t German?” I cocked my bad ear towards them. And, do you know, they weren’t gay at all. Just Danish.

Darlings, what type of gays/lezzers/hets would you make? As ever, bisexuals are barred from the survey/game. As are Scandinavians. My findings will probably appear in The Lancet.

I’ve been a wild smoker for many’s the year and I’ve spent all me money on ciggies and beer…

But that’s all in the past. Darlings, you wouldn’t think you could get so much blog-meat out of your lungs, but I’m going to give it a go. Bear with me (if you haven’t got something much better to do).

I’m sorry to say it, but I realise with ever-increasing certainty that my mood is as much controlled by money as it is the weather. Battling scum-kings to get the money they owe you makes me more livid than a bear with a personality disorder who’s been woken early from his hibernation by builders building a supermarket on his patch of forest, but the upside of this is that when they finally cough up and you can put the grievance to bed, my mood is so euphoric that I actually have to inject myself with a whisky+NightNurse cocktail to knock myself out so as not to annoy the neighbours with constant singing and leaping round the room for joy. If the sun is out when the scum-kings happen to cough up - luckily, a rare event in northern Europe - then I buy strangers flowers, heal the sick and stand on a soap-box in Alexanderplatz and tell jokes.

Yesterday, I was paid. And the sun was out. But I had a gazillion things to attend to so I halved the whiskey+NightNurse dose, sent an SMS to the Christian I borrow the soap-box off and told him he could do a double shift, and set about my errands. Paid some of the more manageable-looking bills from the pile. Wrote some rude e-mails to translation people. (No thanks, I don’t fancy working for 40 euros for a thousand words and you paying the invoice after 90 days, actually. PS. Fuck off.) Tried to distract the Russian as he was suggesting we go to Australia, the moon AND IKEA, and all before bedtime, and remembered, to my great relief, that I was completely out of my delicious inhalers. Russians adore and respect illness, so when I said I’d better make a quick detour to the quack, the Russian adopted a stern but caring expression, patted me on the back and wished me luck as I went into battle.

I’d hardly relit the cigarette which I’d only started smoking the night before to annoy the Russian but which was truncated by the predictably punctual arrival of the tram before I noticed the dreaded attempt at eye contact by not one but two cigarette-poncers on our famously boring street. I tried to look away, down, behind me, but they were not to be thwarted in their poncing. A youngish couple - late 30s, dishevelled. I instantly had wicked Daily Mail thoughts about their last moment of non-taxpayer-funded generosity being when one of them once bought their friend a penny chew. He asked politely enough for a cigarette. She giggled goofily, in the way that Andrea Jaeger did when she finally won a point in that Wimbledon final against Navratilova in 1845 when she was 6-0 5-0 40-0 down (probably a Navratilova double fault), if they could take two. I’ve decided the best policy on such occasions is to agree but with a look of foul distaste and, of course, total silence. They bounded off happily on their way and I worried about the world we live in and thought that she could easily get a job as a court jester and I couldn’t quite think of what he should do, though he had the looks for a certain type of singer, and isn’t it queer when you’ve been on the street for two seconds to have only smoked 2/3rds of a ciggie yourself and to have given away two.

I wheezed my way to the asthma quack. Stopped off to buy chewing gum to take away the stench of fag so that the doctor wouldn’t bollock me only to be served by a Hungarian woofter I’ve chatted to when out and about on numerous occasions. “What are you doing here?” I said to him, feigning surprise, interest and normality. “Working,” came his not surprising answer. “But what are you doing here?” he countered, thinking he’d better play along. “Um, buying chewing gum.” “80c please.” “Bye then.” We didn’t exchange phone numbers.

The doctor’s was lovely. The old but dim receptionist had obviously cut back on the booze and was a beacon of efficiency. There was one new receptionist who looked like a model. And the young, dim, plump one seemed to have settled into the job. “I’d like some drugs, please,” I said to the old but dim but sober one. I didn’t have an appointment, but she flashed my computerised file at the doctor who happened to be sitting in reception and is so tall and thin that I worried he’d be no good in an earthquake (and I did think of suggesting he have one of those weights attached to his head that they put on top of buildings in Japan, but then remembered we don’t have that many earthquakes here. Phew!), plus he wasn’t wearing a belt, so I was preparing to amass disdain for him, but he authoritatively said I hadn’t had a good, thorough check-up since 2002 and talked me into one without a drop of resistance. The young, dim, plump one was in charge of that and she was ruthlessly efficient. She hurried me down the corridor. Sat me in the booth. Made me put a posh clothes-peg on my nose and fellate the blowy-machine. I sat still and looked left, then right, and felt a little bit silly as I awaited instructions. She fiddled with her knobs then told me to breathe normally. Then deeper. Then she regulated my speed by chanting in, out, in, out. First it was regular speed, then frantic, then I had to do a big ‘in’ and then she’d holler, “BLOW!” And then another big in and BLOW! And again and again. I was putty in her hands. I thought she was probably the dominant one in her relationship, and imagined her boyfriend as being tall, thin and silent.

I calmed myself down and waited for my go with Herr Quack himself. An old Berlinerin beed witty with the receptionists. Another old Berlinerin’s eyes were so wide with indignation at this display of Schnauze that I was worried they might fly out of their sockets and land on my lap. A youngish couple dressed IDENTICALLY - identical dark-blue jeans turned up a mile, identical black leather jackets and identical caps - waited their turn and I wondered why he still needed his girlfriend to take him to the doctor.

The beltless doctor ushered me in. I assured him I was as right as rain but didn’t half fancy some drugs. He did the stethoscope while I worried if I could breathe in and out and still manage to hide my belly at the same time and then told me what the young, dim, plump one’s tests revealed. “Yes, no major change. Your asthma’s much the same as it was. Do you need the inhalers much?” (Scribble, scribble.) Then some technical spiel and telling me that if I wasn’t careful, I might have a nice little bout of emphysema to look forward to. The word emphysema sounded so terrifying that it was the first time I’ve taken medical advice properly, instantaneously on board. I remembered an old friend’s girlfriend - a nurse - from a former life telling me I’d be dead by 40. A combination of the beltless doctor’s words and a will to prove the nurse wrong did for me in one split second what I am led to believe Allen Carr does over the course of several chapters.

I will never smoke again.

I woke up craving quite strong, milky coffee, toast with a hint of crispiness and slatherings of jam and wondering whether the Russian and I should get married tomorrow or pack our bags, decide that it had all been a bad joke and agree never to see each other again.

We sat down later to spaghetti with bacon and halloumi and talked of Marx and nuclear fission, work and our next hundred holidays. England, Turkey and Poland are all on the agenda and will be visited by Friday. Squeezed in some speed-nagging. Both enumerated with pride each of the communal things we’d paid for to score points over the other. Then celebrated being alive with a disgusting cup of tea - I vaguely loathe tea - from our brand new teapot.

The Russian would ideally like every moment when we’re not eating or planning a holiday to be occupied with some activity or other, preferably useful and unpleasant. Little does he realise what a nag-meat godsend it is that he is, like almost all Russians, a stickler for cleanliness and tidiness and I am a slovenly slob. We have colonised a room each in the flat. I get culture shock every time I leave his room, which looks like a neat Norwegian hotel room and re-enter mine, which looks like a room in a doss-house where the resident’s corpse has been lying unnoticed for a week and a half. His room smells of flowers and productivity. Mine of cigarettes and dust.

“Vot zese papers lying khere?” my darling asked primly, motioning towards reams of tree scattered around my desk with only some dictionaries, calendars, anti-allergy pills, a calculator and wayward ash for company. “I dunno. Probably some unpaid bills or other.”

I live in fairly muted terror of the times when the Russian decides it is time for me to conranise my life. When I can sense that his sigh-level is about to beat all previous records, I might frenziedly try and bring some order to my chaos. But it’s worthless and counterproductive labour as outward neatness only means that my system has broken down and none of these papers will ever get dealt with. For when things are as I like them, one pile of papers strewn there may be the dealt-with pile, another might be the being-dealt-with pile and another the haven’t-even-got-round-to-thinking-about-dealing-with-them pile. Whereas any neat stack of papers will inevitably turn into an oh-I-give-up pile and will then only get dealt with when the threats start coming in the post.

But the Russian is currently into tidying my internal as well as external world. Terrifying. This inner and outer slovenliness has got to stop. “You’re 72 now.” It’s going to be theatre on Mondays, swimming on Tuesdays, museums on Wednesdays. Exhausted just typing it. Basket-weaving on Thursdays. Fish on Fridays and god know what little something for the weekend.

I try to put up resistance but I know he has the moral high ground. I say it’s part of my translatorly lifestyle - you know, we’re almost writers and all that - to live like Christopher Hitchens but we look down at our hitchenly bellies and concede that he is right.

If I can get past the lashings of (sugar-reduced, at least) jam, I’ll be all lithe, lissom and tidy in no time.

OK, that’s enough grammatical nonsense now. No doubt most of these tenses/moods/whatevers don’t even exist. And I’ll be blowed if I can remember what the supine is. Apart from meaning lying on your back.

Speaking of which, I went to a gay bar not long ago. I didn’t lie on my back there, though there was quite a lot of that sort of thing going on on screen. And I had pangs of sympathy for porn-stars who seem required to come together in quite the least comfortable of positions.

The gay bar’s not bad for people-watching. And still just about the only place I’m not too mortified to go to on my own if drink is deemed absolutely necessary and there’s no-one handy to imbibe with. I might often pop to a gay bar with a pal. Even with the Russian once in a blue moon. But on your own is best for observing the full, undiluted misery of certain aspects of being in the gayers.

Arrive at a gay bar late and it might already be vaguely pulsating and that can be hopeless. There might be people having fun. Smiling. Knocking back poison. Watching whatever the gay bar is choosing to show on its screen, if it has one, which might well be Czech soldiers rodgering each other senseless (with their oohs and aahs helpfully subtitled into English) but might easily just as well be some nonsense film, or scenes from Eurovision, or MTV, or some other bollocks.

But arrive early and it might be empty enough for you to sit, if your mood’s just right, and witness grimmery in slow-motion. My last absolutely essential bout of solo-drinking at the gay bar came unpredictably early. I ordered a beer I loathe to make the occasion all the more miserable, smoked for all I was worth and watched life go by.

A middle-aged gent who is either married, in the closet or has come out that day creeps over the threshold paralytic with fear. He edges himself to the nearest corner of the bar, still close enough, in theory, to make a dash for the door, and whispers his order. The barman bellows that he can’t hear, what with the distraction of the Hungarian soldiers who appear to have got waylaid during their exercises and have ended up porking in an abandoned barn plus the boom boom boom of whatever the music they’re playing is. The shy type whispers again. The barman bellows back twice as loud to make sure that he’s grabbed the attention of the other punters - all three of us - so we stare at the shy type to make him feel uncomfortable (and, anyway, it’s got to the plot-setting bit in the new film. The Slovak soldiers aren’t in a barn yet but are still at the willy-waggling stage at the urinals. No need for subtitles). He eventually has success articulating loudly enough that he’d like a beer, which the barman pours with record-breaking slowness to make him feel just a little bit less welcome. Five minutes later he retrieves his tiny beer and retreats to a hidden corner as close to the door as possible.

The tourist queens arrive with a look of stunned horror. Why only four people? They explore the premises in case there are people hiding under tables or behind pillars and then trudge resignedly to the bar. They order in English. The barman leers back with contempt but provides them with refreshments. Again, they mope round the bar in disbelief that no-one is there bar me, the shy type, some regular or other who monopolises the barman - I think they’re discussing the porn and seem very knowledgeable - and a respectable older gent in a suit and with some sort of satchel who makes a poor attempt at trying to look busy.

I sip my beer. I mourn in advance the fast-emptying packet of fags. I watch the other punters coping with life as best they can and snatch the odd look at the perfect boys from the Austro-Hungarian empire pedestrianly shagging on the screen.

A familiar face or two gradually drifts in. I do my best to avoid eye-contact, as do they. This bar seems to have unintentionally etched itself a niche where folk go to drink and watch. Either the other queens who drink alone in bars or the entertainment on screen (which has mysteriously changed to The Golden Girls. Perhaps it’s Happy Hour).

A falsely jolly queen arrives and hollers, mistakenly thinking that what he has to holler might be of interest. He recounts to a long-suffering friend every thought that enters his head. Every expression appears carefully chosen. Every mannerism is rehearsed. He blinks artificially slowly. Spontaneity has long since left the building.

The place de-empties slightly as one solo punter after another walks in. Some look nervous. Some do confidence. Most are probably on the pull at some level or another. Sometimes an eye is caught and that may either linger or shift determinedly or shyly away. Some will gaze longingly at the object of their desire, whether the desire be of the raunchy kind or just someone to drink life away with. Some will be here by default, their feet as trusty as any guide-dog in getting them there every damned night and somehow getting them home again, not that they’ll have remembered the end of an evening with anything bordering clarity since 1986.

The perfect boys are back screwing on screen. It is unclear whether this is intended as encouragement or discouragement. “Look what you could be doing!” “Look who you haven’t got a hope in hell of bedding (or barning), drunken old losers!” Most people pay it little attention. Some stare blankly. I glance at an article in a gay magazine on why transsexuals are sexist.

We drink quietly on.

Gosh. Life’s a bit relentless, isn’t it? You go to bed at night thinking, “I am good, aren’t I? Got through another whole day. In Russia I’d probably be given an Order of Someone-or-Other for that.” And then, sure enough, you wake up again the next afternoon morning and have to do the whole living thing again.

So, to fill in the time… some books wot I have been given.

Quite exciting getting books in the post. Well, terrifying if the postman happens to catch you in, because there’s all that opening-the-front-door and worrying that it will be the police, who’ve finally tracked you down for the crime you haven’t done, or the landlord to say you’re too unspeakable to go on living in his flat, or someone from some Amt or other making sure that you’re living your life correctly. But, luckily, the postman normally can’t be bothered to ring - we live on the second floor - and pretends we were out and leaves the nice note in our correct, standard and labelled-in-keeping-with-the-other-fonts-of-the-house post-box downstairs. “Ooh, a parcel!” I think. And plan to dash straight off until I see in big letters that the parcel is to be picked up at such and such a place - heute jedoch nicht - but not today. Then I pace the streets all night until I finally get exhausted and pitch my tent outside the post-office to be in before all the ne’er-do-wells with too much time on their hands first thing…

I wake sodden and confused, then rustle up a full-English on my camping-gas and have some tepid tea from my flask. Check if I’ve started a tent-city and a democratic revolution and burn the tickets for illegal camping from the Ordnungsamt. Then I change out of my Kevlar into some appropriate day-wear - a nice pair of slacks, my deck shoes and a tweed jacket - and take up my position in the queue. Of course I’m normally beaten to first place by some pensioner (posting letters to the Stasi) (you think they’d do pre-paid) but patiently wait my go with the woman-with-short-blond-hair-and-glasses with heroic forbearance.

But do you know who was in the queue between me and Stasi-woman last time round? Only a young woman, with LONG blond hair and NO glasses - have you ever known such a scandal? - with a huge parcel for, and I’m not joking, the Engelbert-Humperdinck-Schule in Frankfurt. I forced my brain into activity and can only conclude that she had printed out all of Enge’s fan mail to send just in case spirits in Frankfurt were at a low ebb. I know it’d work for me. (OK, I suppose that the school could, possibly, be named after another Enge but I’m choosing to go with the other option.)

I rushed through my transaction with the woman-with-short-blond-hair-and-glasses so that the pensioner behind me wouldn’t have to labour for too much longer under the weight of the parcel he was having dispatched to the Paula-Abdul-Schule in Hoyerswerda. Truth is stranger than fiction.

So the DJ has been up to his old tricks and is sending me books in the post again to try and keep me on the straight and narrow. And he’s so clever, knowing that it’s my only ambition in life to be a Jew (but without the God bits) (or kosher bits, while we’re on the subject) (well, or probably most of the bits, actually) and giving me a book on Yiddish civilisation by a certain Paul Kriwaczek, whose family fled Vienna for London when he was a boy. It’s got Jews. It’s got anecdotes. It’s got Central Europe. I’m in clover.

“You khev got peckidzh?” the Russian asked out of the blue in an e-mail from Putin’s perfect post-communist paradise.

“No.”

“Bzzzzzzz,” went the postman, who was obviously working on a commission that day. I slipped into my negligee and high-heels just in case he’d need to be encouraged to take the weight off his feet. Up the stairs bounded a lovely, big, blond thing. “I’m having awful trouble with my cistern,” I said, thinking he’d happily help a damsel in distress. But he said it wasn’t in his remit, asked for my signature and went bounding off back down the stairs with, I think I’m not mistaken, a hint of a chuckle.

I got back into my slacks, deck shoes and tweed jacket and made short work of the overdone packaging. The book of Belle de Jour with her name and a big high-heel that frankly wasn’t a patch on the ones I’d put on in my failed attempts at seducing post-boy in glittery pinky-purple on the cover.

“Oh, darling, thank you. You’ve got me the book by that blogging prostitute.”

“Yes, I sink you laik. She prostitute. She Jewish. She blog. She make book.”

Liukchik, will you marry me?