Tag Archives: Mick Hart's Diary

Mick Hart’s Diary One Day in Travel Trade Publishing

15 May 1996

On recounting some of my experiences of working in the publishing industry, some wag asked, back in the 90s, “So, what are you going to do when you leave school?”

1 March 2026 – Mick Hart’s Diary One Day in Travel Trade Publishing

The following diary extract is taken from my time as managing editor at a now-defunct travel-trade publishing house, which we shall here refer to as Shackelton Press.

Shackelton Press for me represented the last post in a long line of desperately bizarre, tumultuously chaotic, and unbelievably high-octane-stressed advertising-based publishing houses, each one stocked with larger-than-life, weird and wonderful characters.

Let’s do a bit of time travelling:

Preface

These little insights, or snippets of madness, are taken from my 1996 diary. The setting is London. The names of both the publishing house and the actors in it have been changed to protect the reputations of the not-so-innocent. If you know who you are, God bless you. I trust that you all came through the experience mentally and emotionally unscathed. They were, as John Lennon lyricised, “Strange days, indeed!”

Cast of Characters:
Editorial Director: Byron Quill (Quilly)

Managing Editor: Mick Hart (or, ‘managing badly’, as Sebastian used to say, or ‘managing just’, as Mr Ormolu was wont to quip)

Production Department Staff
Sebastian Forrester (subeditor/researcher/writer – part-time actor)

Margaret Clark: (researcher/subeditor)

Matt Ormolu: (editor)

Grant: (graphic design and page layout)

Arthur: (freelance editor – South African) nickname ‘Slice’

Suit & Tie: (researcher/subeditor) – female

Publishing house: Shackleton Press

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Introduction

Is it the same today? In my days, people were always leaving publishing house editorial/production departments, either because they couldn’t stand the pace any longer and wanted to get their life back or were, or so they said, moving on to richer pastures. Such is the land we occupy, known as Wishful Thinking.

On this day, Friday 15 May 1996, someone – yet another someone – was about to make the great escape. She was a northern lass, who we will refer to here as Margaret Clark.

In connection with this event, I had been directed by my director (after all, that’s what directors are for, directing) to sally forth, in my own time, of course, or manage someone else to do the same (that’s what managing is all about, delegating) in the interests of procuring for the aforesaid Margaret a communal card and leaving present.

To avoid the boredom of it, I delegated the role to the one chap in our department whom I knew would turn a routine task into something more diverting. No one was better suited to this task, I thought, than Sebastian Forrester, the irascible budding actor, whose aspirations of high culture and whose self-regard for sophistication presented numerous opportunities whilst preparing for the lunchtime trip to, how do we say it, ‘take the piss’.

Friday 15 May 1996 – as it happened

Sebastian, who was extremely excited by the responsibility conferred on him, entertained, with my help, the whole department. He set up his affectatious cultural airs as if they were skittles and my debasing of them the balls that would knock them down.

Margaret Clark, the girl who was leaving today, reminded me of a stick of rock; she had ‘Northern Girl’ stamped right through her. As such, she would most likely have been happy with a pair of clogs, a flat hat and a bowl of mushy peas, heavy on the mint sauce, for a leaving present, but Sebastian, true to form, had his mind set on something she would like because it was something he would like. He seriously had no idea if she had any interest in, or appreciation of, art, and neither did I. But once Sebastian had latched onto something, it was like a dog’s teeth in arse. (This analogy has some baring, sorry, bearing, on the eventual choice of gift, or, of course, I would not have employed it.)

So, we were off to Covent Garden to buy Margaret, who was leaving, a book on art that she might not want, would not like and would never read. It sounded to me like the perfect present for a person quitting a job that she did not want, did not like and was pleased to close the covers on.

Sebastian, just before we left the office, was commenting vociferously on the remarks of one of his colleagues, whose projected view on everything he considered rather crass: “Oh yes, Michael, there’s old Ormolu, his usual helpful and refined self, ‘I think some novelty items are in order, Sebastian,’ he said. Novelty items, indeed. And we all know what he means by that!”

What Sebastian did not know was that Matt Ormolu and I had already discussed the type of present that we were going to buy dear Margaret, and novelty items were top of the list.

“Oh no, Michael!” protested Sebastian, his nose curling and sensibilities clearly offended. “I’m not under any circumstances going into Nutz Novelty shop!”

“Sebastian I barked (Sebastian was the son of an army officer, and sons of army officers, I have found, respond instinctively to the old sergeant major treatment). “Sebastian!”

“Yes, Michael!”

“We are going in!”

“Right, Michael!”

“Oh my God!” That was Sebastian, genuinely shocked by the risqué greeting cards greeting him in Nutz Novelty.

Naturally, being a thespian by aspiration, buying anything of such a crass, crude nature was theatrically beneath him.

Officially, we only had our lunch hour in which to buy a present, and the clock was ticking. In Nutz Novelty, the hands and the pendulum bore an intended resemblance to male genitalia.

“Pity we can’t afford that,” I thought.

Sebastian’s dithering was impinging upon our schedule, so I had to make a managerial decision. So, much to his dismay, I grabbed the nearest greeting card. On its cover was a naked man, who was looking rather gay. Then, before Sebastian could faint, I added to my basket a jumping clockwork bum and a packet of luminous condoms.They were always experiencing power cuts up North, so Margaret should find some practical use for them.

Sebastian was so appalled that, in the interests of balance and resuscitation, I accepted his need to restore the culture he’d lost by looking for it in Dillons bookshop.

In Dillons, we haggle over two potential publications: Works of Art of the Past Century or 100 Years of Playboy. I’ll leave you to decide which one of us advocated which book.

To placate Sebastian, Works of Art of the Past Century it is. A good manager always manages to make concessions when they are faced with a member of staff who looks as though he’s about to stage a tantrum.

With the esteemed book in his mitt, Sebastian proceeds to checkout, putting the book on one side of the counter and resting the Nutz Novelty nude-man card on the other.

The shop assistant rings up the book and then, glancing at the gay card, with its picture of a compromised nude man on the front, asks Sebastian, “Is this yours?”

Sebastian panicking, “Good heavens, no! He bought it from Nutz Novelty!”

But ‘he’, meaning me, was nowhere to be found. I had expeditiously removed myself and was studiously and demonstratively preoccupied with Post-modernist Works of Art.

“We sell them here,” the assistant said, referring to the card.

“Do you!” exclaimed Sebastian. “Well, I’m shocked!”

Mick Hart’s Diary One Day in Travel Trade Publishing

We were already late back from lunch, two hours late to be exact.

“It wil be a ground-to-air arse-seeking boot for us, Mr Hart!” was Sebastian’s prediction.

We were rattling along on the tube, with Sebastian imitating what he expected Director Quill to say about our lengthy expedition,” Huh! Did it take two of you!”

“To which the reply will be, Sebastian: ‘Yes, one to go into the arty-farty shop and one to buy the bouncing bum.’”

Mr Quilly never commented on our combined late return, but he did say, “I can’t have my managing editor buying condoms, bouncing bums and false breasts in Nutz Novelty Shop.”

“I’m sorry, Mr Q.” I contritely replied. “It won’t happen again.”

Leaving his office, I thought, “Where did he get the false breasts from?”

As I approached the editorial department, I could hear actor Sebastian hamming it up in no uncertain terms: “… and whilst I was in Dillons looking for a decent present, there’s old Mick,” I could hear him sneering, “dithering about in Nutz Novelty shop, undecided about whether he should buy the fart spray or the masturbatory glove?”

“False breasts? Masturbatory glove?” Perhaps Quill and Sebastian were more frequent visitors to Nutz Novelty than we gave them credit for. Perhaps they are given credit? Perhaps they had a joint account!

When I entered the department, I was greeted with: “We thought you were never going to come back. It’s 5pm!”

“Sebastian’s fault,” I replied. “He’s such an old woman when it comes to buying presents.”

No fear of reprisals for that comparison. The one thing I never did was employ feminists.

Mick Hart’s Diary One Day in Travel Trade Publishing

We were late back, so late that we barely had time to wrap the presents and get the card with the bare gay man on the front signed.

South African Arthur, regarding the nude picture on the front of the card, asked: “Why is there a picture of Quilly on the front? More to the point, who took it?”

Grant, from the production department, asked, referring to the photo, “Is this a still out of Sebastian’s latest film?”

After everyone in the production department had signed the card, I ferried it, with half the department behind me, to Mr Quilly’s office. Through the window in the door, we can see him smiling as he signs the card.

Matt Ormolu: “Quilly’s smiling. Perhaps people should leave more often.”

Even Mr Quilly himself had a comment to make: “I’ll have to be more careful about who photographs me as I’m scrubbing my right knee!”

It was almost time to leave for the leaving party, which was taking place at a venue in the Angel. There was an air of school days’ excitement in the office. We were going to be really naughty and leave fifteen minutes early. Even old Suit and Tie, one of the female editorial staff, was coming with us tonight. She usually went straight home to darn her socks or something.

Outside on the street, most of those people accompanying me waited patiently for a cab; all, that is, but Sebastian.

“Typical Harty situation,” he scoffed, referring to me, and then directed at me: “Haven’t you heard of that simple and convenient mode of transport known as the tube?”

“Indeed I have, Sebastian, but you being an actor and all, I wouldn’t dream of casting you in the role of a commoner. Besides, on the tube you’d most likely be deprived of a speaking part, whereas in the cab your oratory will be rewarded with a standing ovation.”

“You’d have a job standing …” but his derision was cut short by our chariot arriving.

The cab got us to where we wanted to be, door to door, in half the time it would have taken by tube.

“I know, Sebastian, there is no need to congratulate me. We are here much quicker than if we had taken the tube; that’s why I’m the manager, here to manage.”

Sebastian’s book, A 100 Years of Art, came in handy. Margaret used it as a platform for the jumping bum, and everyone, except for Sebastian, was enraptured by it. “Good choice, Sebastian,” Ormolu glowed – and so did the condoms.

Whilst Ormolu and the condoms glowed, Sebastian glowered; he was leaning in close – too close, I thought – to two of the female editors for which he had a lascivious liking, chastising me for all he was worth: “You should have seen him, old Hart, standing there in Nutz Novelty, unable to make up his mind whether to buy the fart spray or the masturbatory glove!”

I steered clear of this conversation but wondered how Sebastian would deal with certain questions the female staff now were putting to him regarding the glove to which he had alluded, of which, like Quilly’s female breasts, I had not the slightest knowledge.

All things considered, the party went well, which was something of a letdown by publishing standards. Nobody got paralytic and disgraced themselves by fondling bottoms, except for the clockwork one, or by slagging off the production director to his face; nobody threw up, got into a fight or bonked one another in the gentlemen’s lavs and the stench of Ganja was conspicuously absent. It all could have been so very different, if I had only invited the sales staff.

Dear Diary … 2025 – that was the year that was / How to grow old graciously

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

What goes up must come down, but it took 50 years to do so

29 March 2024 ~ Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

I go away for four weeks, and this is what happens! In my absence, someone has nipped off with three-quarters of the House of Soviets!

I must confess (no, it wasn’t me), as I sat on a bench with my coffee and sandwich, looking across the Lower Pond, that the sight of the House of Soviets dwindling into nothing plucked in my nostalgic heart a sentimental chord.

Kaliningrad House of Soviets Melts into the Past

Like it or not, the great concrete monolith has dominated Kaliningrad’s skyline for more than 50 years. Photographed arguably more times and from every conceivable angle than any other structure in Kaliningrad, in spite of itself and for all the wrong reasons, the towering, bulky edifice, with its plethora of empty windows achieved cult status, most notably, ironically and cynically, as a prime example of the best in Soviet architecture, and with its unfortunate reputation for being the house that never was occupied, haunted itself and the city with the cost of taking it down.

Its huge rectangular cross-bridged frame, which had incongruously, but none the less defiantly, replaced the splendour of Königsberg Castle in all its baroque and historical glory, had idled away the years as an unlikely city-centre successor to the 13^th century Teutonic castle, later residence of choice for the region’s Prussian rulers, which eventually became the point of convergence for the city’s cultural and spiritual life.

Conversely, the House of Soviets never became anything more than an object of curiosity and a convenient hook for western media on which to hang derogatory.

In my 23 years of visiting and of living in Kaliningrad, I have to say I have never heard anyone admit to loving the House of Soviets, and yet, to balance that out, likewise, nobody ever committed themselves to hating it

In its lifetime ~ fairly long lifetime ~ I suppose we can conclude that the inhabitants of Kaliningrad neither revered nor reviled the building. It was simply there and where it was, and very soon it won’t be.

<It’s Curtains for the House of Soviets>

Published 2021: It is official: 51 years after its construction and the same number of years of non-occupation, arguably one of Kaliningrad’s most iconic buildings, and ironically one of its most lambasted, especially by the western press, is about to be demolished. I am, of course, referring to the House of Soviets, ninety per cent of which was completed in 1985 on a site close to where once stood the magnificent Königsberg Castle, the East Prussian city’s jewel in the crown, which was extensively damaged in the Second World War and then, in 1967, dynamited into oblivion.

Why Happy New Year?

You said it last year, you’ll say it again … probably

31 December 2023 ~ Why Happy New Year?

Hardly a year goes by without somebody saying, and I believe that I have said it myself, “Thank God that 1987, 1999, 2020 (whatever the year) is over. It’s been an awful year for me. Let’s hope that the next one will be better.” So off we go to the New Year’s party, drink copiously, leap around, get wildly and uncontrollably drunk ~ don’t you! ~ pop the champagne corks, countdown the minutes to 12 and on the strike of midnight shout ‘Hooray and Happy New Year’. In short, we do everything we are supposed to do. We play it by tradition.

Come the next morning, nothing has changed. It’s just as grey, cold and wet outside as it was the day before. The holidays are over, and in a day’s time it will be back to the treadmill of work. The New Year stretches before us, not the Yellow Brick Road of the night before but a long, bumpy, uneven track seemingly heading nowhere. And to add to the disconsolation, there’s also the terrible hangover.

Nihilistic, is that what you say? Or perhaps, what a miserable bugger!

Why Happy New Year?

Let’s roll back the decades and take a look at the event-grabbing headlines that defined the ‘Happy New Years’ of those specific years.

Happy New Year: 2014
1. Global Bola epidemic
2. Malaysian airline disaster
3. Rise of the terror group ISIS
4. Black Riots in America

Happy New Year: 2002
1. Mount Nyiragongo erupts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo
2. President George Bush delivers his ‘Axis of Evil’ speech
3. Two Snipers in Washington DC kill and injure people
4. Terrorists detonate bombs in two nightclubs in Kuta, Bali, killing more than 200 people

Happy New Year: 1992
1. Black riots in Los Angeles
2. Pro-abortion demonstrations in Washington
3. Major earthquake in Turkey
4. First McDonalds in China

Happy New Year: 1982
1. Argentina invades the Falkland Islands
2. Tylenol capsules impregnated with potassium cyanide kill 7 people in Chicago
3. Genetic Engineering is used commercially for the first time
4. IRA bombing campaign in London

Happy New Year: 1972
1. Watergate {death by boredom}
2. The Munich Olympics Massacre by Palestinian terrorists
3. Northern Ireland, the Bogside Massacre
4. Vietnam War drags on

Of course, newsworthy calamities such as those listed above pertain to world events. On the scale of our own lives, we have to back-peddle somewhat to bring together the recollections of all that was said and done over the months preceding the New Year bash.

Happy New Year from a rather strange potato

Now there’s an exercise for you. If you don’t keep a diary, and you jolly well should, grab a pen and a piece of paper and jot down a list of events and incidents that define in your opinion the past 12 months of your life. When done, back-track through the list and mark the incidents and events that gave and brought you happiness with a smiley-faced emoji and those that caused you harm or grief with, if you happen to have one handy, a two-fingered ‘V’ sign. Next, just tot them up and compare the ‘Happy’ to ‘F..K Off!’ score to determine what sort of year you have had and the quality of life you are having. At the end of this simple exercise, hopefully but most unlikely, you should be able to say, “What a stonking good year that was. If 2024 is anything like its predecessor, my life going forward is right on track”. Have you been able to say this? Welcome to the minority.

You could say, if you belonged to a certain generation, that ‘it’s being so cheerful that keeps me going’ and that’s why my New Year’s resolution for 2024 is going to be ‘Smile though your heart is breaking’. I’ll let you know how my new business venture, ‘Rent a Life & Soul of the Party’ is doing 12 months from now, if I’m still doing time here on Earth.

Meanwhile, enjoy yourselves, and I hope you’ll be able to say this time next year that 2024 was the best year of my life. (snigger).

Happy New Year!

Kaliningrad 20 Years Ago

Kaliningrad 20 Years Ago
(or Russian Hospitality part 1)

Diary entry dated 28 December 2000

From our brief excursion to Königsberg Cathedral we were off at last to Olga’s mothers. I wrote in my diary of rattling over roughshod cobbles, dodging one pothole to land in another, of dimly lit streets, an old metal railway bridge overlooking a huge rolling-stock marshalling yard crammed with lines of open wagons and tankers, of winding streets clung onto by tired old German flats and overlooked impersonally by more modern chunks of concrete that looked more tired and shabby than the ones they sought to usurp. I wrote of the street onto which Andrew let us out of his car. (It was the approach road to Olga’s flat, the flat she shared with her son, her mother, daughter and Marsha the cat.) ‘Mean Street’ I wrote, on account of what the road was: a narrow lane that ran along the side of two or three groups of flats, which taken together formed open-ended quadrangles. On our right there was a small shop in a low-level shed-like building, with a thick wooden entrance made of two doors bolted together. We were going to get in there, once we had braved the terrain: an adventurous combination of savaged concrete interlaced with sinews of ice.

Previous article: Svetlogorsk to Kaliningrad by Train

It was warm inside the shop; very little, very basic but altogether very warm. Here, I could chalk up another first, my first time in a Russian shop. The fish and meat counter was enough to give a vegetarian a fit of the flying ab dabs, so I focused elsewhere and found that that every packet, every box and every wrapped item, no matter how small it was, had a little bit of paper stuck to it on which the price was clearly written in hand. The shop keeper, a stout and formidable-looking lady, was dressed in an apron of broad stripes, reminiscent of ticking material used in pre-war British deck chairs.

Whilst I was taking in the ambience and generalities, brother Joss was concerning himself with the relative prices of things, particularly those things to which he was most partial, ie meaty things, such as sausages, big chunks of meat on the bone, plus large cheeses and pickles.

Olga purchased some items to take with us to her flat, and on the way we stopped at another shop, this one built into the end of the block of flats immediately preceding hers. This shop was slightly larger and more enticing owing to its ample stock of alcohol. I remember that the brand selection was impressive, whilst the generic composition was limited primarily to a choice of vodka or beer.

As it was about 5pm, I was surprised to discover that we would not be taking wine with our afternoon tea but vodka. “It is cranberry flavour,” Olga emphasised, so that was alright then!

Kaliningrad 20 years ago

It was not far now to Olga’s flat. The street lighting was worse here than it had been on our approach and, as we turned into the open-ended quadrangle, our best guide was the light filtering out from an open door at ground level. The beams of light seeping out from the hinge side, threw a thin and lurid glow across a large mound heaped up at the front of the flats. Some of its composition had spilled out across the path and, as it crunched beneath our feet, we realised it was coke (ie, the sort you put in the stove to heat your house!).

We passed through the external door, a big, old wooden affair, blistered, warped, incapable of being closed that night as it had been, no doubt, for years. We were now in the stairwell. This was my introduction to the average Kaliningrad stairwell, typical in its design and appearance to thousands across the city.

The Balham flat

In looking back on the way I reacted to and described these communal areas, I feel both reticent and awkward. In England, I had been brought up in a rural community. My family home was an 18th century thatched cottage. My closest friend’s father, a farmer, had a large 18^th century hunting lodge set in the most rural and sequestered piece of English countryside that you could possibly imagine.

It is true that on moving to London, as a postgraduate student and later in my first job, that my flat in Balham was so notorious, I mean in the sense of basic and humble, that it earnt itself the sobriquet of The Balham Flat. But as shabby, disheveled and wanting as it most certainly was, this flat occupied an old Victorian house, the type that in the early 80s was, like numerous other residential Cinderellas, waiting for Thatcher’s golden slipper. These hangbacks from the 1950s, with their garish red and yellow wallpaper, threadbare carpets, doors overpainted in rivulets of gloss, antiquated electric fires, mouse-eaten skirting boards, rising damp, yellowing net curtains and a kitchen and bathroom that looked as if they should have been consigned long ago either to the scrapheap or social history museum, were known and tolerated, loved to some extent, in that quaint way, with reservations, that you might compassionately look upon a gentleman of the road. Such flats were held in affectionate dislike, reviled but revered as home.

Kaliningrad 20 years ago: the flat

For all I know the residents of Kaliningrad back in the year 2000 may have felt exactly the same about their flats as we did about our bedsits, but for we westerners, particularly those who had tasted comparative privilege, no matter how lowly or secondhand, it was one of the most challenging moments of coming to Kaliningrad ~ how to react to the flat.

I could tell that Olga, who had travelled and stayed in London on at least two occasions and observed such differences as there were, was embarrassed about what we might think or say. We thought, oh dear, this place could do with a coat of paint, the metal stair rails could do with fixing, the concrete steps could do with some attention and the tangled mass of electric wires protruding dustily from every orifice like an old man found in the nude, well, we did not think much of that and, of course, we said even less.

Unlike some flat complexes in Kaliningrad, the block containing Olga’s flat was a mere three storeys, and her flat was on the third floor. We had already passed some of the biggest, burliest doors I have ever seen not standing outside of a nightclub wearing a dinner jacket, and now we were standing outside yet another which did not fit with the rest whilst none of the rest fitted with any.

As with the stairwell, Olga’s flat premiered yet another phenomenon ~ the two-door combination security system. The first door, which was made of metal and looked secure enough to resist yet another revolution, was immediately backed with another, this one as solid as the first but having a button-down padded interior. It crossed my mind that I must have missed the KGB plaque as we entered. However, the ritual awaiting us was surely a special test (as challenging and bizarre as anything that the Masons could have thrown at us).

In Russia shoes must be removed

As is the custom in Russia, and the custom remains today, all visitors must give up their shoes as soon as they cross the threshold of the flat, the assumption being that the streets, in this instance the streets of Kaliningrad, are so bad that …

Anyway, I had on a large pair of clod-hopping lace-up boots, difficult from which to extricate myself even in normal circumstances but very near impossible whilst dancing around on one foot. Being winter, and a harsh winter at that, hopping around wearing a full complement of heavy clothing in an attempt to connect with your lace, whilst it may have been good for Jane Fonda, was hardly conducive to dignified composure and still to this very day leaves you all sweaty and flustered.

Advice for all of you who are visiting Russia in winter, invest in a pair of winter boots but make sure that they are zip-fastening.

It did not take long for us to get acquainted with the Soviet flat, even in a pair of slippers that were two sizes too big for me. The flat comprised a small bathroom, two short corridors, one extending from the front door to bedroom and the other to the right, a small kitchen at the end of this second corridor and before that, to the left, a medium-sized bed-sitting room. This room opened out onto a balcony typical for flats in this region: it was narrow, but of a size sufficient to accommodate two to three people, together with two small chairs and a table. Incipiently, such balconies were open to the elements, but a trend for boxing them in had developed, as was the case in this instance. The inclusion of glazed casement windows converted the humble balcony into an extension of the living space, giving the occupants somewhere to sit and smoke whilst offering additional insulation in winter and a semi-open area in which to relax in summer.

The little kitchen was truly thus, allowing, with cooker and fridge, no more than a small table in front of the window along with a chair and stool.

The bathroom was likewise space-conscious, the bath, unboxed, having a long-reach, combination-tap fitted with a shower rose and, of course, there was a toilet.

Kaliningrad 20 years ago: the toilet

The toilet itself, or rather pan system, was a somewhat curious affair, and I must confess that I had never seen the like in the UK. Looking into the bowl, it consisted of two parts. At the front there was a small water chamber and to the back a shaped platform. Without wanting to go into too much technical detail, how this worked was that one answered the call of nature, turned the handle, a jet of water shot out of a conduit at the back of the platform and, if luck was with you, the water chamber did the rest. For young children I suppose it must have been a far more exciting model than our boring British bog, more of a successful launch than, to use the vernacular, dump.

Russian hospitality

Moving swiftly on, two to three sociable hours were spent at the flat.

Whilst feeding Joss presented no gastronomical difficulty, Olga’s mum had solved the vegetarian issues by augmenting various salads with traditional Russian blinee: savoury pancakes with three different fillings ~ cabbage, potato and mushroom. These went down very well with the cranberry vodka purchased earlier.

I have never asked Olga’s mother what her first impressions were of the two visiting Englishmen ~ perhaps it is best not to know!! We found her very open, interesting, sociable and hospitable, and for me, as I was going out with her daughter, it was nice to know on this cold Kaliningrad evening that the ice, as they say, had been broken.

Back out into the cold, we were now to go by taxi to Olga’s friends’ flat, Andrew and Inna’s.

Being a person of moderate food consumption, I was more than a little concerned to learn that Russian social tradition places great store upon the provision and demonstrable enjoyment of a hearty meal and that any show of reluctance or inability to eat what is laid down in front of you could engender serious offence. I cushioned my concern with the self-assurance that a degree of exaggeration may be expected regarding accounts of the size of the meals and the reaction to reasonable restraint from those who had prepared the meals to those about to receive them.

Very soon, I would find out.