The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad (11 page)

I offered Pascha some of my Revels as a way of bonding, but he wasn’t interested. So I tried to be friendly by showing interest in his car.

I think I moaned less when I was with Pascha. His pessimistic approach made me more optimistic. This hasn’t happened much to me before. Suzanne very rarely moans, and I wonder if
it’s ’cos I do it all for her, as Pascha was doing for me. If someone is happy I tend to look at the negative. There’s no fun in moaning if it isn’t getting the opposite
reaction. The longer he was with me, the more he moaned. If Pascha was a dog I’d have had him put down.

Other than his tuts and huffs we drove in complete silence until the police pulled us over. Pascha spoke to them in Russian and then we drove away again.

I got out of the car while I was on his good side. The director took me to an old-looking place that I thought was going to be for food. I entered the main room where old dark wooden furniture
soaked up any light. Me mam bought some old antique furniture like this once, but me dad found it depressing so he stripped it and painted it in white gloss. Me mam went mad. He did that sort of
thing a lot. He washed an old ornament with a Brillo pad ’cos he thought it was dusty, and all the paint came off, so he tried painting it himself. It ended up looking like a garden gnome.
There’s a song by Daniel Merriweather with lyrics that go ‘took something perfect and painted it red’ – I’m sure Daniel must have met me dad.

Men sat around talking, some naked, some with very little on apart from a towel and a white bell-shaped hat. I sat down on one of the hot leather high-backed chairs. Not the sort of chair to sit
on naked ’cos it sticks to your skin. It took me back to when my dad had a Ford Cortina with a dark PVC interior, seats that on sunny days could heat up to temperatures close to that of
molten lava. People always talk about the hot summer of 1976 when it was so hot you could fry eggs on your car bonnet. Well, in my dad’s Ford Cortina we could have slowcooked a leg of lamb.
Baby seats were not needed back then ’cos the hot plastic kept young kids stuck to their seat. Everyone had car seat covers in the late ’70s, not for comfort but ’cos they were
needed to stop drivers getting third-degree burns and oven gloves were used as driving gloves the steering wheel got so hot.

I picked a row of seating where nobody else was sat and pointed at some food from the menu, which I thought was sausage. A plate turned up with thin strips of dark meat. It could’ve been
bits of burnt arse skin scraped off these leather sofas, but it turned out to be horse meat, and going on the amount of meat on the plate I’d say it was the whole horse. It was dried, quite
spicy and tasted all right, but I didn’t get to eat much as a man threw me a towel and asked me to get undressed. This place wasn’t just a restaurant, it was a
banya
, which is
a traditional Russian steam bath. Blokes were wandering about in the huge tiled area wearing the little white felt hats but nowt to cover the bollocks. If you’re hot, surely the hat comes off
before the pants! It’s not a good look. It’s like being naked with socks on – it looks bloody stupid. It always seems to be the people you don’t want to see naked that are
happy to be naked. The man said that the hat was worn to protect the head from the intense heat in the sauna. It was roasting in there. I was asked to lie on a bench where another man then took it
upon himself to batter me with a shrub. It was twigs from a birch tree that they use to help blood circulation. As I was being whacked, other men in the sauna sat and cheered and laughed. There was
not one bit that was nice about the whole experience. It felt like walking through an automatic car wash.

I’ve had quite a few different styles of massages around the world, and they’re getting madder. In China I had some woman rub my legs wearing gloves that were set on fire. In
Thailand I had a woman prisoner bending me about. I saw something on the internet recently where they pile a load of snakes on your back to wriggle about! There’s even some procedure that
involves smearing bird poo all over your face to take off dead skin. I experienced this once when my pet magpie poo’d on my ear and I didn’t have anything to wipe it off with. I thought
I’d leave it until I got home, but I ended up forgetting it was there. A few hours later, it was pointed out to me, so I cleaned it off to find it had burnt away my ear. But what’s the
world come to when a relaxing day is having snakes all over your back and your face smeared in birdshit? I remember when a posh face wash was using Imperial Leather, an expensive bar of soap that
we only got out when we had visitors.

After I’d been battered by the bush I was told to pull a chain on a bucket that then tilted and poured a gallon of freezing water over me to finish off the relaxing process: hot to cold,
back to hot and then freezing, a bit like Pascha’s personality.

Later, we made our way via Red Square to where I would be boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway. It was the first time I’d seen tourists while being in the country. They
were all busy getting photos of themselves stood by St Basil’s Cathedral. When I think of Russia this is the building I picture. It’s not your normal design for a cathedral. It looks
like something a Lottery winner or a footballer might build. The amount of different colours on it, you’d think the whole thing had been done using Dulux sample pots. The story goes that Ivan
the Terrible was so impressed with the building, once completed, he gouged out the eyes of the architects so they wouldn’t build another one like it. Seems a bit harsh, but then his name says
it all.

The biggest queue in Red Square seemed to be of people who wanted to see the dead body of political leader Lenin. He died in 1924 and was embalmed and then put in a glass box. I
think I quite like the idea of this. People will never forget him while he’s there to be seen. Statues kind of do this job, but you can’t beat having the actual person, can you? I
wonder if we’ll get to a point where we do it with loved ones. I can imagine having Suzanne waxed and stuffed in the front room. I’d just have her sat reading a book. That seems like
the most normal thing to have her doing. If someone came round to read the meter or decorate they wouldn’t say anything to her ’cos people don’t interrupt people who are reading.
They wouldn’t know she was stuffed. I’d just change the book now and again, so they didn’t think she was a slow reader. I think it would be nicer having her there like that than
not at all.