One Minute It's There...

In a congested city like London, how do you tow illegally parked cars in the shortest time possible, and/or when it's jammed between two other vehicles? This is the London solution. Within minutes the car is gone, without a trace.

The End of Autumn

I snapped this photo at Inner Temple, at the end of autumn 2007. That time of year can be so depressing, especially when summer time ends. This picture sums it up. The last few leaves about to fall, at a time of day when the sun should still be shining...

Spooky, Possums

A funny thing happened on the way to Moscow, and the story is worth retelling on its own. I was sitting in the front row of economy in the port-side window seat. The 767 had a 2-3-2 configuration: to my right was a well-groomed young man who was disturbingly ill. He rested his head between his knees, coughed deeply over and over, and otherwise displayed symptoms that I diagnosed as early on-set ebola infection. And all that was before takeoff. Fearing contagion, I was not pleased. And to make matters worse, he insisted upon engaging me in conversation... All before 9am.

Curiously, he mentioned in passing that he was Australian, despite having the thickest Received Pronunciation accent... which actually annoyed me, I must confess. Challenging his Australian credentials, I asked how he came to be in England. The reply was peculiarly loaded with detail: "My father is a comedian, and he left Australian in the late 50s and moved to England". I felt like I was being lead, but I didn't bite... at least not yet.

Sometime later, when the ice was broken, and we had chatted on a dozen other subjects, the breakfast was served, and I'd managed to unwittingly charm him with a (serious) request for a gin-and-ginger ale at 10am, the conversation turned to Kath & Kim. He asked me if the show was still in production (even though I had already said I had lived in London for almost two years now). I said I wasn't sure, and that the last episode I saw was the Christmas special... To which my travelling neighbor sharply interjected, "my father was in that". "Oh", I inquired, "is your father Barry Humphries". His answer was "yes".

I think it rather interesting how our brains can contemplate stuff only with the passage of time (eg was I primed to mention the Kath & Kim special), and how sometimes certain things can automatically pop into your head when a previously untested circuit is synapsed. An example for the latter is how, on learning the identity of my travelling neighbour, I suddenly remembered reading a newspaper article about Oscar Humphries, son of Barry, who had instigated a London society scandal a few years back, by writing about a brief love affair. She happened to be Tamara Mellon, financial backer behind Jimmy Choo Shoes. She was also 20 years senior to young Oscar, and married, with children. Oscar wrote about his seduction in a thinly veiled roman-a-clef for The Telegraph. (I'd love to know how that job was pitched). The article caused a huge sensation. Those who knew, knew the real identity of Ms Mellon... Whose marriage, in the real world, publicly dissolved a short time thereafter.

Anyhow, we didn't discuss all that. It seemed rather rude, though I did have to bite my tongue on one occasion in order to let politeness rule the day. What I did ask, is whether Oscar found his life was unusually interesting, or at least different, growing up as the son of a household name in two different countries. He replied firmly in the negative, and insisted that life in the Humphries household was normal, like anyone else's. Normal, relatively speaking, I am sure of that... But like anyone else's I couldn't disagree more. This strand of our conversation was moments before explaining to me that one his first jobs was as a personal assistant to Joan Rivers in New York. Impressed, I asked how that came about, and he said that Rivers is a friend of his father's. And therein was the real answer to my question. Would he have got the job without the connection? Most probably not... But then again, how is this different to a shop owner helping out a friend by employing the friend's son? The only difference is celebrity.

The flight to Moscow is almost four hours, but the time flew with our light-hearted conversation. Throughout, Oscar was polite and cheery, but what most charmed me was his acutely sharp sense of humour. Definitely "a chip of the old block", as we'd say back in Australia. And on the one occasion he used the word "spooky" to describe something bizarre, it sounded to me exactly as if Dame Edna Everage was sitting right next to me. Spooky, indeed.

Moscow

The mission charter of my 2007 travel plan was to visit really different places. Perhaps it's a communist-state thing, but the first two cities I thought of were Moscow and Havana.

I visited Moscow over the second bank holiday weekend in May, arranging to meet up with my friend Geoffrey, who flew in separately from New York. In brief, Moscow is a huge, flat, ugly, sprawling city, so large that its easy to forget that this is Europe's most populous city, with 13 million people. But the size of the city is best appreciated not long after landing at Domodedovo Airport. Located in the middle of a pine forest, we drove for more than an hour - mostly on fast highways - to reach the city centre.

To Geoffrey's horror, I booked our accommodation at the Novotel. Admittedly, it was far from salubrious, and had all the atmosphere of a well-trodden Ikea showroom, but it was spacious, affordable, and not representative of the larcenous pricing that accompanies most Moscow hotel experiences. Everyone we met on our trip seemed to be staying at the Kempinski. (Madonna stayed there once, and she being the pied-piper-to-the-poofs, everyone wants to follow her it seems.) At the Kempinski, a basic and simply-decorated twin-share room (with single beds) can be had for the reduced weekend price of €300 per night.

My tip for first-time travellers to Moscow is that you must be prepared to haemorrhage money, from the moment you pay £50-£80 for a single-trip short-stay holiday visa. If that seems reasonable, consider that a tapas-sized serve of Goulash at a cafe on Red Square cost £10 (okay, it was Red Square). But that's nothing compared to our bill for supper at the Metropole Hotel: £180 for a piccolo of Moet & Chandon, two glasses of house sparkling wine, two trays of red caviar, and one (rather delicious) tray of black caviar. We briefly contemplated joining the working girls in the lobby to pay off that one.

Red Square was our first stop in Moscow; it lives up to expectation. The square is massive, and rectangular in shape. Along one long edge is the imposing wall of the Kremlin. On the other, the beautifully renovated GUM state department store. Elsewhere in the square are Lenin's tomb, and the Cathedral of Intercession of the Virgin on the Moat. This cathedral is better known as St Basil's Cathedral, and is Moscow's enduring iconic image. So much so, it's often mistaken for the Kremlin - which is not merely one building, but a citadel - right next door. The cathedral is now a museum, and can be toured.

One of the most surprisingly enjoyable things we did was to visit the Monino Aircraft Museum on Moscow's outskirts. This was Geoffrey's suggestion, and worth every minute of the two-hour bumper-to-bumper trip in steaming hot weather sans air-conditioning. Located at the edge of a military site, Monino is an aircraft graveyard, home to dozens of mothballed flying machines. We were most interested in the supersonic passenger jet Tupolev TU-144 (nicknamed the Concordski) which is a near copy of the Anglo-French Concorde. It's a "near copy" because it's based on stolen Concorde plans. One of the design flaws of the Concordski was that it lacked the superior wing design of the Concorde. Seeing it up close, it's a wonder that it ever flew! But that might have to do with the poor condition of the plane, like most in the museum.

We also saw the Mil Mi-12; with two rotors it is the largest helicopter ever built. The Mil Mi-12 is a good example of what makes Monino so interesting Monino, that basically the Russian aircraft engineers have toyed with a variety of ingenious design concepts: swing wings, droop-noses, VTOL, double-propellers, double-wings, double-engines, tri-jets, wing tips, and nose canards to name a few. Some designs are familiar, some look wacky, and many look like they were assembled in someone's garage using scrap. It really helped to be accompanied by our tour guide, Roman, on this trip. Having been in the air force himself, he was able to give us a lot of background on the planes that we otherwise would not have learned from the simple aircraft annotations.

Roman also accompanied us on our tour of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. The history of this church is really interesting. Originally constructed in the late 19th century, it was demolished after the Revolution. In its place, Stalin intended to build the Palace of Soviets, a grand skyscraper/monument which would have been the tallest building in the world. Construction floundered early on, and the foundations were soon utilised to become a huge public swimming pool. In fact, this was the world's largest outdoor swimming pool! Roman remembers visiting the pool in his youth, and recalled how it was temperature-controlled from a geothermal source, allowing one to swim in warm water during Moscow's notoriously freezing winters. Following the fall of the USSR, there was a public campaign to rebuild the cathedral, which was achieved in 1997 at a cost of $350 million.

Another of our Moscow memories was when we attended the Bolshoi Theatre to see the Bolshoi Ballet performance of La Fille Mal Gardée (lit: The Badly Kept Girl). This is a comedy ballet, in the style of a pantomime. We had front row seats (a bargain for us at £30, even though it's much much more than what Russians would pay). This was the first ballet for Geoffrey and I, and we were both worried we might get bored, or not be able to follow the story. But as we discovered, our fears could not be further from the reality. The performances were outstanding; truly breathtaking.

Second only to London, Moscow has more resident billionaires than any other city. We didn't see any, but we did see enough Russians spending big bucks in restaurants and shops to make me wonder how people can become so wealthy in just 16 years. Right on Red Square is the beautiful ex-Soviet department store known as GUM. It's now a high-end shopping mall, and it's pretty much empty. Nearby there is another department store, SUM, that resembles Harvey Nichols, except the staff-to-shopper ratio is 10:1.

Moscow's subway is a tourist attraction in its own right. The early stations employ a variety of architectural styles - Stalinist, neo-classical, or art deco - depending on what was in vogue at the time of construction. But the first three lines dating from the thirties, and for which the network is famous, feature barrel-vaulted ceilings, chandeliers, and marble floors.

Geoffrey and I spent a lot of time in Red Square, but we never got the chance to tour the Kremlin. On the day we planned to visit, we found army barricades at every public entrance leading to the Kremlin. We later learned that this barricade was imposed by the government, without warning, to prevent a protest taking place in Red Square. On the weekend we visited - and totally by coincidence - a group of gay and lesbian Europeans had planned to hold a gay pride rights march in Moscow. However the mayor refused to grant a march permit. The protestors gathered outside the mayor's residence, where they were assaulted by the police, and the army and special forces were called out to ring the Kremlin with metal barricades and a human shield. So while we didn't get to see the Kremlin we got to see a nasty and underreported side to Russian politics. Basically, there is no right to peacefully assemble if the government doesn't like the subject matter for the protest. And in a country that has had the same government since the end of the Soviet era, and with a President who is changing laws to hold on to power, one really wonders how much has actually changed, if at all.

On my departure, I actually couldn't wait to leave the city. I'd had enough of the rich/poor disparity, and the sense that nothing is easy, yet everything has its price. Hardly anyone smiles on the public transport, which I found rather depressing. Admittedly, a lot of people don't have a lot to smile about. And I have come to realize my experience of Moscow is not so much a slight against the city, as it is the resonance of the grim, bleak existence that many are fated to live there. Still, I'm grateful for that experience, and while we saw a lot, there is a lot more to see. I will return some time in the future, perhaps when I'm better prepared for the experience.

All of my Moscow photographs are on Flickr, and can be viewed in a slideshow.

BAFTAs at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Happy Chinese New Year

Today's celebrations in the high street of Queensway in Bayswater, near my flat.