Beasty Bistros

Tea-Spoon(Russian fast food)

What does my teapot see?(White, standard teapot. Boring)
A fine glitter - Christmas

Lights - some well coated passers-by and cars

The number 47

Orange plates, squares of orange that could be a modern bar.

What doesn’t my teapot see?

A man in the corner asleep. The amused, embarrassed staff gathered to discuss the situation and sent a young man to gingerly wake him up. Now he is eating food which was clearly not bought in the café and gazing out protectively from under his puffer coat. Then he walks out, weaving to one side with his hands in his puffy trousers.

A Canteen - social sample


This 24 hour cantene  right in the centre of town harbours  basic Russian food  in the Soviet style; that is, if you want honey or jam, or any sort of extra,  it costs a lot more.

Today I ate baked fish and rye bread, a cheap and basic meal, in the Stolovaya by Dosteyovsky metro station. I couldn’t finish it all. It was very dry , as anything superfluous such as butter  is an extra and extra costs extra, funnily enough. I scribbled down the motto of the communist poster on the wall(Live well, for a good life - how ironic is this tobacco stained room) , a yellow background and blue bottles and wondered that I’d chosen the ugliest perspective for my contemplation(driven by an urgent need to write  in the warm rather than a need to eat) and too exposed to grey on every side.

 I had walked on and on through the different landscapes of the Stolovaya until I reached the furthest one, furthest away from every-one and nearest to the  outside world. The furthest too from observation. Then I pushed my plate away and began to write a fanciful story about icicles all the time wanting to floss my teeth because there was fish stuck in the back, but thinking that it would be very impolite and many people would stare, I  carried on writing. So while I politely refrained from flossing a young man with scruffy red hair came over to my table and sat right opposite me. He pulled my plate towards him and began eating the scraps of fish left on the bone; parts I’d left for inedible. Then he methodically ate the dry bread, sitting right in front of me but not looking at me, only at the food. I nonchalantly carried on writing while absolutely shocked and quite losing the thread of my story. Then really feeling that this was pointless and uncomfortable and I really wanted to de-fish my teeth anyway, I began to pack away my bag and the scavenger got up and wandered away unsteadily to another table. It is difficult to tell if he was only very drunk, and had run out of money but had food cravings, or was homeless and poor and drunk or slightly mentally unstable or on some form of drugs. It is useless to conjecture. I felt the dark emotions issuing from Dostoevsky -so many ignoble characters -in there today.

The Only Park

I found a beautiful park which is unlike any of the other parks in St Petersburg.. It is bare and lovely. Unpretentious and radiant. The ruffled layers of white snow are the only decoration.  It’s possible to change direction in time to crossing paths with any-one, so that the most delicious snowy solitude is possible.

This park is delicious because while all the other urban parks have high-heels and ice-skating rinks and ticket booths and music stands and statues and artifice in all its forms this has none of those. In once section  abandoned iron-railings, de-rooted and at an angle, gape from between the trees.

There are specific views which could belong to a rural postcard, so you can believe you’ve suddenly wandered into rural St Petersburg, a wooden stables leading to a country road and a pack of motley dogs, a poorly  maintained copse. Outside the edges of the postcard though, you would see merry red and white stripes of a factory chimney, a strange species of tree branchless tree. At the end of the winding road, suddenly massive blue and grey triangular buildings imposing their joyless colours onto the skyline like monstrous lego blocks. Everywhere there are tenement blocks and building works on the edges of the park. That hardly matters., they are only glinting their on the edges(how long I wonder, before they encroach more upon this space, though? ).

There are a few babushkas and old men in their tough beaver hats, walking briskly and the odd sporty person with walking skies. There was an unkempt man just standing there on the edge of the path smoking.

In a copse, a man had cleared a hole in the snow and made an impressive fire. It was amazing to see fire in the snow, in the woods, in the sun,

As I walked on through the park I thought the sienna trees and the miroitic snow, beautiful velvet shades, and the sunshine would go on forever, long after the railway bridge. I could almost imagine myself walking out from under a dear disused railway bridge in the English country side, to see wild horses and  and lovely  gentle skies (the English sky seems so gentle and small now, as terrible and storm-filled as it can be) and wild flowers making a mockery of the scattered remains of the track.

But there were only  heartbreaking insipid flat blocks, another residential area. The only way to preserve the illusion of a borderless forest is to weave round and around the paths, within the frame of a Maurice Denis or a Klimst, so straight and ordered are these winter trees and there in the distance glints and thunders the factories of modernism.

Illustration

Pionerskaya - walking home one evening, across the Supermarketerially lighted streets I seemed to see a troupe of yellow cats following me. Not literally of course, but quite potently in my minds eyes they were denouncing their absence from my stories. These straight streets of ice and snow piled high high high  and reflective rectangular towers  piled higher were their stalking ground.

The yellow cats were out hunting in a pack and their coats were shining lemon curd, their eyes muted stars (some strange in-between colour) .  They turned to me all together.

‘You’ve never written a story about us/
You’ve never even thought of us
Nor a song not a word
We mellow yellows
Slink as ghosts
Along the margins of your pages.’

Their purr was deep and angry and slightly in discord so it seemed like some rough avant-garde orchestra.

‘Red cat blue cat
Did you forget the third
Primordial summerial cat.
Where did green cat come from
Don’t you wonder?

Today the metro lights were malfunctioning, giving only a gloomy glimmer of light, so the people in their black outfits with white faces seemed to be from a  carravagist painting. The clair-obscur, the rocketerial zoom of the metro made Russia seem even more like a strange dream, a nouvelle of the vaguely absurd played out under curved ceilings.

Re-encounters

I wondered in a previous blog if I might see the same people when I get the metro, which is always at disparate times of the day.

Yesterday, I remarked the same woman as I saw around two weeks ago. I think it was perhaps a couple of days after I went to the all night-party and was focussing on specific details as is easy to do when tired.

I particularly noticed her because she  walked in a strange inhibited way. How I imagined chinese women who had theire feet bound would walk. She wore a white shawl aroiund her head and white shoes. THis time I noticed that the soles of her shoes were strangely sloping platforms, which explained her slow careful walk.

A week later;  I saw her a third time too.

Wagner, Tristan und Isolde at the Marinsky Concert Hall

A concert-hall performance , without stage action in the bare environment of a modern concert hall, Homegenous wooden walls in relief, the sort of insipid memorial hall decor which neither offends nor inspires no-one. Even the people who are dressed smartly lack 'eclat' in this flat setting, because it is an Opera but not the Opera.and therein is a great difference. The seating besides gives no encouragement to the great sport of people-watching. So the atmosphere is altogether more academic than the Marinsky prorpre.

Isole was a died blonde prima-donna, appearing in a long Operatic black dress, blood-red for the secind act and black widow lace for the third. She acted nonetheless, with prima donna guestures.

Tooalyetee

Russian toilets are epitomised by a Belorussian friend’s statements ‘Toilets are just for getting what’s needed done as quickly as possible.’ I’d noticed the lack of luxury and architectural importance placed on toilets. This very friend, in a spacious flat with  plenty of extra unalloted space has a closet-like toilet, where there is barely space to fit in; windowless, jammed between the door and the coat rack. It shares its’ space with a cupboard of household miscellany. Clearly, the architect when designing the layout of the flat thought something along the lines of, ‘We’ll stuff the toilet out of the way by the door  in the minimum space possible and leave all the interesting space for other rooms‘. No big windows, no fluffy mats, no coquettish or trashy toilet paper holders.,no decorated tiles , no fresh air or light. A space dedicated to the over-and-done-with-ity. The English pink fluffy towel attitude goes more for the position of ’ its necessary so it may as well be made as pleasant and fluffy and disguised as possible.’

I realise some of this comes from the habitual separation of bathroom and toilet, a practical thing in these flats where there’s often a whole family or two. Wheareas in England toilet often shares  the more respectable bathroom space,

I walked into the grandeur of the Belorussian Opera - not as luxurious as some more important Opera houses, but still leaning towards a certain degree of magnificence - and was glamorously preparing to lament with the princes and princesses of a Tchaikovsky ballet when I discovered hole-in-floor-toilets. Reminiscent of roadway toilets in provincial France. There they were in the heart of ornamental civilisation and all these Opera-goers in their elegant tailor-cut dresses and smart suits go to the toilet in the same way as a Provincial French peasant or workman.

A similar shock was encountered on the Electrisichka St-Petersburg - Viborg, a two hour thirty minute journey. After my satisfactory experience of long distance trains, I was quite prepared for the journey, and I drank a teapot’s worth before getting on the train. ‘I brought a face mask with me., ‘ I imparted to my travelling companion. ‘Where will you wash it off?’. In the toilet basin , of course. ‘What toilet basin? ‘You must be joking. There’s no toilet on Electrishika.’ ‘No toilet at all?’ So I didn’t need the mint teabags I packed either. I asked the train official, just to double check and she laughed.

Now this is generalisation, and there are some interesting toilets with concessions to kitsch if not to light, air, space and windows. One toilet in a restaurant, off Nevskiy, has a  toilet with mirrors on every surface but the floor. The kind of toilet you should go to just to visit.