Robert Smith

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...

‘We’d like to try some Russian food.’ ‘No, Russian food is bad – how about New Fusion?’ There was only one way to answer that. And anyway Vitaly clearly wouldn’t hear otherwise.  But we were in Russia to see Russia. Surely that meant doing Russian things, like tasting the borsch, stodgy stews, and endless herrings that passed for their national cuisine. Having no overwhelming desire to stuff ourselves with potatoes and small fish, though, we took Vitaly’s suggestion went to Duo, the New Fusion ‘gastrobar’, to book a table. Seven hours, and much canal-admiring and rain-dodging later, we were back. The burrata we ordered came out with a thick, salty puree of sundried tomatoes, and a dark green tapenade of mashed olives; we speared it on our forks and watched the cheese wobbling under the pastes; it disappeared in seconds. Veal cheeks followed, in a sticky, sweet gravy: slow-cooked, tender meat offset by sharp spinach and young peas. We finished with a chocolate ganache – t...