Ancient Babushka with a Tall Fur Hat

Blusher and pink lipstick forced onto the most minimal of lips. A fur hat is the only moisture in this shrivelled creature and even that seems dried and has none of the  fresh-from-the=slaughterhouse lusciousness of the coquettish hats the younger girls wear. It is stiff and starched. Perhaps it dried with age along with her pink lips and cheeks.

Eyptian without the desert

The Staccato of Stilettos

Yesterday,  I was painfully attuned to the high-heels on the semi-defrosted streets, in the sort of way a graze is very sensitive to a drop of acidic lotion. A girl in tacky delicate  block heels, the sort that have only rubber height and no beauty of form, was walking unevenly before and behind me as I alternatively relaxed or speeded up my pace, enjoying the puddles in my clumpy trekking boots from a hunting shop in deep America. The advance of the heels , tak tak tak, sounded like a child cutting an awkward shape with slightly unwieldy scissors. From the other direction, the more steady, clip clip clip of a secretary’s scissors.

At the Pavlovsk park, in the company of my friends, a girl was wearing  precarious stilettos which leaned slightly on the ice, destroying any continuity of line and therefore parading the ridiculous rather than the feminine. Some  of us were worried what the stilletos would do to the rubber dinghies we planned to sled on. Nonetheless, she stalked on ahead of us like an inelegant clumsy flamingo.

There are many girls who resemble large exotic avian creatures stuttering around their cage because of their long thin legs which walk with such precipitate awkwardness. Many are extremely thin but their body fluffs out like a bird from flaring coat and bags.

Others are patently women(and not girls trapped in unflattering mimicry), or the Feminine, wearing delightfully statuesque heels and walk quite magically and naturally in their leg extensions.

Beauty Convention

A beauty convention . My friend got free tickets from her hairdresser. To get there from the metro you need to walk across a frozen lake; such a contrast of the savage and the altar of the artificial. Inside were boutiques with a strange mixture of products, not necessarily suited to a beauty convention; honey beer, Kvac, Cider, beeswax . Not far from these traditional market products was an ultra-modern tan-spray machine, being used (demonstrated) by young generic  bikini-clad girls and photographers in suits . This was placed incongruously next to an esoteric stall of essential oils and health books.

On the main stage, spread out like painters canvasses but more orderly, was a beauty competition on the theme of fantasy . Behind each stall was a fabulously decorated woman; a dress with a pom-pom skirt in play-school colours; hair curled into a cylinder and fixed with some very powerful hairspray or perhaps glue, like  a wooden honey-comb scraper or moulded from the interior of long thin ribbed bucket(she had to hold it up with her arm).; an onion.

By the main stage was a body-painting competition inspired by Dali. Nude women with fabulously painted bodies and surreal hairstyles curling in the air. It seems this kind of decoration could only work with these Russian models, given their strawberry facial structures and long Rapunzel hair.

Some of the models were clearly amateur and the dowdy presenter of a hair-dressing master class berated them models, ‘They’re young. They don’t know how to walk. We choose this music for them and they walk like that.’ She was very deputy-head style .

It was fascinating to see the mixture of extravagant and tacky (cheap stilettos, leopard skin) people attending the convention.

Moscow free-write

I got to Moscow at 7am on a night train and the first image I saw seemed to be St Pete train station; the same large rectangular room, the same statue in the middle, Then out in the streets instead of the 'boom, crash, wow!' and bold colours and rough rude glamourous Moscovites of the communist capital, of the site of battles who's parliament sounds so very much like 'gremlin', there were quiet becastled streets and polite people dressed modestly in jeans and flat shoes. The sun seemed to rise, athough it had already risen and was merely emerging slightly from cloud cover.

Me and my Russian friend walked on and on down a straight straight street reminscent of Mosckovsky prospect(as one may expect) but could only find the same inspid banal chain establishments restaurants, russified  versions of the Costa coffee concept, as in St Petersburg. Oh, and a Starbucks and Mcdonalds to mark how far Moscow was from it's anti-capitalist past. Then we spotted a My-My, a Societ style cantene mentioned in the guidebook and sitting down to soup, sirniki and and a rich cheese and mushroom dish to accompany post night-train coffee we wrote without limitations our impressions of Moscow.

Moscow. What is there, but towering skyscrapers and primitive Latvian castles squatting be hind the train station; a mirror image of St Petersburg and you can drink coffee in the St Petersburg Café and take the metro to Mayakovskaya or Puskinskaya (semantic shift in operation)? The main problem is walking for a very long time with a heavy bag amongst Moscovite towers and the side-streets are not full of squats (skvots) unless you coud say the side-streets are squatting and ALL THESE PEOPLE (what people, what metropole? I can’t see any.) have space to move through the boulevards. Café is all she wanted and it’s the word she proclaimed loudly and proudly and angrily, holding her arms up to the Slavic gods. ‘Café, café.’ There were no cafes , only bars and late night dives and then Mcdonalds. The stars were unsympathetic. The little known god of Coffee Houses however peered down from his barista’s ledge in the sky, near the moon, and took pity on this unglamorous Moscow night, in the civilised light. Suddenly, in this industrial town, a café fell from the sky and inconveniently blocked the entrance to Mcdonalds. The goddess of tearooms forgot her long-running dispute with the Coffee god and laughed seraphatically at this triumph over fast-food. The muscovite, who   was  wearing   jeans   even  though   she   was   long out  of her teens, strolled into the café which boasted an excellent selection of wholesome cakes and ordered the special brew before blowing the café to smithereens and emptying the pockets of a few groggy customers. She had been inspired by the ribald diction of pulp fiction and this divine intervention was a lucky twist of fate.

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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.