To the Hermitage by Ambulance (or, Russian Hospitality)

No, this is not the screen adaptation of a Malcolm Bradbury novel starring George Clooney, but a true and faithful account of how the Impster and I came to be travelling in St Petersburg last Thursday somewhat unconventionally.

With flashing lights and a masterful U-turn, our ambulance driver swings across four lanes of traffic to drop us at the bank of the River Neva so that we might make the next hydrofoil for our day's sightseeing at Peterhof. I offer him many spasiba's, and he kisses me warmly on both cheeks and pats the Impster’s head. Konstantine is my proof that Russians make powerful allies. If they're on your side, they can make things happen and will stop at nothing to help you overcome a predicament.

As a random pregnant tourist with a toddler, however, most Russians wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire (never mind give you a hand with your pushchair). Russian cities are not child-friendly affairs. To attempt them with an infant leaves one exposed to the view that as a mother, one is at best eccentric, and at worst unfit for purpose. Lifts, highchairs, pushchair ramps, baby-changing facilities, and (it slowly dawned on me) children under the age of eight are nowhere to be seen in St Petersburg. And as the week went on, I had a creeping suspicion that mothers might actually be banned from the city centre. For one thing, the women living here of child-bearing age are intimidatingly svelte (possibly as a result of the unpardonable cuisine creating a kind of national Cabbage Soup Diet.)

For another, they have clever ways of making sure children don’t interfere with their cultural tourism, as I discovered when I went to the Russian Museum and was told that only disabled people could use the lifts. To be honest, I’d had better days than last Wednesday, redeemed only by the prospect of seeing a fantastic collection of Kandinsky’s. So to discover that the House of Culture was denying me access, put me in a magnificent rage (‘f-ing Revolution’ etc etc). But the good Book advises to, ‘Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure: fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil’, and being in a pretty murderous temper, I head for the House of God. Unfortunately, St Isaac's Cathedral is closed on a Wednesday. (This is the city that simultaneously made one of its cathedrals the museum of atheism and religion for a time, which is possibly an indication that it shouldn’t be relied upon exactly for nurturing spiritual wellbeing.) In the end I did what any oppressed English mother would do, and contemplated a fag and a McDonald's. But on my way I stumbled across St Petersburg’s answer to The Dorchester, which went a considerable way to lifting my spirits (plus, the Impster still got her chicken nuggets, chips and a toy, because you can order absolutely anything there).

And now, somewhat in the manner of Ronnie Corbett, let me return to the matter of the ambulance. On Monday morning, dear K wakes up feeling, as Withnail would have it, 'unusual'. By Tuesday morning he is off-puttingly pukey and shaking uncontrollably, so I think it best to call a doctor (all the time privately convinced he shouldn’t have had ice in his drink the previous day). Two hours later he’s in surgery with a nearly-ruptured appendix, and I’m harbouring visions of a theatre equipped with vodka anaesthetic and a hacksaw. Turns out we’re in the poshest hospital in the city, and after a brief sojourn in intensive care, K ends up in a private room with en suite, river view, telly, fridge and no hyperactive toddler - so is marginally better off than me. And one can't but admire the Russian method of convalescence, his room being furthermore agreeably furnished with six wine glasses and six shot glasses (not a water glass in sight).

Here he resides at the current time, visa expired, regrettably unable to leave the country due to a faux pas on my part. All I did was to call BA to try to get him upgraded on the return flight. Admittedly I may have laid it on a bit thick, but how was I to know they would take it into their heads that he was unfit for travel?

It's been a curious week all in all. On Monday my brother had his gallbladder removed, on Tuesday K was relieved of his appendix, and on Wednesday I began to wonder how many other expendable organs we might be housing. Perhaps in California one could plausibly sell the idea of getting rid of a few, as a new surgical weight-loss method?

Anyway, being so posh, this hospital does a good line in English-speaking guardian angels. Dear Olga pities my lone-mother-in-St-Petersburg experience so much that she insists upon ambulance transportation to help the Impster and me get about (the charge for an ambulance is £250 an hour, so she can easily find one hanging about the place). A Russian on a mission will go to any lengths.

A few nights earlier, Madonna has come to St Petersburg to do a gig in Palace Square. We get accidentally caught up in the hordes of fans, and then caught in the torrential downpour which follows (Russian rain is really something else). Next day, as Dimitri is driving me to the hospital, he tells me how the authorities tried to break up the rain clouds by shooting things into the sky. Can you believe that? I know Madonna can be, well, prima-donnaish, but they actually tried to move the rain for her. My friends, that’s Russian hospitality for you.

On Creativity

This week, I’ve been naval-gazing in the hope of gaining some neurological insights (admittedly, there's a chance I've been looking in the wrong place). In a scribbly-brained moment, I had the overwhelming desire to establish once and for all whether I am capable of thinking in a left-brained manner like this:

Or whether my life's work is likely to be the result of right-brained mayhem like this:

So I’ve done lots of online cosmo-style quizzes, some of which judge me moderately left-brained, and others moderately right-brained, from which I joyfully conclude that (contrary to popular opinion) I do have a whole brain after all.

Having worked in publishing for so long, this is a perfectly shocking revelation. The entire industry is predicated on the assumption that people are either organised or creative (the former tending to hit deadlines, the latter tending to have brilliant ideas). So while half the industry is churning out thirty-odd books by Jordan, the other half has a licence to work completely chaotically whilst harbouring Romantic notions of their own genius and creativity. And when the shit hits the fan, a new and over-paid position usually arises for ‘a creative’, as if to say, ‘we don’t know what we need him to do, but he’s sure to figure something out.’ (Unfailingly, he doesn’t.)

Now as every newspaper editor knows, working in non-fiction tends to be a more creative enterprise than working in fiction. But of course brand credibility requires that precisely the opposite impression is conveyed - reliable, factual, blah blah blah. So when HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster recently became the first publishers in the race to release their Michael Jackson books, you’d have thought their publicity would have focused on the new revelations and extraordinary insights their books brought to bear on the life of the pop icon. You might even have reasonably expected a little white lie about how the book had been painstakingly researched for the last three years and was just on the verge of completion when the news of the singer’s untimely death was announced. Not so. One HC spokesperson was heard on The Today Programme boasting of how they had got a book to market ahead of their competitors in a mere two weeks: in summary, thanks to an imaginative writer with outstandingly rapid typing skills, fuelled by a giant crate of coca cola.

To any sane and rational potential purchaser, this insight into the rushed compilation of celebrity hardbacks would be deeply off-putting. But it does at least prove beyond all reasonable doubt that to get there first you need to be both organised and creative. Though whether you need a whole brain is, of course, another question...

Eat, Drink and Be Merry (unless you're pregnant)

It is generally agreed (in the way generalisations are) that second children tend to grow up to be rather competitive and with an air of having been treated unfairly all their lives. Whenever a cake is about to be served, you can bet that it’ll be the youngest (even if they’re 25) who has the fine-tuned ability to detect any inequality in the size of the slices to the nearest millimetre.

This week I discover that - quelle surprise – this turns out to be entirely due to bad parenting. According to various child psychologists, such is our concern over sibling rivalry and our desire to keep the first sproglet sweet, that we virtually forget we have the second one (especially since it all seems so much easier second time round). The result? A lifetime of in-your-ear ‘me, me, me’ whingeing.

Naturally, I decide to put pay to any namby-pambying of the Impster and focus on the bump for a moment, only to realise it’s already too late. For a start, no one (including fathers) gives a bugger about the second pregnancy. You’re already drained of your reserves from nurturing the first little poppet, so the second time you’re exhausted at the outset. Not to mention fatter. This time round, K was late turning up to the 12-week scan, so I was already lying on the couch slathered in jelly. Then the Impster distracted everyone from looking at the baby on the screen by spilling an Innocent smoothie down herself. Then, the photos mysteriously disappeared, only to turn up a few days later stuffed in a pair of K’s shoes (whoever heard of antenatal sibling rivalry? At least I’m presuming it was the Impster’s doing, otherwise I’ve got more of a problem on my hands than I’d anticipated).

And another thing that totally sucks. As if to make clear the essential undesirability of pregnant women, on holiday in Cornwall I spotted the above picture on a bottle of Grolsch. What can it possibly mean? ‘Pregnant women: piss off’? ‘Pregnant women: singing ist verboten’ (a unlikely event given our enforced teetotaldom in any case)? There is pretty much an endless list of reckless acts that pregnant women shouldn’t do, unless they wish to be held any more accountable than they already are. Such as eating peanuts. I mean, the whole nine months is just total suckitude.

Uh oh, have I just been having a rant? Tcha, I’m a second child - blame it on my parents.

The Consolations of Sugar Craft

If you had been in Winchester yesterday, you may have seen a slightly tubby lady in badly creased clothes and wet hair, clutching hen-night merchandise, running through the centre of town like an overwrought banshee, trying to catch the London train in order to make a very important chocolate-making appointment. Happily, catching that train gave me (the aforementioned banshee) opportunity to write this blog.

Child-free journeys are the midwives of thought, which probably explains why I have such difficult deliveries these days. And if you haven’t yet asked me why I’ve not responded to your last email or posted a blog of late, then bless you for your impeccable manners and forbearance, and let me summarise thus:

1. Am pregnant and wildly hormonal, so naturally
2. Have just bought a car and decided to move house, then
3. Went to Cornwall on holiday, which was unremarkable except for the fact that
4. My brother was taken into intensive care, resulting in
5. The cancellation of my trip to Vienna tomorrow.

Now all this might sound like the prelude to another moan about the impossibility of holidaying, but as it happens, adversity has instead mustered a creative but somewhat haywire set of reactions. For example, my new asymmetrical haircut (with which I resemble a member of The Human League), and the frenzied organisation of no less than three parties in celebration of the Impster’s second birthday. Not to mention cake.

Last year for her birthday, I bought a cake from M&S and received a very reducing look from one stay-at-home mummy who said 'you know, I simply wouldn't feel right if I didn't make a cake myself'. So this year, rather than suffer a guilty conscience and incitement to murder again, I had a sudden attack of the Annabel Karmels. When my old work buddy, J, phoned and I told her that I was 'in the Entertainer buying In the Night Garden figurines to put on the Impster's birthday cake which I'm planning to fashion into a magical gazeebo.' There was a slight pause, followed by the enquiry: 'Have you had a stroke?'

Only very exceptional circumstances can drive an otherwise sane woman to seek solace in the art of sugar craft. For what can possibly result but yearly spiralling expectations and the potential for significant dental bills? Oddly enough though, taking on such a monstrous task was curiously calming, a bit like making sophisticated chocolate truffles on a hen weekend, when one’s expectations had been raised no higher than half a dozen chocolate penises.

My brother is recovering nicely, and now he’s off the morphine I do wonder whether I might have spent these last few weeks hallucinating in sympathy. All the same, I might knock up a few Viennese biscuits this week. Just as a consolation.

The Big Deal

Time on the clock has exceeded time in the mind this week, which is why I’m so tardy in writing to tell you about my bank holiday weekend. Eighty or so of us were sun-burning ourselves at my goddaughter’s churchless naming celebrations in Deal, Kent. If you haven’t been (to Deal that is) you must remedy this immediately. It is utterly charming and resides on my list of favourite seaside towns, alongside Bamburgh, Porthcurno, St Ives, and Southwold.

We stayed at a place called the Beachbrow Hotel in Deal, which has an alluring enough website and, inexplicably as it turns out, a link from ‘The Best of Deal and Sandwich’. Our suspicions should have been aroused by being asked to pay in full for the whole weekend stay on checking in, but then again, as this blog has already shown, our suspicion-arousing antennae seem oddly defective. Or perhaps even before that, when the attention buzzer played all the Big Ben chimes at 100 decibels (the manager informed me he is deaf, so if you have a problem, you can probably guess at the response you’ll get). The restaurant was closed for ‘lots of reasons’, which momentarily brought to mind the episode of Fawlty Towers with the hotel inspectors – or perhaps I’m thinking of the one with the hamster. Anyway, you get the gist.

Somehow I had managed to book a family room which contained four beds (yes I know, just like a Victorian slum house). But to be honest, by the time we left, we’d had need of them all (for reasons best left unmentioned, but which sadly had nothing to do with any sexual antics). The ensuite, which admittedly was huge, but unaccountably shower-less, had a poo-chopping loo, which was so deafening as to rouse even a sleeping baby. And more curiously, water from the hand basin also seemed to get the chop (presumably as a precaution against any particularly filthy guests), so we couldn’t even clean our teeth once the little Impster was asleep. Really, what I’m trying to say is please do go to Deal, but book yourself in at the Royal Hotel.

Now, for Babe C* (or more factually Day-wood*, as C cannot yet read), here is a little poem which I wrote during one of my two sleepless nights at the Beachbrow. When reading it, you need to take into account that a) I haven’t written a poem since I was 12 and b) I was horribly sleep deprived (but to be fair, both these points are patently obvious). Thus:

Who can say what great events
Await you from afar?
But I am certain you were born
Beneath a lucky star.

Sometimes we get our just desserts
To each her own reward:
Smile and shine through all life’s trials
And you will be adored.

And when the path gets muddier,
If you need another,
I shall try my best to be
Your fairy godmother.

For what is life without good luck
And magical surprises:
Imagine just how dull we’d be
Ruled by our own devices.

So all best wishes, little one
From me to you this day:
For every blessing you can count
May one more come your way.


*So named by the Impster (who I don’t think can pronounce all her v’s yet, given she counts ‘nine, ten, a-lemon, twelve...’)

The Impossibility of Holidaying

I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my mirth. I took my leave of K with a right-minded smugness. He would be working, I would be holidaying on the French Riviera. He would be earning, I would be spending. A pleasing natural equilibrium seemed to have established itself. And Menton lived up to its promise in many ways: I barely had requirement to remove my sunglasses the entire week, there was a frisson of glamour about its yacht-studded shores and heady prices, and the promise of reckless abandon lay tantalisingly within grasp.

Query: when is a holiday not a holiday? Answer: when it is spent with two toddlers. After all, what defines a holiday if not rest, relaxation, and time spent at leisure, free from work? And how to fulfil same holidaying spirit if one is perpetually forced to rise at unsociable hours, appease tantrums, listen to whingeing, get splattered with tomato and orange juice in restaurants, and generally be subject to the relentless repetition and routine of parenting a nearly-two-year-old? No good ever came of believing that a change is as good as a rest. One day you have children, and the next you find yourself in the midst of a dance reminiscent of something from They Shoot Horses Don’t They? Menton has a garish little merry-go-round, which simply thrilled the Impster. Riding round and round and up and down and ‘again again!’ is the perfect metaphor for toddlerdom.

I confess I was greatly relieved to see K after the 9-hour journey home. He was looking remarkably chipper, and dare I say it, had a note of right-minded smugness about his countenance. He’d spent his week in London and Manchester doing that kind of sociable working which involves late nights, Michelin-starred restaurants, unbridled luxury, vast expenditure, lazy mornings and too much alcohol. Is it just me, or is that the definition of a holiday?

The Home Tourist - Part Two

If the art of travel is to recognise why we love a place, to grasp the cause and meaning of its beauty, and to fathom its allure, then it is a gloriously subjective thing, not worth committing to paper. (Rather like this blog. Yet I do, so I will. Is that the same as saying ‘I blog therefore I am?’)

Elizabeth Gilbert , in her book Eat, Pray, Love, says that every city has a word which defines it, and that word is also the word going through the minds of most of the people in that city. Such as, Rome = SEX; New York = ACHIEVE; Stockholm = CONFORM. And she suggests that if your word doesn’t match that of the place you’re in, then you don’t really belong there.

So after my day of home-spun tourism, I got to wondering what makes Winchester, Winchester, instead of, say, Salisbury? And I’ve come to the late conclusion that it might be ASPIRE (as opposed to a spire, which Salisbury most impressively and irrefutably does have).

Edgy is certainly not a word one would use to describe Winchester - it is full of white middle class people, all trying to have something slightly better than the very nice things they’ve already got. Its only edge is a ruthlessly competitive and slightly smug one (people expect their toddlers to get French lessons at nursery).

But while I loathe its provincial smugness, I confess I love the reasons for that: its beauty, its sense of privilege, its boutique shops, marvellous hairdressers and fabulous farmer’s market. Yes, I am perfectly at home here, and no wonder. For I aspire to all best wishes: to idleness, happiness, expensive haircuts and one day being able to write a decent blog.