Robert Smith

I’ve been at war with rodents.  On the street where I lived in Brixton I’d see them sometimes, big, well fed, three or four convulsing a bin bag. Once, some rats even moved in underneath the tarpaulin on our roof terrace, after the fox, our first tenant, had cleared out. Climbing up the rusty fire escape towards our front door, I’d hear them squeak and see them scurrying away. Sometimes I chased them beneath the stairs, cornered them, and then wondered what, exactly, I’d planned to do. Probably I would have yelped and run away if Mister Ratto ever charged me. Eventually, though, we twigged to the rodent colony, binned the tarp, and rid ourselves of the rats.  Fast forward a year and to a new house, new challenger. These were smaller, less intimidating, more insidious, than their ratty cousins. They chosen method of warfare was psychological. I’d wake in the middle of the night to ‘eek eek eek’, the scratching of mousine claws on some err, protein powder (I can explain...

The following is a briefing on UK politics I wrote for my boss, Matthew Parris, on Tuesday 18th, covering the previous ten days.  The air is chillier here now, and not just because of Autumn. Since you’ve been away, EU talks have stalled further. No Deal has risen in prominence. The prospect of economic disaster seems more real, and more worrying, than ever before. This is a step change. Speaking personally, the consequences of Brexit have always felt quite abstract for me. They still do, partly because there seem so many possible outcomes, but No Deal is beginning to get under my skin. Even worse is the problem we’ve had since the referendum: no big figure in either main party is willing to tell the truth, at least while the prospect of their own personal success still glimmers. But when has politics ever been different? The referendum, as we’ve said, changed those rules and those laws, but nobody seems to have noticed, and personal fulfilment, whether of ideology or selfish ...

As often happens with places you see on a map, on the ground I felt a bit lost. There was the giant, six-lane Crystal Palace Parade, and then a confusing series of one way streets forming a triangle. This…is it, I thought, feeling deflated.  And so it was. I hopped through the three lanes, looking for somewhere to sit and ‘soak up the incredible atmosphere of Crystal Palace’ as I’d told myself in my head. The portents were not great, I have to say. As I crossed one junction the people in the car next to me were having a huge argument with the passenger window down.  ‘Well you’ll just have to let me out right here, won’t you’, said the passenger to the driver as they crossed the big junction onto the equally big quasi-motorway. If he’d been let out he would have been squashed in an instant. He looked mid 30s, with a big beard, and seemed petulantly angry. ‘I can’t put up with this any more.’ Yikes! I was sad to see them turn away. I wanted to keep listening. But on...

It can see you. Wherever you turn, you know it’s watching. Think you’re safe hidden within four walls? Think again. Those three evil eyes at the top can see through bricks and mortar with x-ray vision.   What am I talking about? The eye of Mordor Elephant & Castle aka Strata SE1 aka ‘Razor’, one of the more evil looking buildings in London, with its wind turbine apertures that look like eyes. I remember leaving for work in the mornings when I lived in Brixton and casually, even nonchalantly, glancing backwards as I crossed the Brixton Road and BAM. There it was. Staring right back.  Ugh. Creepy.  Thankfully, where there is darkness, there may be light. The fell presence of this all-seeing towereye is combatted by a mast to the south of the city. Hardly exciting sounding I know, a mast. Great. But just as some buildings can produce an irrational disquiet, so can others come to mean much more than what they seem. Rewind to eleven years ago. Edinbur...

My French career at school ended in the ditch, like a kid’s toy car overturned by its ridiculous driver, me. I took out teenage frustrations on our French GCSE teacher, who was a good, intelligent man. I still laugh and/or cry when I think about it today. I ‘swore’ at him, but my act of teenage rebellion was in fact a complicated, jesuitical expression of anger. By jesuitical I mean like those Jesuits who excused lying under oath because they finished their sentences in their heads. An example is: ‘Have you seen the priest?’ ‘No…’ and then within their own heads ‘…, not since yesterday when I saw him in his hidey hole’. This was not lying because they had said the truth, and it was a truth God could hear, albeit not their interrogators.  When I swore I used my ring finger, not my middle one, to make the obscene gesture. I mean…if you’re going to swear, do it.   Don’t depend on some outrageous defence that ‘it wasn’t the middle finger’ as you’re thrown out the classroom. B...

One hot afternoon in Moscow we decided to hire bikes and cycle through Gorky Park, on the banks of the Moskva river, where the breeze would cool us. But the shuttered booth we saw from the bridge as we entered was, in hindsight, more ominous than we realised. Still optimistic, we criss-crossed the park, hoping that the rare scooter or odd-looking bike we glimpsed might mean a sole kiosk, somewhere, was still trading. Slowly, station after station, we began to accept that we were going to be defeated. The counters were inexplicably closed, perhaps something to do with it being paratrooper day – the park was thronged with crowds of paratroopers clad in white and blue striped tanktops getting drunk as they could – or because it was a Wednesday, but the cause didn’t really matter when it was the effect we cared about.  Peter the Great sails his stone ship Hot and now bothered, we didn’t feel like hanging out with the increasingly boisterous paratroopers, but nor did we w...

There’s a cannon in the Kremlin so big it’s never been fired in anger; no cannon ball has ever left its cavernous aperture. The Tsar Cannon keeps guard, uselessly, as waves of tourists stream past. Just down the path lies the Tsar Bell, the largest bell ever cast. But a huge, ten ton chunk broke off during the casting and its note has never sounded. They’re both massive and imposing, and designed only ever to be those.  The Kremlin is full of such stuff, spanning the mega, the mini, and all in between. Elsewhere there were swords, regalia, thrones, helmets, shields, and guns. All owned by Prince this and Tsar that. There was a throne for the twin Tsars, complete with a secret compartment from which their mother and regent could whisper to them. And then, as if it were totally normal, you stumble into a side room and come eye to eye with a fully stuffed horse. The best bit was the royal carriages. These ornate wooden traps, often entirely gilded, or painted a deep maroon, w...

We were desperate to get in. We’d been hanging around since 8am, queuing since 9, and couldn’t wait for the doors to open. We weren’t even the most keen. That honour went to the squat man in the orange coat who made a ludicrous cut across to the front of one queue as both were slowly walking up to the doors. In the event he saved a grand total of sixty seconds before we were all swallowed up in the vastness of the Hermitage.  This imposing turquoise, white, and gold palace, the scene of great drama in 1917, when the Bolsheviks stormed it, and the repository of the second largest art collection in the world, is one of Russia’s most famous buildings. Like St Basils, or the Kremlin, the Winter Palace is synonymous with Russia itself.   But now questions of authenticity and tourism, after that meal at Duo, were nagging at me. Had we been seeing Russia inside the Hermitage?  Michelangelo's Crouching Boy My memories, both the particular and the gene...