From Russia with love

Tuesday, Moscow, Irish pub, no Guinness. I last slept on Sunday night before leaving for Moscow on Monday evening and arriving in the early hours today (now yesterday at the time of publication). I could have kipped down in the transit lounge but chose instead to “do” Moscow in a day.

I turn up on the doorstep of an old friend, Neil Buckley, the FT’s Moscow Bureau Chief who opens the door in his pyjamas as if he does this all the time. I’ve known Neil a long time. He has just become a father for the second time and seems to be taking the new arrival in his stride. Well he can because the baby is back in the UK with his mum awaiting his visa. A few weeks old and he already has a passport. I hope the passport control people can tell it’s the little guy in the photograph.

The cabbie who brought me from the airport must have been a getaway driver before turning to taxis. He drives as if the rest of the road users are competitors in some big urban grand prix. Indeed he takes the chequered flag.

I ask him for a receipt and he proceeds to write what looks like a comprehensive précis of War and Peace. It’s the first receipt I’ve ever had in paperback. All that precious time won on the road is lost in the paperwork

Neil shows me how to use the Metro. I try to memorise things in the street: the advertising hording that looks like football jerseys on a washing line – that’s where we turned right. The station stops are in Cyrillic script so I count the stops and try to memorise the artwork at each of the stations.

He’s going to a conference so I leave him not far from the Kremlin. The Kremlin only takes about an hour – all that Russian history knocked off in a few camera shots. I stand in the road to get a cathedral in the frame. A policeman with a hat the size of a dinner plate blows his whistle in shrill sharp, bursts. He talks “whistle,” the language of officialdom everywhere, possibly because it is so easily understood. I translate this particular series of blasts as “get off the road and back behind the fence if you know what’s good for you.”

Red Square takes marginally less time than the Kremlin, I photograph St Basil’s Cathedral from every conceivable angle, onion by colourful onion. It’s easy to overdose on onion towers in Moscow. The Gum store is not what it was. You can buy things there these days.

There’s time to pop down to the Pushkin Museum that has one of the world’s great collections of Impressionist art. The Degas pastel drawings, the “Blue Dancers” and his “Nude wiping herself” are stunning. So is the Renoir “nude sitting on a couch.” No-one, not even Rubens, could do flesh like Renoir could do flesh.

There is Van Gogh’s “Prison Courtyard”, Matisse’s goldfish, Picasso’s “Young Acrobat on a Ball” and Monet’s “Luncheon on the grass.” I can’t think of another gallery anywhere that has this quality of Impressionist and Post Impressionist art concentrated together.

I call back at the FT office for my shoulder bag that weighs almost as much as my luggage after I stuffed my hand baggage with heavy stuff in a bid to escape excess baggage charges. I’m going fishing in Mongolia and fishing means a lot of gear. There’s not much room for luxuries such as clothes.

I’m wondering if I’ve seen the last of my bags. Even the Aeroflot woman at the check in desk in London seemed to have little faith that it would pass smoothly through transit in Moscow. “A lot gets lost,” she said reassuringly.

At the airport I ask the taxi driver for a receipt. This time it’s Anna Karenina. Where else could bureaucracy demand a record of payment that reads like a book plot with a twist at the end?